By Joseph Franklin, New York City College of Technology—I am writing this at a bamboo table and simple folding chair combo. I am using Microsoft Word on a Mac laptop mounted on a Roost laptop stand and using a Logitech ERGO K860 keyboard that supports my wrists. I am playing instrumental music by Grandbrothers through Sennheiser PXC 550 noise canceling headphones and I have notifications turned off on all devices. These tools (and others) have been curated […]
By Mary O’Shan Overton—In her acceptance speech at the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal ceremony, the novelist Toni Morrison said that “There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely an absence of war. It is larger than that. […] The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one—an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in.” I am interested in making space for that kind of peace. In fact, as a writing center director, I feel an ardent responsibility to do so. […]
By Gabrielle Isabel Kelenyi and Seth Umbaugh—This fall, the Writing Center offered an ongoing education group (OGE) about being an ally versus a co-conspirator in an antiracist writing center, which was co-facilitated by the TA Assistant Director of the Writing Center, Seth Umbaugh, and the TA Coordinator of Multicultural and Social Justice Initiatives, Gabrielle Kelenyi. We assembled […]
By Ellen Cecil-Lemkin and Lisa Marvel Johnson—As several scholars have already pointed out (Dembsey; Hitt; Kiedaisch and Dinitz to name a few), historically, the scholarship on disability in the writing center is… not great (to put it lightly). It’s seeped in ableism by positioning disabled writers as “other” and problems that need to be solved. This framing leads to positioning disabled students “as so radically different from other students that they are beyond help—that they require too much time, resources, or special knowledge” (Hitt). This perspective, however, goes beyond ableism that occurs on an individual level. […]
By Emily Loney—When Sir Philip Sidney sent the manuscript of his prose romance, the Arcadia, to his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, sometime in the 1580s, he sent a letter along as well. Apologizing for the imperfections of his tale, Sidney tells Pembroke in his letter that the Arcadia was written for her, and he reminds her […]
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 kind of writing that they want to produce. This is why we […]
By Amy Gaeta – As a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in English, writing center tutor and student, I love to write. Even if it was not part of my job, like many people reading this blog, the writing process is where I continue to find myself. During my past two years of working in the writing […]
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 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 Leigh Elion – I’m angry with Paul Silvia. Don’t get me wrong. He seems like a very nice person. When he came to UW-Madison in 2013 to speak with our Writing Center tutors, he was funny, generous, and insightful. Silvia is a psychology professor at UNC-Greensboro. His book, How to Write a Lot, offers […]
