By Siri Carpenter—My path to becoming a professional writer was a wayward one. Toward the end of my undergraduate career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was a psychology major in the early 1990s, I had the sudden inspiration that I wanted to be a writer. But when a friend asked me a perfectly reasonable question—“What do you want to write about?”—I was stumped. I stammered that I figured I’d write about . . . uh . . . whatever seemed interesting, and that . . . hrmmm . . . I was especially interested in science. […]

By Mckenna Kohlenberg—For Black men in the contemporary age of mass incarceration, the consequences of functional illiteracy are devastating. 70% of America’s adult incarcerated population and 85% of juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, which extends beyond the ability to read and includes the development of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills one needs to access knowledge, communicate, and participate effectively in political processes, the economy, higher education, and other 21st century exercises of democratic citizenship. […]

From Nancy Linh Karls and Emily Hall—In August, 2020, thanks to the support of English department chair Anja Wanner, associate dean for humanities Sue Zaeske, and L&S Dean Eric Wilcots (among many others), UW-Madison’s Writing Center was fortunate to welcome five new, full-time academic staff members. During the summer of 2020, our search committee reviewed over 116 applications for “outstanding and energetic administrators/teachers” […]

From the Directors—We are happy to welcome you to the Fall 2020 at UW-Madison’s Writing Center. In doing so, we’d first like to acknowledge the unique stressors of this semester. The Spring 2020 semester called for quick transitions to virtual and physically distanced services, surrounded by uncertainty and individual-level issues for us all in a global pandemic. […]

By Mia Alafaireet—As an undergraduate student at the University of Missouri, one of the things I loved most about campus was that it seemed like there were endless places to write. There was the tried-and-true Bookmark Café, where you could count on the muted din of coffee cups to keep you focused. On a sunny day, you could find a spot under one of the many Bradford pear trees that studded campus. Or, if you were a little bit weird like me, you could sit on the edge of a flowerbed and write amongst the horticulture school’s newest arrangement of ornamental cabbages. […]

By Brenna Swift—Hello from the UW-Madison Writing Center as the summer term begins! In this uncertain time, we have both continued to serve our students and considered the ways our work might fit into the big picture—of a transformed world, of education for social justice, and of new practices in teaching of writing. As one of the assistant directors of the undergraduate Writing Fellows program and an instructor for English 403, our peer tutor education class, I have found myself thinking […]

Are you doing okay? What do your days look like right now? How’s your family? How’s your focus?

By Chris Castillo—The inclusivity statement is an increasingly prevalent genre in academic and nonacademic spaces. Inclusivity statements have become staples in most academic institutions—and even within specific departments in those institutions. The individual departments that take the initiative to develop inclusivity statements make it a point to […]

By Nancy Linh Karls and Emily Hall—The last two weeks have been tumultuous on many fronts, for our students, tutors, and staff at the UW-Madison Writing Center and at other writing centers around the country. We write this brief post to let you know of the decisions that we’ve made to adapt our writing center to the array of current challenges Our response, of course, may shift going forward, but this is our starting point for continued instruction this spring […]

By Amanda Pratt—As graduate students who work in writing centers, we tend to juggle many responsibilities. Our coursework, our dissertation research, our other jobs—the classes we teach, the professors we are tasked with supporting, the programs we run. Our families and personal lives. Oftentimes, and especially for neurodiverse and otherwise marginalized graduate students, this balancing act compounds the unseen emotional and psychic labor of existing in the academy […]