Tending Other People’s Texts: Writing Center Tutoring and MFA Workshops


Collaborative Learning, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Sarah Dimick – Last winter, during a late afternoon appointment, a graduate student in the history department asked me how he might make the final chapter of his dissertation more compelling.1  We’d already discussed what I think of as skeletal concerns: the order of his paragraphs, the clarity of his topic sentences.  We’d already […]

March 13, 2017

The Impact of Writing Center Outreach: Empirical and Anecdotal Evidence


Classes, Collaborative Learning, Outreach, Satellite Locations, The Online Writing Center, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Workshops

By Leah Pope—Every semester, the Outreach team of the UW-Madison Writing Center devotes dozens of hours to visiting classrooms, workshops, resource fairs, and student organizations to deliver brief introductions to the Writing Center’s services and teach or co-teach workshops on various genres and aspects of writing. As the TA Coordinator of Outreach this year, I have the unique pleasure of a bird’s-eye-view of Outreach teaching […]

November 7, 2016

Using Peer Writing Groups For the Senior Thesis and Beyond


Collaborative Learning, Peer Tutoring, Student Voices, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, Writing Fellows

By Rebecca Steffy – This year, I have the privilege of coordinating the UW-Madison Writing Center’s Senior Thesis Writing Groups, small peer-led writing groups that meet weekly or bi-weekly throughout the daunting semester- or year-long process of writing a senior thesis. I help spread the word that senior thesis writing groups are forming at the […]

March 8, 2016

Teaming Up: A Collaboration between the Writing Center and the Library


Collaborative Learning, Graduate Students, Science Writing, Writing Center Workshops

By Nancy Linh Karls and Barbara Sisolak Nancy Linh Karls is a senior instructor in the UW-Madison Writing Center, where she serves as its science-writing specialist. She also leads and teaches the Mellon-Wisconsin Dissertation Writing Camps and coordinates the community-based Madison Writing Assistance program. Barbara Sisolak is a senior academic librarian with Steenbock Library, where she […]

January 19, 2016

Collaboration in Action


Classes, Collaborative Learning

By Rachel Herzl-Betz Rachel Herzl-Betz is the T.A. Coordinator of Outreach for the Writing Center at UW-Madison, where she has been a tutor since 2012. She is also a PhD candidate in Literary Studies, with a focus on Victorian Literature, Disability Studies, and Rhetoric. The perfect teaching collaboration is an elusive ideal, more like a dream […]

April 27, 2015

Showcasing Undergraduate Research


Big 10 Writing Centers, Collaborative Learning, Peer Tutoring, Student Voices, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Fellows

By Emily Hall At a large university we are regularly exposed to the original and sometimes groundbreaking research that takes place across campus. Mostly, this research comes from the work of professors and graduate students, many of whom have grants, research funds, and laboratories to support their endeavors. Less frequently do we have the opportunity to […]

April 20, 2015

Results of a Research Expedition: A Study of Writing Center Leadership


Collaborative Learning, Writing Center Research

By Katrin Girgensohn, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt, Oder, Germany Two weeks ago, a newspaper notice has caught my interest: The National Library in Berlin has received the original logbooks of Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition to South America. All his notes, drawings, thoughts – every word he had scribbled down every evening during his journeys, are […]

March 24, 2014

Sharing the Space: Collaborating in Sessions with Laptops


Collaborative Learning, Multilingual Writers, Peer Tutoring, Technology, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Tutors

By Leah Misemer @lsmisemer Leah Misemer is a graduate student in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the TA Coordinator of the Online Writing Center there.  While her dissertation is on serial commercial comics, she is also interested in media specificity and technology in writing centers.  This is her sixth semester working as […]

February 10, 2014

The Importance of Being Interested


Collaborative Learning, Graduate Students, Outreach, Peer Tutoring, Student Voices, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Michelle Niemann Michelle Niemann is the assistant director of the writing center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 2013-2014. Her first tutoring experience was in the writing center at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, in 2003 and 2004. She recently defended her dissertation and will receive her PhD in English literature from UW-Madison in […]

December 9, 2013