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

Crossing the Barrier: Advocating for Students, Educating Faculty


Outreach, Peer Tutoring, Student Voices, Technology, Undergraduate Students, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Alexandra Asche – When I first started planning this post, I intended to write about the UMM Writing Center’s formal outreach to faculty. However, as I looked through the previous posts on this blog, I found that others have already written about how to plan this sort of outreach. I also noticed, though, that […]

March 14, 2016

How We [Actually] Write: Neurodiversity, Writing Process, and Writing Instruction


Disability and Writing Centers, Graduate Students, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center Tutors

By Leah Pope Leah Pope has been a Writing Center tutor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since fall of 2014. She is also a PhD candidate in English literary studies, writing a dissertation that explores representations of disability and bodily difference in Anglo-Saxon England. Alexandra Gillespie opens her essay in How We Write: Thirteen Ways […]

January 25, 2016

A Case for Compulsion? On Requiring Whole-Class Writing Center Visits


Peer Tutoring, Student Voices, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Jessica Citti Jessica Citti, Ph.D., has tutored in the writing centers at UW-Madison and the University of Iowa, where she also taught composition, rhetoric, and technical communication. She is now the Writing Skills Specialist at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where she provides one-on-one writing consultations for students and coordinates the HSU Writing […]

October 26, 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

Two Heads Are Better: An Experiment in Paired Skype Tutoring


Satellite Locations, Technology, The Online Writing Center, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Writing Center Tutors

By Leah Misemer Leah Misemer is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she has been working as a Writing Center instructor for three years.  She served as the TA Coordinator of the Online Writing Center at UW-Madison for the 2013-14 school year. Usually, we think of a writing center […]

September 8, 2014

Instruction Beyond the Assignment: Working with Learners of English


Multilingual Writers, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors

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 […]

February 24, 2014