Saint Anselm College Paper Format & Writing Requirements

Saint Anselm College at a glance

A Benedictine liberal arts college on a hill above Manchester, New Hampshire, home to the New Hampshire Institute of Politics where presidential primary candidates routinely stop, and to one of New England's larger undergraduate nursing programs.

The campus sits in Manchester, New Hampshire, operates as a private (benedictine) institution, and enrolls about 2,000 students — a scale that directly shapes how writing support works. Founded in 1889 with an acceptance rate around 77%, Saint Anselm College pairs selective admissions with the large-course writing loads typical of its category.

Citation styles Saint Anselm College actually requires

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

• MLA 9: used across humanities and writing-sequence courses
• APA 7: used across social science, nursing and business courses
• Chicago: used across history, fine arts and some social science seminars

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 humanities-centered core keeps seminar discussion and essay writing at the center of the first two years, and nursing and business majors add discipline-specific APA papers; the Writing Center tutors by appointment.

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 Saint Anselm College papers that surprise new students

• Founded in 1889 by Benedictine monks of Saint Mary's Abbey in Newark, New Jersey, the college is still governed by the monastic community of Saint Anselm Abbey, whose church sits at the head of the quad.
• The New Hampshire Institute of Politics, opened on campus in 2001, has become a required stop for presidential candidates ahead of the nation's first primary, hosting generations of town-hall events.
• Alumna Kelly Ayotte, a former U.S. senator now serving as governor of New Hampshire, is one of the college's best-known graduates.

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 Saint Anselm College students face most

• Essay — most frequently assigned across Saint Anselm College's programs
• Research Paper — most frequently assigned across Saint Anselm College's programs
• Case Study — most frequently assigned across Saint Anselm College's programs
• Coursework — most frequently assigned across Saint Anselm College's programs

Popular programs at Saint Anselm College include nursing, politics, business — each pairs the assignment list above with its own capstone or practicum expectations, detailed on our subject pages.