program philosophy & goals

The Writing Fellows Program -- based on a model initiated at Brown University more than twenty years ago and now in place at campuses across the country, including Michigan, Harvard, Swarthmore, and Penn -- trains talented undergraduates to serve as peer tutors, called Writing Fellows, in writing-intensive classes across the College of Letters and Science. Two central principles guide the Writing Fellows program. The first is that all writers, no matter how accomplished, can improve their writing by sharing work in progress and making revisions based on constructive criticism; the second is that collaboration among student peers is an especially effective mode of learning.

The Fellows put these principles into practice. Like their colleagues in the Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, the Fellows understand writing not simply as the expression of thought but as an integral part of the process of thinking. Therefore Fellows not only seek to help their peers express themselves more clearly; they aim to show them how to develop, deepen, and hone their ideas by gaining control of the writing process through which those ideas take shape.

All the students in your course--not just writers who appear to need extra help--will be required to submit drafts of two papers to their Fellow and to meet with the Fellow in conference to discuss revision plans for those papers. Fellows will help students decide how to present ideas more effectively and how to express themselves more clearly. Keep in mind that Fellows will not necessarily be familiar with your specific course material, or even with your discipline; rather, they will respond as intelligent and attentive general readers.

Because paper drafts will be turned in to the Writing Fellows at least two weeks before the revised papers are submitted to you for a grade, you can be assured that all papers you receive will have been started early and revised at least once. Ideally, having students go through this process of drafting and revising their papers with a Fellow will enable you to concentrate on discipline-specific issues of content and methodology when grading student papers.

Using a Writing Fellow in your course will not, of course, result in perfect student papers. Fellows will try to identify in each paper one or two significant areas that the writer should work on to improve the draft, but they will not be able to "clean up" all student prose. No matter how successful they are, for example, Fellows will not be able to guarantee that students turn in drafts free of grammatical and mechanical errors. Nor will they be able to ensure that your students incorporate course material correctly in their papers. Fellows will focus on general writing concerns (How well does this draft fulfill the requirements of the assignment? How clearly does it express the writer's ideas? How logically is the argument laid out?) rather than specific issues of content.

Because Fellows act as peer mentors instead of graders, they serve as facilitators, rather than judges, for the student writers in your class. Collaborative learning plays a crucial role in this process. Although Fellows are not specialists in the disciplines in which they tutor, and therefore do not offer instruction in course content, they are accomplished, self-aware writers and intelligent, attentive readers. They are therefore able to offer sound guidance and concrete advice on any and all writing-related issues. What is more, by serving as sounding boards they can help their peers to work through their ideas for themselves and to discover the most compelling ways to present them. By acting as collaborative colleagues, the Fellows not only help their peers to write better papers but encourage them to take themselves more seriously as writers and thinkers.

This sense of commitment to the idea of a learning community informs all aspects of the Writing Fellows Program. By placing undergraduates in positions of intellectual leadership and creating new opportunities for intellectual exchange between and among students and faculty, the Writing Fellows Program helps fulfill the university's teaching mission. And by supporting Writing Fellows in their development as teachers and scholars, you, the Writing Fellows faculty, help us work toward our program's most ambitious goal: building and maintaining a community of undergraduates dedicated to uniting intellectual inquiry with service to the university.