The Online Writing Center
The Social Center: Why Writing Centers Need Twitter
Mike Shapiro is a graduate student and the online coordinator of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center.
At its best, Twitter looks like the perfect tool for promoting any writing center’s goals: it privileges writing, supports lively conversations, and develops long-term relationships between writers and readers. Twitter can remind students, faculty, and administrators, every day, of [...]
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 [...]
Looking Gorgias: Coming to Be in the Online Writing Center
Anne Wheeler is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric. Her research tends to focus on rhetorical artifacts produced in the Japanese American internment camps during World War II. She is also a TA Assistant Director of the UW-Madison English 100 program and has worked for the Writing Center since Fall 2011.
Perhaps it’s because [...]
Writing Centers Have Flex Appeal
At many universities, writing centers have now earned significant respect for the work they do with student-writers. Within that respect, though, almost never do I hear writing centers valued for what I like to call their flex appeal: for the flexible ways in which they meet not just the needs of student-writers who have drafts [...]
This rant is asynchronous
This is Mike’s sixth year at the Writing Center. He is the 2012–13 TA coordinator of our Online Writing Center. Since 2010, he has worked as a tutor for the Pearson Tutor Services Online Writing Lab.
Writing centers use the phrase asynchronous online writing instruction to describe this sequence:
A student sends a draft to the writing center.
A [...]
Now is The Writing Center Website of Our Discontent, Made Glorious Summer by This Sum of Our Work
By Christopher J. Syrnyk, Assistant Professor of Communication, and Faculty Liaison, Advance Credit Program for Communication Courses, Oregon Tech
At Oregon Tech, where I became an Assistant Professor this fall in the Communication Department, I volunteered during a recent Communication department meeting to take on the role of the department’s Web Content Manager. Volunteering [...]
New(s) from the UW-Madison Writing Center!
Welcome to a new academic year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Writing Center! As our Writing Center re-opens on the first day of classes for the fall semester–on Tuesday, September 4–we’ll be eager to welcome undergraduate and graduate student-writers from across the University. And we’re delighted to have 26 talented new undergraduate [...]
The Madison Area Writing Center Colloquium
I’ve long argued that writing centers at research universities should prepare interested doctoral students to lead strong, innovative writing centers and WAC programs when they move into their faculty careers. And that we should do this in systematic and sustained ways. Being a dedicated, successful, experienced writing tutor is of course a necessary part of [...]
Writing Center Websites and Their Discontents or
Dissing the Contents of Your Own Writing Center Website
All Graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) who are beyond their first semester of tutoring in UW-Madison’s Writing Center participate in professional development opportunities, known as Ongoing Education opportunities, affectionately, as an “OGE.” At the start of a semester, Teaching Assistants will often see a description at the top of an OGE selection form that reads as [...]
It Begins with a Mentality: Disability and the Writing Center
By Sarah Groeneveld. The day I met Laura (a pseudonym) was a memorable one. It was a slow day at the Writing Center last January, and I had a free hour in the middle of my shift. Laura was scheduled to meet with me later, but had mistaken the time of our appointment and had [...]
