Year: 2020

Blogs Can Create Community Among Students in Courses Across the Curriculum

Classes, Collaborative Learning, Higher Education, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum

By Annette Vee—Like every other teacher in higher education right now, I’m navigating the new terrain of socially distanced, online, hybrid or hyflex teaching due to our global pandemic. I’m also a writing program administrator, which means that I share some responsibility to help other teachers navigate this terrain as well. Conscious of the labor issues of instructors preparing new classes in flex, hybrid or online contexts, I’m digging into my online toolbox to share strategies that might work for others in this context and for the future, after the pandemic. The best little tool I have for teaching online or in hybrid formats is a class blog. […]

December 29, 2020

Reflecting on a Virtual Semester

Collaborative Learning, Community Writing Assistance, Diversity and Inclusion, Events, Higher Education, Madison Writing Assistance, Outreach, Peer Tutoring, Social Justice, Writing Center Workshops, Writing Fellows, Writing Groups

From Chrissy Widmayer—Looking back on the Writing Center’s Fall 2020 semester, I am awed by all that we have been able to do. Alongside our students, we grappled every day with new challenges posed by the pandemic, adapting to an entirely online slate of services this semester, and sought to maintain the high level of professionalism we always offer. I am grateful for the patience our students have shown as we’ve adjusted to our new methods of teaching and so pleased with the reciprocal culture of care the Writing Center has fostered this semester. […]

December 15, 2020

NaNoWriMo & AcWriMo: A Month-Long Celebration of Writing is Just the Beginning

Community Writing Assistance, Diversity and Inclusion, Events, Madison Writing Assistance, Outreach, Writing Centers, Writing Groups

By Gabrielle Isabel Kelenyi—What comes to mind when you think of the Writing Center? Perhaps you think of a place where you can receive help with your writing; a place where you can take your writing to the next level; a place where you can brainstorm ideas for a first draft, get feedback on a second draft, and put the finishing touches on a final draft… before submitting it to be evaluated by a professor, a TA, an admissions committee, a potential supervisor. That is, the Writing Center is typically thought of as a place where writers can receive short-term and long-term assistance with academic writing. But what if the Writing Center could be more? […]

November 24, 2020

“Focus on the Now,” or Embodiment in a Virtual Dissertation Writing Camp

Graduate Students, Higher Education

By Calley Marotta and Jennifer Conrad—In May of 2020, two months after the sudden jump to online-only instruction necessitated by COVID-19, our writing center held its first virtual Dissertation Writing Camp. Co-sponsored by UW-Madison’s Graduate School and facilitated by Writing Center instructors, the central goals of this camp have always been to support writing and its production during a compressed timeline and to provide dissertators with a community of fellow graduate student writers engaged in the same effort. The decision to host this long-running camp online rather than in person felt provisional, and yet necessary amid so much upheaval.

November 10, 2020
A nighttime view of earth from space

Translingualism: An Alternative to Restrictive Monolingual Ideologies in Writing Instruction

Diversity and Inclusion, Higher Education, Multilingual Writers

By Emily Bouza, Tim Cavnar, and Keli Tucker—Multilingual students should be celebrated for what they bring to academia. In this post, we hope to share what it looks like to support multilingualism in education. Emily’s section will cover different frameworks for understanding multilingual practice, Tim’s section will discuss language ideologies as a framework for thinking and talking about language and writing, and Keli’s section will propose a translingual disposition as a possible move toward a more inclusive writing center pedagogy.

October 27, 2020

The Craft of Science Writing: Introducing a Resource for Writers, Instructors, and Tutors

Tutor Publications, UW-Madison Writing Center Alumni Voices

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. […]

October 13, 2020

Booked but Can’t Read: “Functional Literacy,” National Citizenship, and the New Face of Dred Scott in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Racial Justice, Social Justice, Tutor Publications, Writing Center Tutors

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. […]

September 29, 2020

Introducing our New Academic Staff Members

From the Director, Staff Introductions, Writing Center Academic Staff

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” […]

September 22, 2020

Welcome to Fall 2020 at the UW-Madison Writing Center!

Community Writing Assistance, From the Director, Higher Education

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. […]

September 8, 2020

What Makes a Writing Group? Undergraduate Writers Model Compassion and Acceptance

Collaborative Learning, Higher Education, Undergraduate Students, Writing Groups

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. […]

August 3, 2020