Another Word, the award-winning writing center blog from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is currently seeking proposals for blog posts to be published in 2027. 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. 

By Annalee Roustio, Queens College (CUNY) and Jo Christian, Southern Illinois University—Dear reader, We’ve chosen to address our first correspondence to those who will read this blog: the audience we’ve kept in mind even as we’ve written to one another. In “Dear Co-Authors: Epistolary Revelations of Five Writing Center Directors” (2008), authors Geller et al. do exactly this. Letters, to each other as co-authors and to a broader audience, are the […]

By Izzy Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville—At a weekly training meeting for new consultants in the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center, my tutor trainer—Greta, a first-year Ph.D. student who researches tutor self-efficacy—asked us to solve the million-dollar writing center question: How can we get students to buy in to tutoring? How can we make students feel comfortable in the writing center? Instantly, I thought about how embarrassing writing is. It’s horrible to bring in your half-baked ideas and run-on sentences and show it to someone you perceive to be good at writing (whatever that is) and ask them to help you.

By Maggie Hart, University of Minnesota—For many writers, and tutors, the writing center is a place to slow down, to rest, and to recover. // I began to understand the importance of recovery differently after completing treatment for blood cancer. Just a few months before I began graduate school, I was in a hospital room receiving chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia. Then, I was sitting in seminars, reading complex theory, and trying to think clearly again. I quickly learned that recovery is not the clean narrative we often imagine when we talk about “beating” illness. For me, and for many other survivors, recovery is slow and uneven. Some days are clear, productive, and focused, and others feel foggy and fragile. Progress happens, but sporadically. The body and mind renegotiate their capacities constantly. […]

By Brady Hall and Emma Bapst, Miami University of Ohio—AI has become part of our writing center ecosystems. Whether we like it or not, students use it in their processes. Some professors require it in their courses; others ban it completely. This leaves students caught in the middle, trying to satisfy competing interests. As students perform to try to satisfy their instructors, they are learning a “hidden curriculum,” or knowledge that travels behind the network of traditional classroom education with regard to AI. These contexts permeate writing center experiences as well. With coexisting perspectives of AI refusal and acceptance, it can be difficult for writing center consultants to feel comfortable addressing AI use with students at all. 

By Anonymous—The field has long emphasized the collaborative ethos of writing center work (Harris, 1988; Lunsford, 1991). Within this framework, writing centers are often positioned as “safe” or “low-stakes” environments where writers can experiment, explore identities, and develop confidence in their voices (McNamee & Miley, 2017). But the ability of writing centers to function as “low-stakes” environments depends on the broader social conditions in which writers and tutors live. […]

By Anmol Sahni, Emory University—Last semester at the Emory writing center, I had one of those tutoring sessions that just felt… off. It began the usual way: greeting the writer, setting an agenda, and planning to read the draft together. These practices often work well—but that day, something wasn’t clicking. The student wasn’t disengaged, but I sensed a kind of resistance, or maybe fatigue, that the standard approach wasn’t addressing. […]

By Hidy Basta, Seattle University—As a transnational translingual academic, I’m used to spending an unfair share of emotional energy worrying whether I have missed a subject verb agreement somewhere, if that “error” would jeopardize my belonging—if it would undermine what I’ve written. I appreciate the helpful tools of […]

By Tisha Turk, Grinnell College—In recent years, attention has come in for a lot of, well, attention. Scholars, journalists, and cultural critics have written about how corporations capture and monetize the finite resource of our attention and, sometimes, how we can regain control of it (Wu; Odell; Hari; Hayes). Those of us working in institutions of higher ed have probably observed the effects of attention capture not only on ourselves but on our students. My observations about attention are not […]

By Andrea Hernandez Holm—Many writing assignments, genres, and reference styles require that writers include positionality statements. Some genres are entirely informed by positionality, even if we don’t recognize them. For example, personal statements ask the writer to explain what experiences have shaped their perspectives, objectives, and goals. Positionality can still be a difficult concept to grasp because we typically consider it only in the immediacy, and in relation to our own experiences—my positionality is informed by who I am. […]