Writing Center Support For Your Class
However small, connections made between the Writing Center and writing-intensive classes are profoundly influential to students’ future interactions with the Center. If you are interested in having your students use the Writing Center for their assignments in your class, or in having Writing Center staff visit your classroom for a workshop, please consider the options outlined below.
Feel free to contact the Director, Alicia Brazeau, with any questions or requests. I am happy to work with you to create something unique for your class.
Individual Writing Consultations
The Writing Center offers one-on-one appointments for writers facilitated by either our professional staff or by our student consultants. Our student consultants are all trained in writing pedagogy and tutoring strategies, and represent thirteen different majors.
How to Incorporate Writing Center visits into your class
If you would like to encourage or require students to visit the Writing Center, there are a few options we suggest:
- Incorporate an informal assignment for students to visit the Center at least once during the semester. This option allows the student to decide when and for which assignment they will seek help.
- In your feedback on their essays, encourage or require students to visit the Center to revise.
- Incorporate the Center into students’ pre-writing work to reinforce good writing habits. Consider encouraging students to make use of an online or in-person appointment to create or evaluate an outline, discuss a prompt and thesis-statement idea, etc.
- Require or encourage students to work with a consultant on a specific assignment draft. Note: if you would like to pursue this option, please contact me at abrazeau@wooster.edu so that we can ensure that students are able to get an appointment when they need to. If you are teaching an online course in fall, we might also be able to facilitate a consultant peer-review through Moodle forums or workshop.
Workshops
All of our workshops are activity-based and seek to introduce students to writing and revising strategies that they can use to craft stronger, more nuanced writing for assignments in your course. Since the content and form of writing assignments varies so broadly across disciplines and classes, we do not instruct students in genre-based conventions; we do, however, welcome your participation in the workshop if you would like to point out (or reinforce) how your students might adapt strategies to the specific parameters of your assignment.
You can request an in-class workshop by contacting abrazeau@wooster.edu.
Introduction to the Writing Center
We will introduce students to our services, talk about what to expect when meeting with a consultant, and discuss how working with the Center might be useful to them. Approximately 15 minutes.
Optional Add-On: “Pre-Mortem Reflection”–a guided reflection on students’ strengths and challenges when facing writing situations. (Additional 15 minutes.)
Rhetorical Reading
This workshop presents students with a straightforward strategy for evaluating texts, prompting them to consider authors, purposes, claims, evidence, applications, and biases. We will guide students through a reading of a short video “text” and engage them in a discussion about how they might apply this strategy to texts from your course.
Thesis and Argumentation
This workshop covers the basics of argumentation and crafting a thesis statement. Students will practice designing and drafting supportable, complex thesis statements and have the opportunity to review their work with peers.
When to Schedule: When students have a prompt and are about to start drafting their essays or when they are about to revise rough drafts.
Writing Introductions
This workshop prompts students to discuss the purpose of an introduction and outlines advice for crafting an engaging and topically appropriate opening paragraph. Students will practice designing possible outlines for their opening paragraph.
When to Schedule: When students have a prompt and are about to start drafting their essays.
Creating Body Paragraphs
This workshop guides students through the structure of different types of paragraphs with the aim of helping them consider how to organize and develop ideas within a body paragraph. Students will practice outlining (or reverse outlining) a paragraph for an essay they are currently working on.
Incorporating Sources: Paraphrasing and Quoting
This workshop introduces students to the basics of how to use paraphrases and quotations of source material in their writing.
Pre-Writing: Outlining
This workshop introduces students to the practice of outlining the content and organization of an essay and emphasizes the necessity of considering the connections between and progression of ideas. During this workshop, students will build and assess an outline for their essay for your class.
When to Schedule: When students have a prompt and are about to start drafting their essays.
Revising for Concision
This workshop teaches students strategies for making their writing more concise, including reducing word count and honing word choice and sentence structure. During this workshop, students will revise one of their essays to make it more concise.
When to Schedule: When students have partial or full rough drafts of their essays.
Giving Peer Feedback
This workshop prepares your students for peer review. We identify the qualities of good feedback, outline the parameters of a strong essay (using your rubric), and have students reflect on their goals as writers.
When to Schedule: When students are about to participate in peer review–either the class before or in the 20 minutes before peer review starts.