Rachel Herzl-Betz is a PhD student in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pursuing a minor in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research focuses on intersections between nineteenth-century British literature, rhetoric, and disability studies. This is her first year with the UW-Madison Writing Center. I have a thing for personal statements. I realize that I’m […]
By Brad Hughes, Director of the Writing Center and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At many universities, writing centers have now earned significant respect for the work they do with student-writers. Within that respect, though, almost never do I hear writing centers valued for what I like to call […]
By Andrew Kay. Andrew Kay is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is at work on a dissertation about Romantic and Victorian poetry. He has worked at the Writing Center since Fall 2009. Toward the end of his life, Robert Frost wrote a wonderfully mysterious poem called “Directive.” […]
By John Bradley. John Bradley is Assistant Director of the Writing Studio and Senior Lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Before joining Vanderbilt’s faculty this fall, John was the 2011-2012 Interim Associate Director of the UW-Madison Writing Center, having also worked as a tutor there for many years as he finished his […]
By Kevin Mullen. Kevin Mullen is a dissertator in Literary Studies, with a minor in Composition and Rhetoric, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is his third year working at the Writing Center. There is a particular kind of shame that forms when you come face-to-face with the fact that you are not practicing what […]
By Nmachika Nwakaego Nwokeabia.When I found out that the UW-Madison’s Writing Center was offering a dissertation writing camp (or, as I fondly call it, a dissertation boot camp) during this past summer, I knew I had to apply for it. I was obsessed with my dissertation, and this was yet another way for me to […]
By John Duffy—Most people who have taught in a writing center, or who have given the work any serious thought, are usually skilled in explaining what a writing center is not. That is, those of us charged with helping students, faculty, or the occasional inquiring dean understand writing center teaching often begin with negative definitions, listing the various things that a writing center isn’t and specifying those actions that writing center tutors don’t undertake. And so, we may say […]
I’ve considered myself a “writing center person” for over twenty years now, ever since I anxiously took my first college paper to my undergraduate writing center and left with a few concrete ideas for revision and the sense that I might actually be able to do the whole college thing. I eventually became a writing […]
Every semester, our Writing Across the Curriculum program gets a head start. The week before classes have even begun, we have the privilege of spending two mornings training up to 75 new Teaching Assistants. These TAs will be teaching writing-intensive courses across the disciplines—courses that fulfill an intermediate communication requirement for undergraduates. In our UW-Madison […]
By Brad Hughes, Director, The Writing Center, Director, Writing Across the Curriculum, UW-Madison. In this blog post, I would like to honor the legendary founder of the Writing Center (originally called the Writing Laboratory) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the most influential pioneers in the modern writing center profession—Professor Joyce Stribling Steward. […]
