Eastern Washington University Paper Format & Writing Requirements

Eastern Washington University at a glance

A regional university founded in 1882 as a private academy in Cheney, twenty minutes southwest of Spokane, known for health-sciences programs anchored at its Spokane campus, the scarlet Inferno turf at Roos Field, and an Eagles football culture that plays on one of the most distinctive surfaces in American college sports.

The campus sits in Cheney, Washington, operates as a public institution, and enrolls about 10,000 students — a scale that directly shapes how writing support works. Founded in 1882 with an acceptance rate around 80%, EWU pairs selective admissions with the large-course writing loads typical of its category.

Citation styles Eastern Washington University actually requires

EWU courses predominantly require APA 7 or MLA 9. That is not a trivial preference: it decides your title page, heading levels, in-text punctuation and reference format on every graded document.

• APA 7: used across social science, nursing and business courses
• MLA 9: used across humanities and writing-sequence courses

Verify against the specific course syllabus anyway — instructors can override departmental defaults, and the first paper is where they enforce it.

The writing requirement, decoded

A two-course composition sequence anchors the general-education core, upper-division majors add discipline-specific reports and case writing, and the Writing Center tutors students in both Cheney and Spokane.

Plan the sequence early: composition requirements compound, and students who defer them discover the advanced seminars — where the writing-intensity lives — conflict with major courses later. The registrar's degree audit shows exactly which flags remain; check it each semester.

Three things about Eastern Washington University papers that surprise new students

• Founded in 1882 as the Benjamin P. Cheney Academy and named for the railroad executive who funded it, the school entered Washington's state system as a normal school before earning university status in 1977.
• Roos Field's scarlet playing surface, installed in 2010 and nicknamed The Inferno, made Eastern one of the first college football programs in the country to trade grass for red turf.
• The Spokane campus in the Riverpoint district houses nursing, dental hygiene and allied-health programs that feed Inland Northwest hospital networks.

None of these appear in the course description. All of them appear in the rubric. Students who learn them in week one report smoother first-semesters than students who meet them at the deadline.

Assignments Eastern Washington University students face most

• Essay — most frequently assigned across EWU's programs
• Research Paper — most frequently assigned across EWU's programs
• Lab Report — most frequently assigned across EWU's programs
• Coursework — most frequently assigned across EWU's programs

Popular programs at EWU include nursing, business administration, computer science — each pairs the assignment list above with its own capstone or practicum expectations, detailed on our subject pages.