Welcome to a New Writing Center Year!

Classes, Community Writing Assistance, Events, From the Director, Outreach, Satellite Locations, The Online Writing Center, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Centers, Writing Fellows / Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
WAC workshop for writing-intensive TAs
WAC workshop for TAs teaching writing-intensive courses

From all of us in the UW-Madison Writing Center programs, welcome to a new academic year!  We’re off and running on an exciting new year.

Just some of what we’re up to–

  • Our main Writing Center location in Helen C. White Hall opened on the first day of classes, September 2nd, and several hundred undergraduate and graduate student-writers have already been in for consultations.  These students are writing in such varied fields as electrical and computer engineering, educational leadership and policy studies, business, literary studies, sociology, classics and much more.
  • 21 wonderful doctoral-level teaching assistants are new to the Writing Center’s staff this fall, the most international group of TAs we’ve ever had on our staff.
  • 51 fabulous undergraduate Writing Fellows are getting started working with student-writers and with faculty in writing-intensive courses across the curriculum.  Some of the many departments Writing Fellows are working with–African Languages and Literature, Anthropology, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, business, Education Policy Studies, English, History, Languages and Cultures of Asia, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.
  • Our satellite locations in three multicultural student centers on campus opened this week.  Our satellite locations in the residence halls and in College Library and Memorial Library open next week.
  • Our online consultations (synchronous and asynchronous) begin next week, and a redesigned home page for the online writing center is in the works.
  • The fabulous Community Writing Assistance program is busy working with writers from the Madison community at the South Madison public library and at various other locations around Madison and beyond.
  • The Writing Center’s outreach staff have introduced the Writing Center at orientations across campus, and are busy collaborating with faculty and TAs across campus to co-teach custom units on writing within courses in many undergraduate and graduate classes in the sciences, arts, humanities, and social sciences.
  • Our short-term, non-credit workshops have already begun.  These cover such varied topics as Fulbright application essays, grammar, graduate research proposals, writing about literature, writing Peace Corps application essays, dissertator’s primer, designing research posters, writing reviews of published literature, presenting with Prezi, perfecting your punctuation, writing law and medical-school personal statements, responding to and evaluating student writing, writing statements of teaching philosophy, improving style, developing and delivering conference presentations, writing CVs, APA documentation, and creating interactive digital timelines.
  • The Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program has introduced WAC to new faculty across campus and has been busy consulting individually with faculty.  A completely new WAC website is in the works.  And the WAC program led training for close to 70 new writing-intensive TAs from Biocore, sociology, literature in translation, journalism and mass communication, zoology, botany, psychology, communication arts, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, classics, theatre and drama, library and information studies, and geography.  The photo adorning this blog post is from that recent WAC training.
  • The Madison Area Writing Center colloquium kicks off its fall-semester programs next week.

Thanks so much for your interest in our programs!  More later,

brad hughes
director, writing center
director, writing across the curriculum