From the Director
UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester urges instructors to assign more writing in all courses, not just Ws. Students need the practice, and writing will also help them engage more deeply with their subject matter.
“Graduate students now account for about 20% of the total UWC clientele, so we’re developing programs to meet their needs, including offering graduate workshops,” says UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester.
University Writing Center consultants are dedicated to helping students at all levels with writing. That’s a tall order, since students’ needs can be very different at different stages of their academic careers. Our philosophy, however, remains the same whether our client is fresh from high school or completing a dissertation.
Our approach is to focus on the writer and the writing process rather than simply to correct a text. We encourage the writer to reflect on his or her work and to ask questions about audience, purpose, and genre that will guide style and content. We may do that by asking the writer to read the text aloud and discuss it with us, by asking pointed questions, or by identifying writing patterns and determining whether or not they’re helping the writer achieve his purpose. Mostly, we strive to make the writer more conscious of, and confident
about, the writing process.
When it comes to helping graduate students, who depend almost entirely on writing to attain their degrees, the stakes can be high and the pressure enormous. (And the pressure only increases if the student’s native language is not English.) As a result, we see graduate students at the UWC who ask us—indeed, expect us—to edit their work for them. And there are others who visit us every day for a month, hoping we will examine their every word and fix every error. We feel for these students, and it would be easy to edit their writing and hand it back to them, all marked up and ready for corrections. Easy, but wrong. The UWC is not an editorial service; our purpose is to help students learn to write. If we do all the work for them, the students learn nothing.
That’s why we’ve developed a new program for graduate students, which limits them to ten consultations on dissertations or theses. We believe this change will help ensure that graduate students are in control of their own writing on these pivotal projects. To make the most of those ten sessions, we will pair them with one consultant who can get to know them and their work. The consultant will give them advice, encourage them to work on their writing between consultations, and let them know when they need to return to their faculty
advisor for guidance. To encourage graduate students to get writing help early in their careers, we are not imposing any limits on the number of visits they can make for seminar papers, proposals, or other writing.
If you work with graduate students, you can take an active role in helping them develop their writing skills. First, encourage them to attend the UWC workshops geared to graduate students; typical topics include how to write a dissertation proposal or how to organize and integrate source material. Second, be patient and remind your students that learning to write takes time and effort; there are no overnight transformations. Third, have realistic expectations. The writing center can and will help, but there are limits to what we can do. We are not subject area experts, and we may reach a limit in our ability to give advice about a graduate project. Finally, avoid the “too little, too late”
trap by encouraging graduate students to work on writing well before the dissertation or thesis proposal stage. If they write seminar papers, research reports, or journal articles, they will develop skills that will serve them well throughout their careers. Writing at this level requires a new sense of audience and a new understanding of genre. Like first year students, graduate students are acquiring new vocabulary, learning new standards of proof, reading new theories, absorbing new methods—it’s daunting.
We want to partner with the graduate faculty to help our graduate students achieve their goals. We’re proud that graduate students voted to pay the $8 per-semester fee to gain access to the full range of our services, and we hope in return to provide them with a priceless start on their writing careers.
