Group items tagged

Carnegis Mellon's Global Communication Center's resources site Includes resources on structuring reports, thesis and topic sentences, Powerpoints, cover letters, lit review, note taking, citation styles, visual design, videos, etc., etc.

The Journal of Response to Writing is an international, peer-reviewed journal for writing theorists, researchers, and practitioners of Second and Foreign Language Instruction, Applied Linguistics, and Composition to make quality contributions to the study of response to writing.  While we value traditional forms of response, including marginal notes, face-to-face interactions, electronic feedback, self-reflection, and peer review, we also value and encourage the research of alternative response methods, purposes, and practices. The journal is open-access This journal responds to a growing need and interest for additional scholarly venues to publish articles about writing theory and response practices that allow for a cross-disciplinary discussion of response to writing. The focus on response is intentional since nearly all forms of writing benefit from response, and responding to writing is perhaps the most time-consuming responsibility of a writing teacher. Therefore, understanding the theory and best pedagogical practices for response can benefit the writer while maximizing a responder's effectiveness and efficiency. This journal is meant to fill these needs by crossing disciplinary divides and providing an additional publication venue for writing theory and response practice.

"Evaluation/Accountability for the Writing Lab" (on assessment, usage data, student grades, faculty response); "Do We Need Materials for ESL and Engineering Students?" (self-instruction materials); "A Note on Lab Layout" (space design); mailing list

"Eight Suggestions to Attract More Students to Lab"; a handout on "Finding the Key Idea in Topic Sentences"; a note on "Building Administrator and Faculty Awareness"; reports from individual labs; mailing list

crowdsourcing a list of software of interest to writing centers (note: since this is 2008 discussion all of these programs either exist in newer versions or are no longer in production)

"As student populations in colleges and universities continue to diversify, composition programs do not always meet students' varying needs. English as a Second Language (ESL) students appear to fail mainstream writing courses at higher rates than their traditional counterparts, yet mainstreaming continues to be mandated, often due to budgetary constraints. Many programs offer multicultural writing courses, but these, too, are often ineffective for many students. Meanwhile, as Paul Kei Matsuda shows, there is a decided split between the disciplines of composition and ESL. Since ESL scholars have a much stronger history of working with diverse student populations than composition scholars do, this study aims to look to ESL scholarship, specifically to contrastive rhetoric, to explore more effective methods of teaching writing to students with varying needs. This case study takes an in-depth look at one student's journey writing across cultures. Ming, a Chinese immigrant who has been in the United States for approximately ten years, is a junior at the University of Rhode Island who struggles with writing. Over the course of one semester, three of her projects were studied in depth. Data include transcripts of audiotaped tutorial sessions in the URI Writing Center, Ming's assignments and papers, and the researcher's notes from interviews with Ming following the tutorial sessions. ^ The new contrastive rhetoric (Connor, Kaplan, Purves) insists that external factors such as culture, education, and media influence the rhetorical patterns writers use. Through a lens of contrastive rhetoric, it becomes clear that most of Ming's difficulties when writing stem from a lack of familiarity with the conventions of U.S. academic discourse or of what her reader expects from her text. The source of much of this is cultural. While Ming's experiences are not generalizable, an in-depth look at her experiences foregrounds some of the issues that contrastive rhetoric addresses, making th

This spreadsheet presents the years that over 1,000 writing center were founded. It may be of interest to those doing historical research. You'll note that the spreadsheet lists about 3,000 centers in total, many of which don't have founding years listed. If you know of a founding date that's missing, please submit it here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CAMEiTQaiAUCDG5s7ImJVtfbHpvuPtVvS0tjq7rmRA4/viewform. And if you'd like to see some data visualizations of these dates, visit https://suemendelsohn.wordpress.com/.

following the death of Tyler Clementi, important discussion of the role of the writing center in providing a safe space/space of action for LGBTQ students

discussing reports on sessions that can be sent to faculty or students see also: http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=23763331 see also: http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=24506407

Rationale for tutor training.

a discussion of the creating of WCENTER see also: http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=15915123 (this thread also notes creation of WLN)

discussing the methods and purposes of session documentation