Getting to Know the Writing Resources Center

1. Getting to Know the Writing Resources Center 26 September 2018 Dr. Heather Blain Vorhies University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2. What are we? • One-on-one writing instruction • Undergraduate, graduate student, faculty, and staff • All disciplines • Academic and non-academic writing (cover letters, resumes, personal statements, grant applications, etc.) • Classroom presentations and workshops • Student referrals

3. Who are we? • Director and Associate Director • Senior Tutor • About twenty undergraduate and graduate student peer tutors • Marketing intern • Reception staff

4. How do we do what we do? • Training • All tutors take ENGL 4400/5400: Theory and Practice of Tutoring Writing • Regular professional development • Emphasis is on client learning, not necessarily on the product

5. What should your students expect in a session? • A lot… • of talking • of questions • of participation on the part of the client • A little… • address of grammar and usage

6. Why doesn’t the writing center talk about grammar?

7. Copyediting = correcting for error No learning occurs. Ever since the creation of modern medicine the average lifespan of humans has been increasing and the infant mortality rate has gone way down. The combinations of these two factors leads to an increase in the population size in countries that have this medicine and the common question that comes up as a result is how many people is too much? . This is a scary question to have to ask as the world population reaches 7.6 billion since one knows what an overpopulated Earth would look like or maybe we are already living it.

8. What the Tutors Said

9. The writer seems knowledgeable and has several good points, but the reader needs more evidence • The writer seems to leave out several in-text citations, and it’s not clear how he’s using all of his sources • The writer seems to be most concerned about environmental stress on the planet, but this isn’t emphasized • The writer ends up making general statements instead specific ones

10. So what might a session with this client look like? • What’s the assignment? For what discipline? • What’s the argument you want to make? • What evidence do you want to use to prove these points? • Where does your reader get confused?

11. Techniques tutors might use in a session • Glossing (What is the main idea in this paragraph? What is the purpose of this paragraph?) • Post-it notes or storyboarding for organization • The thesis wheel • Transcription/WIRMI • Paragraph and sentence-level revision techniques, such as the old-new sentence pattern

12. What kinds of sessions are offered? • Face-to-face • WebEx • eTutoring

13. What kind of limitations does the WRC have? • We have sessions Sunday-Friday while Fall and Spring classes are in session • Exam weeks and early semester have more limited schedules • We tend to get busy closer to finals • We serve clients on a first-come, first-served basis

14. Some Important Notes • The WRC practices confidentiality • WRC sessions are student-driven, not instructor-driven • Student referrals do provide a place for the instructor to indicate what needs to be worked on

15. Questions?