All Graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) who are beyond their first semester of tutoring in UW-Madison’s Writing Center participate in professional development opportunities, known as Ongoing Education opportunities, affectionately, as an “OGE.” At the start of a semester, Teaching Assistants will often see a description at the top of an OGE selection form that reads as […]
As a visiting scholar from Germany at the UW-Madison Writing Center, I sometimes feel jealous of all the things going on here. Having a writing center with 110 people working as writing fellows, writing consultants and as leadership staff, and, even more important, experiencing how the writing center is valued here at the university, seems […]
By Elisabeth Miller and Anne Wheeler, Graduate Co-Coordinators of Madison Writing Assistance. As of the Fall 2011 semester, Madison Writing Assistance (MWA) was active at 7 Madison area libraries and community centers, conducted nearly 200 sessions, employed a staff of 10 people from several different disciplines and programs within the UW-Madison Graduate School of Letters […]
“Hello? I’m not really sure how this works. I’m hoping to have someone look at my paper…”
Before our students sit down with one of us for the first time at the Writing Center…
Before the opening chit chat…
Before the delving into concerns and ideas…
Before they begin to explore the power of talk for their writing process…
Before all of that, each of our students has to work up the courage to dial our number or to find their way from a packed elevator in a strange building down the hall to our door. In this post I want to take a moment to focus on what happens when our eventual students hit call on their phone or stride into our waiting area for the first time. That’s because, although we might think that learning in the Writing Center begins in earnest once tutor and tutee sit down over a draft for the first time, we should also remember that that first encounter is a packed educational moment, too.
By Danielle Warthen. As a writing instructor who’s also been a writing tutor in the UW-Madison Writing Center for the past five years, I’d say that, hands down, the most common comment I hear from students new to the Writing Center when we begin our sessions is: “I’m a bad writer.” It’s often said in […]
If you’ve ever staffed a writing center or tutoring center in an evening, you’ve probably seen your fill of pure, visceral panic. I’m in my third semester as a Writing Center instructor now, and I’ve been in the trenches. Most times, you can see the warning signs a long way off: the wide, intense eyes; […]
This semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about revision. Well, okay, I always think a lot about revision; it’s essential to my writing center work, my classroom teaching, and my own writing (I am the queen of Shitty First Drafts, as described in the second chapter of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird). But lately I’ve […]
Madison residents and UW students know that Halloween can be a big deal. In fact, as a Wisconsin alum, some of my fondest memories of my time in Madison are of Halloween-related activities. So perhaps it is only natural that my love of this funny, freakish holiday followed me to my new home in suburban […]
By Rebecca Lorimer and Elisabeth Miller. The 2011 Midwest Writing Centers Association Biennial Conference will take place here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison October 20th-22nd. This year’s theme, “On the Isthmus,” gestures quite literally to the conference’s location, but also to the quality that makes this conference unique: just as writing centers bridge disciplines, locations, […]
