Writing with Custodians: Community Writing Center Work within the University


Community Writing Assistance, Events, Higher Education, Multilingual Writers, Uncategorized, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Calley Marotta – How can a university-sponsored community writing center serve those whom the university does not reach? This is a question community writing centers consistently try to answer by designing writing support for those who live and work beyond the university’s walls (Rousculp 2014).(1) By doing so, they seek to bridge a gap […]

September 17, 2018

Venn and the Art of Writing Instruction


Collaborative Learning, Higher Education, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, UW-Madison Writing Center Alumni Voices, Writing Center History, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Shifra Sharlin – Shifra Sharlin has been a Senior Lecturer at Yale University in the Department of English since 2013. In 2007, she received her Ph.D. in the Composition-Rhetoric Program from UW-Madison where she worked in the Writing Center. She has also taught at UC-Berkeley, the Wisconsin English as a Second Language Institute, UW-Madison’s […]

September 10, 2018

Honoring Tutor Excellence at UW-Madison’s Writing Center, Spring 2018


Awards and Honors, Collaborative Learning, From the Director, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Bradley Hughes – It’s graduation and award time, and the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is delighted to honor two of our wonderful tutor colleagues, who are the recipients of our second annual teaching awards for graduate teaching assistants on our Writing Center staff. Every semester there are between 45 and 50 […]

May 9, 2018

Challenging Ableism and Institutional Barriers Through Writing Center Work


Disability and Writing Centers, Graduate Students, Higher Education, Peer Tutoring, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

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 […]

April 23, 2018

Writing Center Outreach and Leading from the Middle


Higher Education, Outreach, Technology, Uncategorized, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Centers

By Angela J. Zito – Last week, the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network held its annual conference in Montreal, Quebec, where the keynote speaker Randy Bass called upon all of us in attendance (and the programs and institutions we represented) to help steer higher education in the direction of increasingly inclusive and integrated learning […]

October 31, 2017

Writing with Evidence in the Age of Alternative Facts


Collaborative Learning, Uncategorized, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Center Workshops, Writing Centers

By Leah Pope Parker—Conversations about evidence in writing center pedagogy traditionally focus on the genre of the research paper, where evidence includes the ideas, data, and quotations located through research that must be incorporated effectively into the prose of the paper. However, if we think about evidence more broadly within writing center teaching, as any aspect of writing that claims the authority of truth or expertise […]

September 11, 2017

Honoring Tutor Excellence at UW-Madison’s Writing Center, Spring 2017


Awards and Honors, Collaborative Learning, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Uncategorized, Writing Centers

By Bradley Hughes – It’s graduation and award time, and the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is delighted to honor two of our wonderful tutor colleagues, who are the recipients of our first annual teaching awards for graduate teaching assistants on our Writing Center staff. Every semester there are between 45 and 50 […]

May 8, 2017

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