By Shifra Sharlin – Shifra Sharlin has been a Senior Lecturer at Yale University in the Department of English since 2013. In 2007, she received her Ph.D. in the Composition-Rhetoric Program from UW-Madison where she worked in the Writing Center. She has also taught at UC-Berkeley, the Wisconsin English as a Second Language Institute, UW-Madison’s […]
By Bradley Hughes – Greetings from a new academic year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Writing Center! We had a very busy and productive summer of 2018. The Writing Center was open for 12 weeks this summer, offering consultations, workshops, and writing groups for hundreds of undergraduate- and graduate-student writers. The summer center was staffed […]
By Bradley Hughes – It’s graduation and award time, and the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is delighted to honor two of our wonderful tutor colleagues, who are the recipients of our second annual teaching awards for graduate teaching assistants on our Writing Center staff. Every semester there are between 45 and 50 […]
By Rick Ness—What is Midnight Madness? Midnight Madness is an all-night tutoring event for undergraduates inspired by “The Long Night Against Procrastination.” This mad event offers one-on-one writing instruction from 6pm to 1am. Midnight Madness is hosted by the Writing Center in collaboration with Steve Frye and our good friends at College Library, UW-Madison’s library for undergraduates. We want to thank College Library for providing the space and […]
By Brenna Swift – Imagine for a moment that you’re trying to reach an educational goal, one you’ve had your sights on for as long as you can remember. As you move closer to the goal, you encounter barrier after barrier along the way. School culture at large, including some of your instructors, tells you […]
By Nancy Linh Karls – All of us in leadership roles at the UW-Madison Writing Center are proud of our undergraduate Writing Fellows and our graduate tutors for many reasons: for doing an outstanding job of supporting student writers, for continually challenging themselves to learn more, and for being all-around great colleagues and friends. We […]
By Cydney Alexis and Billie Schwartz – One night in Philadelphia, my sister Billie and I were dining with friends, and the topic of eye contact came up. While she was able to maintain steady eye contact with most of us at the table, a couple of us noticed our eyes darting to the side […]
By Jessie Gurd – “What do I want?” “How can I tell when I’ve seen it?” “When—and how—do I intervene to get it again?” These exact questions do not come up during my appointments at the Writing Center; they have another source. However, they get at something I think about a lot when working with a […]
By Ryan Holley – “How pleasant it is to know these clever new inventions and to be able to defy the established laws! When I thought only about horses, I was not able to string three words together without a mistake, but now that the master has altered and improved me and I live in this world of subtle thought, […]
By Emily L. Loney – “I may correct an accidental slip (I am full of them, since I run on regardless) but it would be an act of treachery to remove such imperfections as are commonly and always in me.” [1] In 1588, Michel de Montaigne told readers that, although he was revising his Essays, […]
