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 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. […]

By Susanne Treiber—Yet again a student arrives in the Writing Center determined to be successful in their intensive writing course, ready to learn how to improve their writing, and let’s face it, improve their paper. […]

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 2026. 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 Laura Widman, Hamilton College—This past year, I designed fall tutor training with our WC director, focusing on creating opportunities to learn and build community around a central theme: Interrogating Power. I had led numerous trainings on multilingualism and metalanguage in tutoring, but this was the first opportunity I had to plan training from the ground up and to lead large portions of it myself. I was excited to explore training topics further outside of my niche, and to see how our new tutors engaged with training and our WC community. […]

By Anonymous—Do you remember when you were a kid and the idea of going to college sounded like the most sophisticated milestone you could think of? Starstruck by the idea of being rewarded for learning through open acknowledgement of your contribution to English– because you always loved reading and writing, language was a toy and a tool and a comfort– sounded more glamorous than a cover of Vogue. Do the memories taste bittersweet to you too? […]

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. […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]