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

“Something Magical in Meeting with a Group of Like-Minded People”: Graduate Writing Groups in the Writing Center


Tutor Publications, Writing Centers, Writing Groups

By Chris Earle, Elisabeth Miller, and Bradley Hughes  Every week this spring semester, roughly 90 graduate students keep coming back to Helen C. White Hall on the UW-Madison campus. They slog through ice and snow on winter mornings; they eschew sunny spring afternoons and evenings all to participate in the Writing Center’s Graduate Writing Groups. […]

April 25, 2016

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

Peer Tutoring and the Serious Work of Undergraduate Scholarship


Events, Higher Education, Peer Tutoring, Student Voices, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, Writing Center Research, Writing Centers, Writing Fellows

By Rachel Herzl-Betz Rachel Herzl-Betz is an Assistant Director of the Writing Fellows Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has been a tutor and administrator since 2012. She is also a PhD candidate in Literary Studies, with a focus on Victorian Literature and Disability Studies.  I’ve always been a fan of academic conferences. At their best, […]

November 30, 2015

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

Won’t You Be (More Than) My Neighbor? Writing Center/Library Partnerships


Writing Center Workshops, Writing Centers

By Heather James and Rebecca S. Nowacek Heather is a Research & Instruction Librarian at Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Libraries. She works to develop and promote information literacy instruction for courses and is the liaison for the departments of Biology, Biomedical Science, Chemistry, and English. She also holds an MFA in Poetry from San Diego […]

April 14, 2015

You Can Take the Tutor out of the Writing Center…


Writing Centers

By Mike A. Shapiro Mike worked as a tutor at the Writing Center at UW–Madison for five years, and as a coordinator for two. This fall, he is teaching first-year composition in the College of Engineering. As Julia Dauer wrote earlier this fall, writing tutors often balance diverse instructional lives. But what happens when that […]

November 10, 2014