Challenging Ableism and Institutional Barriers Through Writing Center Work
By Brenna Swift –
Category: Tutorial Talk and Methods
Writing Center Tutors as Comp-Rhet Researchers: Some Notes from CCCC in Kansas City
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 also […]
Holding Your Gaze: Non-Verbal Communication Strategies in Writing Center Work
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 when […]
“Excellent Timing and Really Great Praise”
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 writer: […]
Revision Takes Time: Teaching Inefficiency in the Writing Center
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, he […]
Reading in the Writing Center, Beyond the One-on-One Session
By Angela J. Zito – With recent publications like the NCTE’s Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom (2018), What is College Reading? of the WAC Clearing House (2017), and Indiana UP’s Critical Reading in Higher Education (2015), it seems that reading in colleges and universities is gaining a good deal of new critical […]
Unexpected Power Boost: Persona 5 & Writing Center Tutoring
By Niccole Carner When I began working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center this past fall (2017), I was in the midst of my first play-through of Persona 5, a Japanese role-playing game developed by Atlus Games for the PlayStation 4. My approach to the first weeks of teaching was subtly and inadvertently influenced […]
Toward a Writer Future: New Writing Fellows Leading Campus Collaboration
By Ishita Aghi and Erika Gallagher At UW-Madison, the Undergraduate Writing Fellows program is composed of 50 students who assist other undergraduates with academic writing in courses across the College of Letters & Science. Fellows are undergraduate tutors from a variety of disciplines who possess a passion for helping others. They undergo extensive training and […]
Let’s Chat: Considering “Friendly Talk” in the Writing Center
By Tori Thompson Peters Last year, I had several appointments with an advanced writer named Linda Park who was working on an article for publication about language and cultural barriers in our healthcare system. As we were discussing the project, Linda explained to me that even though she was studying communication between doctors and patients with […]
Honoring Tutor Excellence at UW-Madison’s Writing Center, Spring 2017
By Brad 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 first annual teaching awards for graduate teaching assistants on our Writing Center staff. Every semester there are between 45 and 50 doctoral-level […]