what you can expect from your Writing Fellows

Writing Fellows respond to writing in progress as interested peers, not as graders. They are talented undergraduates and active learners, but they are not fully developed teachers. They will need your guidance and support. That said, you can expect your Writing Fellows:

to be enthusiastic about writing. Writing Fellows are chosen in a carefully designed and highly competitive application process. Applicants must submit a personal statement, transcript, two writing samples with explanations about why they chose those particular pieces of writing, and a letter of recommendation from a professor or teaching assistant. After an initial screening, we select about 50 candidates to interview. Based on the interviews, we then choose 30 new Fellows each year. All of them have demonstrated strong writing ability and interpersonal skills, intellectual curiosity about the writing process itself, and a commitment to helping their peers. They are among the brightest and most accomplished students on campus, not to mention among the university's most dynamic and devoted teachers. Together they form a tight-knit group of gifted teacher-scholars dedicated to sharing their excitement and expertise with their peers.

to be trained in effective tutoring practices. All Fellows, in their first semester with the program, enroll in English/Interdisciplinary Programs 316: Seminar on Tutoring Writing Across the Curriculum. This three-credit honors seminar, taught by Emily Hall, explores how writers write, how they learn to write, and how to help writers revise their work. Fellows read recent work from composition studies, practice commenting on student drafts, conduct original research on writers and writing, and reflect on their own experiences as writers and tutors. The seminar also provides support and a sense of community as new Fellows begin the task of responding critically and constructively to student writing. Fellows who have already completed the seminar participate in ongoing education sessions designed to expand the Fellows' repertoire of tutoring strategies and mentor new Fellows; many of them present their research at academic conferences. All Fellows receive continuing guidance and support from the program's administrative staff and other members of the English department throughout their tenure.

to respond thoughtfully to students' papers. In addition to making marginal comments, Fellows write extensive endnotes designed to identify and explain key areas for revision. They seek to praise what works in a paper as well as point out what doesn't work, and they try to offer suggestions and strategies for revision rather than merely pointing out flaws. Take a look at an example of a Fellow's comments.

to address writing issues (not content!) in papers. As they read, Fellows will keep in mind what you tell them about your goals for individual paper assignments as well as the general principles they learn in the seminar on tutoring writing across the curriculum. However, they will not necessarily be specialists in your discipline, and thus they will not be in a position to evaluate the course-specific content of papers. They will attend your class periodically to collect papers, and, if their schedules allow, they may attend one or two classes (the day you assign or discuss paper topics is often a good time for Fellows to visit), but they will not enroll in the course itself. Fellows may well engage in spirited discussions about course content during their conferences with students, but you alone must be responsible for assessing the extent to which a paper's content is "right" or "wrong." Fellows also will not copyedit students' papers. The Fellows' goal is to help their peers to become better writers, not to 'fix' their prose for them. While the Fellows will certainly identify patterns of grammatical or mechanical irregularity and explain how to avoid them, they are not proofreaders. It is ultimately the writer's responsibility to copyedit his or her own work.