Category: Writing Centers

When a Warm Welcome Becomes a Learning Experience

Writing Center Receptionists, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

“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.

December 6, 2011

Practicing — and Reading — Revision in Tutor Education Courses

Classes, UW-Madison Writing Center Alumni Voices, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers, Writing Fellows

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 […]

October 31, 2011

Join Us “On the Isthmus” at the 2011 MWCA Biennial Conference!

Events, Midwest Writing Centers Association, UW-Madison Writing Center Alumni Voices, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

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, […]

October 17, 2011

Co-Teaching as Synthesis: Learning to Ask Questions

Outreach, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

The students in Professor Rebekah Willett’s first-year course on the Internet and Society are crouched over their desks and laptops, some scribbling, some typing, some doing so fervently, some reluctantly. All are working to formulate a couple of sentences that synthesize two paragraphs of text they have in front of them. I’ve just walked with […]

October 10, 2011

Who Needs a Muse? The Real Reasons Why UW-Madison Students Are Attracted to Ongoing Appointments

Graduate Students, Multilingual Writers, Student Voices, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Rachel Carrales. The summer before last, I spent a month traveling through France, Italy, and Spain. It was a whirlwind trip, and I was only able to spend a day or two in each city I visited. It was so fast, in fact, that I find myself remembering only snippets of things: the fat, […]

October 3, 2011

Is There a Person in This Text? Synchronous Online Writing Instruction and Personhood as a Collaborative Gesture

Satellite Locations, The Online Writing Center, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Christopher Syrnyk The physical embodiment treatment . . . When writers come through the doors of the Main Writing Center (WC) at UW-Madison, it’s worth considering how we instructors can process many bits of information about them. Before we meet, we’ve typically reviewed instructor records to prepare us for the session in the here […]

September 27, 2011

From Visitors to Exiles to Tutors: The Changing Face of the Writing Center

Multilingual Writers, UW-Madison Writing Center Alumni Voices, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Paula Gillespie. South Florida is full of surprises. A troop of macaws, probably freed from a zoo or pet store during a hurricane, descends into the trees down the street and spends the morning there, squabbling about which one gets to sit where. Burmese pythons, once pets that are now too large to keep […]

September 21, 2011