ReConnecting the Centers

From the Director, Higher Education, Writing Center Staff, Writing Centers

By Khristeena Lute, SUNY Adirondack—Like many newly minted writing center directors, when I stepped into my first role of Director, I envisioned a hive of activity in this new-to-me center, with engaged conversations about tutoring, connecting with local campuses and their writing centers, and general collaboration all around. I made headway in other areas of my scholarship—literary criticism, creative nonfiction, and even a novel—but I still hadn’t quite found my writing center niche. // Instead, I faced one emergency after another after another (family tragedies, pandemic shifts, and the daily challenges that fill our email inboxes)—with each one leaving me feeling smaller and quieter. […]

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Listening and Learning: The Exigence of Creating Community Through Feedback

Graduate Students, Higher Education, Student Voices, Tutor Training, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Staff, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Sam Hyatt and Meg Hultgren, University of South Carolina—As doctoral students serving as Assistant Directors (ADs) in the Writing Center (WC) at the University of South Carolina during uncertain academic times, we’ve had the unique opportunity to navigate leadership roles while still actively engaged in graduate study. Our tutoring staff is also distinctive—comprised entirely of English graduate students, primarily MAs and MFAs in their first year of school—which has shaped the collaborative and academic culture within our center. // Our overlapping roles as students, tutors, and leaders has been both challenging and rewarding, […]

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Honoring the Writing Center’s Instructors: 2025 Awards for Excellence in Teaching

Awards and Honors, Graduate Students, Peer Tutoring, Writing Center Tutors

Each year, the Writing Center celebrates and honors the exceptional work of our teaching assistants by presenting two teaching excellence awards. Our team of over 35 teaching assistants work extremely hard to provide personalized, one-to-one writing instruction to more than 1,500 students. Beyond this work, they also contribute to the Writing Center’s mission by leading […]

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Discontented with Just Western Consent: A Global Anglophone Perspective on Writing Center Professionalization via Global Rhetorical Traditions

Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Higher Education, Multilingual Writers, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Staff, Writing Center Theory, Writing Centers

By Saurabh Anand, University of Georgia—As an international graduate student who speaks five languages and writes in three, I have survived multiple instances of North American writing epistemology hegemony across academic and professional situations. When they happened, such experiences surprised and frustrated me because […]

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Working Across Time Zones

International Writing Centers, Undergraduate Students, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Melisa Mansuroglu, University of Connecticut—During the summer of 2023, my director at the University of Connecticut writing center, Tom Deans, presented me with the opportunity to extend a project that he helped create while a Fulbright Scholar at Uganda Christian University (UCU) in 2021-22 (Deans). Tom’s goal was to help UCU establish […]

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Writing at the Center of the Neoliberal University

Higher Education, UW-Madison History, Writing Center History, Writing Centers

By Emery Jenson—Writing in 1990, Diana George and Nancy Grimm warned that “writing centers whose programs have expanded to meet university needs” would need to contend with the danger of being “co-opted by the larger system.” Ten years later, at the turn of the century, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford express a similar concern for how the “important scholarly and pedagogical work” of writing centers risks being devalued “as mere academic service” within the expanding structure of the University. […]

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Moving Closer, Never Reaching: Translation as Writing and Tutoring Practices 

Multilingual Writers, Peer Tutoring, Writing Center Tutors

By Xiran Tan, Wesleyan University—My linguistic and physical existence feels much like the in-between space between the asymptote and the curve. The former infinitely approaches the latter yet never touches. Pulled back and forth between Mandarin and English, and drifting away from my first language Cantonese, which was not allowed in Chinese public schools […]

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The Elephant in the Center: The Question of Workshops

Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Centers

By Jennifer Rupp, University of Kansas—You’ve spent hours creating a new workshop that you are genuinely excited about – it’s both informative and fun! Then, it’s two minutes to go-time. One student walks through the door. You anxiously smile and say, “We’ll just wait a few more minutes to see if anyone else shows up.” They don’t. Now you both feel awkward […]

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Video Narratives in Training

Technology, Tutor Publications, Tutor Training, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Katie Layendecker, Carthage College—When our director asked my co-trainer and me if there was anything we’d like to change about our training program, we knew we wanted to modernize it in a way that was both informational and fun. We couldn’t forget that, for the most part, our audience is first-year students who don’t know what a writing center is like. The new tutor training program at our writing center is led by experienced tutors and has been more or less unchanged for the past four years. This means […]

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Call for Proposals, 2024

Writing Centers

Another Word is currently seeking proposals for blog posts to be published in 2024. We seek proposals from those invested in writing center studies on a broad range of topics related to administering, tutoring, training, and working in the writing center. 

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A New WAC Faculty Sourcebook for a New Academic Year


Events, From the Director, Graduate Students, Higher Education, Science Writing, Uncategorized, Undergraduate Students, Writing Across the Curriculum

By Bradley Hughes Greetings from a new academic year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Writing Center! We had a very busy and productive summer of 2018. The Writing Center was open for 12 weeks this summer, offering consultations, workshops, and writing groups for hundreds of undergraduate- and graduate-student writers. The summer center was staffed by […]

September 3, 2018

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


Awards and Honors, Collaborative Learning, From the Director, Tutorial Talk and Methods, 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 doctoral-level […]

May 9, 2018

The Writing Center’s Midnight Madness at College Library


Outreach, Satellite Locations, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Centers

By Rick Ness—What is Midnight Madness? Midnight Madness is an all-night tutoring event for undergraduates inspired by “The Long Night Against Procrastination.” This mad event offers one-on-one writing instruction from 6pm to 1am. Midnight Madness is hosted by the Writing Center in collaboration with Steve Frye and our good friends at College Library, UW-Madison’s library for undergraduates. We want to thank College Library for providing the space and […]

May 4, 2018

Writing Center Tutors as Comp-Rhet Researchers: Some Notes from CCCC in Kansas City


Graduate Students, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Updates, Writing Center Conference, Writing Center Research

By Nancy Linh Karls  All of us in leadership roles at the UW-Madison Writing Center are proud of our undergraduate Writing Fellows and our graduate tutors for many reasons:  for doing an outstanding job of supporting student writers, for continually challenging themselves to learn more, and for being all-around great colleagues and friends. We also […]

April 16, 2018