Open Educational Resources: English

A free, comprehensive, peer-reviewed, award-winning Open Text for students and faculty in college-level courses that require writing and research.

Writing in College is designed for students who have largely mastered high-school level conventions of formal academic writing and are now moving beyond the five-paragraph essay to more advanced engagement with text. It is well suited to composition courses or first-year seminars and valuable as a supplemental or recommended text in other writing-intensive classes. It provides a friendly, down-to-earth introduction to professors’ goals and expectations, demystifying the norms of the academy and how they shape college writing assignments.

This textbook guides students through rhetorical and assignment analysis, the writing process, researching, citing, rhetorical modes, and critical reading.

Writing Spaces is a book series containing peer-reviewed collections of essays—all composed by teachers for students—with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license

MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

Supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network, these books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality.

OER Commons provides a curated collection of textbooks and resources for world language studies.

This collection includes freely available texts written specifically for the BC OpenTextbook initiative as well as books from other sources.

Write Channel is a YouTube Channel for writers who want to improve their craft, hosted by Nicola Monaghan.

Craft Chaps offers substantive essays by contemporary writers on creative writing practice. Each chap focuses on one aspect of craft and also contains a writing exercise and bibliography for further reading.

Shitty First Drafts is an interview podcast hosted by Brynn Martin and Stephanie Phillips that aims to demystify the writing process through candid conversations with guests covering the evolution of the writer, the writing, and everything in between.

Informed by a writing philosophy that values both spontaneity and discipline, Michelle Bonczek Evory’s Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations offers practical advice and strategies for developing a writing process that is centered on play and supported by an understanding of America’s rich literary traditions.

The emphasis in this anthology, therefore, is on non-Western and European works, with only the British authors who were the most influential to European and non-Western authors (such as Shakespeare, whose works have influenced authors around the world to the present day).

This peer-reviewed World Literature I anthology includes introductory text and images before each series of readings.

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature.

Open Modernisms is a Creative-Commons-licensed (CC-BY), social-knowledge resource that allows scholars of modernism to build custom anthologies or coursepacks of out-of-copyright primary materials.
As of November 2019, no new coursepacks can be created, but content is still available to browse.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.

Free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from around the world.