By Karen Best – If you want to spend twenty minutes as the life of the party in a group of academics, tell them you train faculty and staff to better meet the needs of ESL students taking their classes. I’ve worked in the field of English language education for almost 15 years, but it […]
By Antonio Tang – My name is Antonio Tang, a sleep-deprived father of an 8-month-old, a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric scheduled to finish this fall, and this year’s summer director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Writing Center. Keeping all these balls in the air has been difficult, and this director’s role represents the […]
By Luis Cárcamo – Greetings from the southernmost writing center in the world! We are located in the city of Punta Arenas (53.16° S), Chile, founded in 1848 on the north shore of the Strait of Magellan and across Tierra del Fuego in the Chilean Patagonia. Punta Arenas is in a cut-off area of our country. […]
By Scott Chiu – Like many lucky students in US universities, I benefitted from the Writing Center, especially, from the privilege of working as a writing tutor in the writing center; I established my scholarly identity and pursued my vocation as an educator through the writing center world. More than just a beneficiary of the […]
By Bradley Hughes – It’s graduation and award time, and the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is delighted to honor three of our wonderful tutor colleagues, who are the recipients of our third annual teaching awards for graduate teaching assistants on our Writing Center staff. Every semester there are between 45 and 50 […]
By Mike Haen and Brenna Swift – Late in the fall 2018 semester, we wrote a post about our work with Johnson Creek High School teacher Kyle Collins and his students, who visited UW-Madison in October for a orientation to writing center work. Prior to their visit, Kyle and his students had recently launched a […]
by Jennifer Fandel – I have two words of advice on using social media in the Writing Center—embrace it!
By Karen Best – The ESL Program and the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are both housed in Helen C. White hall, just one floor apart. However, despite this close proximity, our floors remain mostly separate, our staff distinct. Either you work in the ESL Program on the 5th floor or the Writing […]
By Mike Haen and Brenna Swift – The UW-Madison writing center, like all centers, is built on collaboration. As tutors, we collaborate during individual consultations to help writers brainstorm ideas and revise drafts. We also collaborate with faculty, instructional staff, and teaching assistants across campus through our outreach program to co-teach lessons on writing and […]
By Leah Pope Parker – We learn to write by imitating, by reading, and by thinking about the construction of texts we aim to emulate. It is commonly understood among teachers of writing that learning to write—at a more sophisticated level, in a different style, in a new genre—requires writers to read models for the […]
