Writing Across the Curriculum
Breaking Bad: The Process of Becoming “Just”
By Danielle Warthen. As a writing instructor who’s also been a writing tutor in the UW-Madison Writing Center for the past five years, I’d say that, hands down, the most common comment I hear from students new to the Writing Center when we begin our sessions is: “I’m a bad writer.” It’s often said in [...]
Join Us “On the Isthmus” at the 2011 MWCA Biennial Conference!
By Rebecca Lorimer and Elisabeth Miller.
The 2011 Midwest Writing Centers Association Biennial Conference will take place here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison October 20th-22nd. This year’s theme, “On the Isthmus,” gestures quite literally to the conference’s location, but also to the quality that makes this conference unique: just as writing centers bridge disciplines, locations, and [...]
Co-Teaching as Synthesis: Learning to Ask Questions
The students in Professor Rebekah Willett’s first-year course on the Internet and Society are crouched over their desks and laptops, some scribbling, some typing, some doing so fervently, some reluctantly. All are working to formulate a couple of sentences that synthesize two paragraphs of text they have in front of them. I’ve just walked with [...]
Who Needs a Muse? The Real Reasons Why UW-Madison Students Are Attracted to Ongoing Appointments
By Rachel Carrales.
The summer before last, I spent a month traveling through France, Italy, and Spain. It was a whirlwind trip, and I was only able to spend a day or two in each city I visited. It was so fast, in fact, that I find myself remembering only snippets of things: the fat, cuddly [...]
The Wisconsin Idea and the Writing Center
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a long and distinguished history of public service. The guiding philosophy of this commitment to public service, called the “Wisconsin Idea,” is often described as “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.” Since I have a scholarly interest in the Wisconsin Idea, I’ve been thinking about [...]
Writing Centers and Academically Adrift: Why We Might Have to Start Reading These Books
By Rebecca Lorimer.
Are college students today academically adrift?
Perhaps this question might make more sense if I had typed the last word in all caps or added a prolonged shriek sound effect after the question mark. You are correct if you feel an implied “yes” in the question and a not-so-implied eye-roll in my own reaction.
A Graduate Education
This week my shift at the writing center will be bitter sweet. I’m finishing
my work on two dissertations and a master’s thesis. In my work at the
writing center, I’m a bit of a graduate student junkie. In fact I probably
spend way too much writing center time with graduate students and not nearly
enough slogging away in [...]
Joint Staff Meeting–Another Big Success!
The undergraduate Writing Fellows and the staff of the Writing Center came together last Friday to build community and share scholarship at our annual Joint Staff Meeting. The meeting was conference-style, featuring panels of Writing Fellows’ original research on various topics related to tutoring and teaching writing. It was an inspiring experience, and renewed our [...]
The Psychosociocultural Perspective: Academic Families and Student Mentoring
On Friday, February 11 we had our monthly staff meeting, which, as we usually do in the spring semester, addressed social justice in Writing Center work. UW-Madison Professor Alberta Gloria, an award-winning researcher, teacher and mentor from the department of Counseling Psychology, spoke with us at length. Her presentation was entitled “Research and Practice Implications [...]
Writing Style Matters: An Engineering Student’s Perspective
By Debjit Roy. What does the UW-Madison Writing Center have to offer a doctoral student in engineering? Actually, quite a bit!
