Tutorial Talk and Methods
In Praise of Quiet
By Mitch Nakaue, The University of Iowa.
As a deeply introverted person, I’ve always been interested in the power of writing center work to incite talk. As a graduate student at UW–Madison, I learned to cultivate an expressive and even outgoing classroom teaching persona, but found myself much less drained by one-to-one discussions with students. Writing [...]
Making Charoset: Teaching by Hand in the Shadow of MOOCs
By Eli Goldlbatt, Temple University.
Eli Goldblatt graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990 and taught at Villanova University from that year until he moved to Temple University in 1996. He is currently professor of English and Director of First Year Writing at Temple. He was faculty co-director of the Writing Center at Temple from [...]
Shame and the Writing Center
By Lauren Vedal. Lauren Vedal was a tutor at the UW-Madison Writing Center from 2004-2009. She is now the Writing Specialist in the Humanities at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she provides one-on-one writing consultations for students and support for faculty who want to better incorporate writing instruction into their courses.
Shame and Writing
I’ve been [...]
Senior-Thesis Writing Groups: Putting Students in the Driver’s Seat
By Elisabeth Miller and Stephanie White
On a Sunday morning in February, five students brave the icy winds howling off Lake Mendota, knock the snow and slush off their boots, and straggle into the student union toward a table near the windows looking over a snowy Memorial Union Terrace. That night, another five students wrap up [...]
The Power in Grammar
Leah Misemer is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison writing her dissertation on how serial comics form communities of authors and readers. She has worked at the Writing Center since Fall of 2011 and in email instruction for two semesters.
Whenever a writing center instructor and a writer sit down for a [...]
Collaboration Times Three
Nancy Reddy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include composition pedagogy, literacy studies, and extracurricular writing groups. This is her first year with the UW-Madison Writing Center.
In one of my first shifts as a new writing instructor tutor this past fall, I found myself sitting [...]
Angels in the Writing Center
Rachel Herzl-Betz is a PhD student in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pursuing a minor in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research focuses on intersections between nineteenth-century British literature, rhetoric, and disability studies. This is her first year with the UW-Madison Writing Center.
I have a thing for personal statements. I realize that I’m unique in [...]
Physician, Heal Thyself!
By Kevin Mullen. Kevin Mullen is a dissertator in Literary Studies, with a minor in Composition and Rhetoric, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is his third year working at the Writing Center.
There is a particular kind of shame that forms when you come face-to-face with the fact that you are not practicing what you [...]
Virtues of Conversation: Ethics in the Writing Center
By John Duffy. John Duffy is the Francis O’Malley Director of the University Writing Program, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and a proud former tutor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center.
Most people who have taught in a writing center, or who have given the work any serious [...]
A Room with a View / Writing with Others
Unfortunately, the photograph with which I would have preferred to begin this post doesn’t exist. Instead I’ll have to help you reach the right place to recreate the picture for yourself mentally. I’m John Bradley, interim associate director of the Writing Center; thanks for following my lead. I’ll get to the point along the way, [...]
