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 […]
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 […]
By Rubén Casas Rubén Casas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department’s Program in Composition and Rhetoric. In addition to his Writing Center teaching, he teaches for the English 201 Program. Two weeks into the spring 2014 semester I worked with a student in the Main Center who, upon asking her what she was […]
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 […]
By Taryn Okuma, The Catholic University of America. Taryn Okuma is Director of the Writing Center and Clinical Assistant Professor of English at The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. in Literary Studies from UW-Madison in 2008. While at Madison, she served as the Co-Director of the English 100 […]
By Mitch Nakaue, The University of Iowa. As a deeply introverted person, I’ve always been interested in the power of writing center work to incite talk. As a graduate student at UW–Madison, I learned to cultivate an expressive and even outgoing classroom teaching persona, but found myself much less drained by one-to-one discussions with students. […]
By Eli Goldblatt, Temple University—My wife, Wendy Osterweil, is a printmaker, often screen printing on fabric in multiple layers and then quilting back into the shapes and colors. She also teaches art education in a fine arts college, where she prepares young artists for a variety of urban and suburban K-12 classrooms. In our many, many talks about teaching and the arts over the years, she links the art she most admires with the teaching she seeks to foster […]
