UAB Resources – MEMORANDUM

Busting a Writing Center Myth

The University Writing Center, courtesy of UAB Image Gallery

Busting a Writing Center Myth

By Anna Sims

The simple words “peer review” is enough to inspire dread in students. They come to class biting their nails. They pass their papers around with warnings and apologies. However, the fear of feedback is unnecessary.

The opportunity to have a fellow student critique your work before it gets to the professor is invaluable. At UAB, we have the University Writing Center that offers face-to-face tutoring to undergraduates and graduates.

Students can schedule sessions for 30 or 60 minutes and bring papers at any stage, from drafts to finished products. The center currently offers tutoring from English graduate students.

However, there exists a myth that the Writing Center is meant for freshman students struggling in English Composition, or visiting the Writing Center is an admission of failure.

According to the 2016 UWC newsletter, 35 percent of those who visited the Writing Center were upperclassmen, and an additional 23 percent were graduate students. This leaves only 42 percent of the breakdown to freshman clients. The highest percentage of clients by category, therefore, were upperclassmen students.

Making an appointment with the Writing Center does not indicate an acceptance of failure but rather an investment in success.

No matter your stage of the writing process, your major or your class standing, I see the following four points as the most important results of visiting the UWC.

Verbalizing Thoughts

By speaking your thoughts out of your head, you can untangle them. A great way to identify flaws with your argument is to explain your thoughts to another person. In that situation, you are forced to think about your peer’s immediate reaction to your thoughts, which helps you evaluate your argument more critically.

Also, by hearing your thoughts spoken out loud, you may draw connections that you had not realized when your argument sat stagnant on a map in your head. Verbalizing thoughts transforms them from the abstract to the real.

Having a graduate student who has previously been in your undergrad shoes listen, critique and support your ideas helps foster awareness of public reaction to your work.

Receiving Peer Feedback

The tutors at the Writing Center have been in your shoes; let them offer you wisdom that they wish they had been offered. Similarly to how you can identify flaws or links in your argument when you speak it aloud, peers can find flaws or links in your argument that you had not seen.

Seeking feedback means that the student wants to improve the final product. While there is a considerable number of freshman students who visit the Writing Center, this more reflects on those students’ desires to understand the writing process and how to succeed in a new writing environment.

Seeking feedback requires confidence. One student indicated that, “it was great to come and talk to someone about my ideas and get great tips, advice and comments.”

Collaboration

The workplace in which many Professional Writing students will find themselves will likely be a collaborative environment. Bouncing ideas off one another allows a company to produce quality content, products or services. Practicing collaboration by visiting the Writing Center provides students with a better idea of what they will encounter in the workplace.

Writing feels more personal than other schoolwork, so students may be afraid to have their work critiqued. However, the tutor wants the student to succeed. When teachers give grades for papers and deduct points for errors, it may seem like punishment for poor writing. This misconception is often carried over to tutor-student scenario, causing the student to feel that the tutor is picking apart their work and looking for failure. However, the entire process at the UWC is a collaborative effort that improves not one specific piece but the entire writing process of the student.

Increased Confidence

Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. Identifying a need for guidance demonstrates self-awareness, investment in individual potential, intellectual confidence and maturity.

Visiting the Writing Center may feel like admitting defeat, but nobody is above asking for help. Being able to ask questions means that a student has evaluated his or her writing, identified pitfalls and has decided that the piece deserves to be carried out to its full potential. Understanding the strengths of the piece and knowing that the student has taken the necessary steps to improve weaknesses allows the student to turn it in with confidence in the result.

Growing Your Writing

By: Laura Jane Stallo

Many students only go to the Writing Center when they are required to as a part of their graded assignments, or when they are struggling with an essay. While the Writing Center does help students with both of those things, they do so much more.

The Writing Center currently offers two forms of tutoring for students, live and asynchronous. Michael Williams, a first-year undergraduate tutor at the UWC, explains the difference.

“Because of the pandemic, we haven’t been able to meet in the office,” Williams said. Much like the rest of the university, the Writing Center offers their services virtually through Zoom where students can schedule 30-minute or hour-long appointments with tutors.

During live appointments, the tutors will meet with students over Zoom and will walk through the essay with student. The tutors can help students with anything from “brainstorming” to showing students “what needs to be edited,” and "why," said Williams.

The process is slightly different with asynchronous tutoring. “It’s basically the same thing, except you don’t have that live feedback,” Williams said.

Students submit documents to the Writing Center, and the tutors “take that Word document or PDF, and we do our best to give feedback and give explanations along the way as if we were actually in a Zoom meeting.” Williams said.

Strengthening your own writing

When asked what some of the most common mistakes students make in their essays, Williams said they can be broken into two categories, “grammatical and structural.”

“Comma splices tend to be an issue a lot,” Williams said, adding that most of the grammatical mistakes tend be the easiest to point out. “In a Zoom meeting, you can read the essay back to them and they’re able to catch it themselves.”

"Even the best wordsmiths are bound to make simple grammatical mistakes," Williams said.

“It’s important to know the difference between commas, semicolons and periods, and when to use them.”

If you are ever confused if your sentence is a run-on or if you should have used a semicolon or a comma, you are not alone, and the Writing Center is there to help you answer those questions and more.

When it comes to structural mistakes, Williams highlights the importance of reading the assignment guideline carefully. “There are some who don’t follow the assignment guidelines,” Williams said, with many students feeling unsure of what the professor is asking of them.

“It’s always good to read the assignment guidelines on your own, and if you still need help following the assignment guidelines, we can help with that,” Williams said.

Style Guides

The Writing Center is also equipped to accept essays and articles from any discipline or style guide. “As tutors we take in all kinds of papers from all kinds of disciplines,” Williams said.

“A lot of my students have been from remedial English courses,” though Williams has also had students from “The School of Business to engineering to psychology and even graduate students.” With such a variety in backgrounds, tutors are constantly learning about different rules and style guides.

“Most of us already know MLA, and that’s the typical style we teach in, but we’re still able to help with whatever style,” Williams said. Most students are familiar with the rules of which style they are writing in, but if the tutors ever encounter an obscure style guide they are not familiar with, most style guides have digital copies available all over the internet.

“We trust students enough that they are able to find the resource for us and that they we are able to go through it together, kind of like following the assignment guidelines, and we take that as a learning experience,” Williams said.

The tutors also get offers to attend training seminars held throughout the semester to learn more about specific style guides. “It’s the expectation that as a tutor, when you do have breaks in your work schedule, it doesn’t hurt to go through the instruction manuals,” Williams said.

Workshops

While most students take advantage of the Writing Center’s tutoring services, the center also offers workshops throughout the semester for students.

“The workshops are free and open to the public. Usually we’ll have a couple of senior-level tutors who help to conduct workshops, to help the community out with basic issues that we see,” Williams said.

The workshops are similar to mass-tutoring sessions, Williams said. During the Fall 2020 semester, the Writing Center offered three sessions: “Presentation on How to Find and Correct Your Errors,” “Presentation on How to Reflect on Your Writing” and “How to Manage Writing Anxiety and Writer’s Block.”

One of the biggest roadblocks and misconceptions that students have about the Writing Center is that it is only a place to go if you feel like there are problems with your writing, Williams said.

“Workshops and tutoring sessions can be for people of all levels – all disciplines,” Williams said, and emphasized that, “We’re helping you to evoke the best writer that is already in you.”

Working for the UWC

The Writing Center is a resource available to strengthen your writing through either one-on-one tutoring sessions or workshops. It can also be a place to gain a variety of skills and connections by working there.

“I’ve learned a lot and it’s definitely been one of my favorite experiences this semester,” Williams said.

“One of the most important things working here has taught me is the importance of different writing styles…working with a lot of different students from first-gen students to students who aren’t native English speakers has been really interesting.”

“As a tutor is has been a really good experience to read and hear a lot of different voices and hear a lot of different experiences and to look more into my own narrative voice,” Williams said, and “learning how to edit other people’s papers has taught me how to edit my own papers better.”

“One of the biggest things about working at the Writing Center,” Williams said, “is that we’re very friendly, we never want to put (the student) in a position where we’re very hard on you.”

“Before I came to the Writing Center, I was always the person that people came to when they needed help with their papers, so I was already used to being in that environment but being a tutor at the Writing Center has given me a lot more confidence in doing that and has also given me a lot more skills and resources with working with different students and different writing styles,” Williams said.

Whether you just want feedback on an essay or want to be on the other side of the screen, the Writing Center is an excellent resource to develop your writing, no matter your year or skill level.

My Role as a Social Media Intern

By Erica Turner

screenshot of the UAB Twitter page — Screenshot of UAB’s Twitter page

During the summer leading into my senior year at UAB, I decided to pursue an internship within the Professional Writing career field. I chose to apply for a social media internship posted by UAB’s University Relations for the fall semester. University Relations manages and creates content for the UAB website, UAB News, GreenMail, UAB Reporter, and UAB’s social media platforms. Luckily, I was given the opportunity to partake in this internship. Continue reading “My Role as a Social Media Intern”

Compositional Composting

By Lane Smith

Do What?

Photo of a recycling waste paper basket on an office floor — Image courtesy of Adobe Stock

Throughout the typical writing process, writers create numerous drafts and test prints designed to check for errors in grammar and formatting. This creates a massive problem in regards to paper waste. I decided to try to do something about this two years ago. So what did I do? I started composting.

The problem is what to do with all of this waste paper, and there are a multitude of things we can do with this waste. Many choose to toss their paper waste into the garbage, or recycle it. However, there is a third option, and that is to compost it. When I realized this a few years ago, I became passionate about composting and sustainable issues.

Low Maintenance

Landfills are overflowing and recycling centers are not popping up quickly enough, but why rely on someone else to recycle my waste? I can recycle right at home with composting. If you are not known as a person with a green thumb, don’t worry; you have a chance to be the person known to have a brown thumb. Composting is a low-maintenance activity and once it is set up it will more often than not give you great results.

Are you wondering why I am talking to a group of writers about the environment? It is primarily because writers produce massive amounts of paper waste every year. We all know about the local recycling center and pick up, and some of us actually use those systems. Composting will provide you with some of the richest soil you have ever seen, and it can be made right in your backyard. You never have to leave your house to take care of the earth and your garden.

Drafting Some Dirt

So, if you are getting the itch to start drafting some awesome dirt, check out some of these great articles and tutorials at Earth Easy. I should not forget to mention that UAB has new programs for sustainable futures. They have added over ninety classes regarding sustainability, and have developed both majors and minors for the subject. They are also encouraging professors to incorporate sustainability into the curriculum of any classroom, as talked about in the UAB Reporter, and even offer a stipend for participants in the workshop.

Being sustainable and writing about sustainable causes is becoming a very large part of the public rhetoric. Start composting your drafts and prints, and take part in making the future a greener place, one compost heap at a time.

Providing Peace of Mind

By Michelle Love

University Writing Center sign — The UWC, located in Sterne Library

As a student’s academic career progresses, the amount of research papers and related stress follows suit. It does not help that the list of rules when writing research papers seems to always be changing.

Thanks to UAB’s University Writing Center (located on the first floor of the Mervyn Sterne Library), students no longer have to feel alone.

How We Help You

By using face to face and online counseling, the University Writing Center helps students create polished papers to get the best grade possible and in the process teaches students helpful writing tips that will improve their overall performance.

UAB professor Jaclyn Wells is the Director of the writing center and also one of the many tutors offering guidance. “We have three types of folks [offering services]. We have adjunct instructors from the English department, we have grad students from the English department, and we have undergraduate students that serve as friendly greeters when people come in.”

No One Left Behind

While some younger students may believe they do not qualify for the center’s resources, Dr. Wells wants them to know that is simply not true. She said the center is open to students of all levels, whether freshmen or graduate students, and all majors. Students are also encouraged to bring in their papers no matter what stage the assignment is in.

“Some people have this idea that they can’t come to the writing center until their paper is finished, and that’s not true. We encourage people to come to the writing center during any stage of their paper writing. They can come in with an idea or they can come in in the middle. It really does not matter. We just want to help you.”

Providing Opportunities

Recently, the UWC has started offering an internship program in coordination with UAB’s internship director Cynthia Ryan. “If students want to intern here they have to take the Tutoring Writing class and then they can follow up with Dr. Ryan.”

Consultations are available by appointment and Dr. Wells wants any students skeptical of visiting the writing center to know that there’s nothing to be ashamed or afraid of.

“Everybody needs feedback on writing,” she said. “It’s not just a beginner thing. And by coming to the writing center, you’re doing what good writers do. Good writers get feedback, good writers revise. So when you come here you’re already doing what a good writer does just by virtue of coming here.”

Why It Is Important

As a Professional Writing major and aspiring writer, I feel that the University Writing Center is more than just a valuable asset to a young writer’s career: it should be considered a requirement.

It’s easy for students to feel safe with their writing style while they’re still enrolled in school and believe they don’t need help polishing their composition. But as someone who has taken the plunge into the professional writing world outside of an academic setting, I can say that going to the writing center is vital to creating a more sophisticated writing style.

The UWC staff will teach you the do’s and don’t’s of being a writer, and can help you grow a thicker skin when it comes to taking constructive criticism. I believe everyone should visit the writing center, if not for the sake of your college writing, then for any future job prospects you may have after graduation.

What Teaching Writing Taught Me

By Rebekah Kummer

two people analyzing a book — Image courtesy of Adobe Stock

Einstein said if you can’t explain a complicated concept in simple terms, you probably don’t understand it well enough yourself. This was the first thing I learned from teaching writing.

Understanding and accepting my own lack of knowledge is the necessary first step toward learning. Teaching writing taught me a lot about my own approach to writing, how much the writing process varies among student writers and the importance of being able to explain why students should care about writing.

Teaching Writing

I have tutored for two and a half years with Student Athlete Support Services and with the University Writing Center. I’ve encountered students across the spectrum of investment in writing.

Some understand that writing well is a good skill, but don’t have much desire to learn beyond a sufficient level of writing. Some abhor writing, or see it as irrelevant to themselves and their future careers. Some come to me with questions to ask their professors after realizing that they don’t know how to sound professional in an email. Some don’t see the point of taking pains to sound a certain way in an email, or in any document for that matter. How do I convince these students that writing matters?

Coming face to face with answering how and why writing is relevant to everyone has been a good lesson in understanding it myself. EH 101 can seem completely useless to a football player on scholarship who has no desire to even be in school. So I put myself in his giant shoes and think about specific situations in his life that would require writing: if he does make it to the NFL as he hopes, that contract is going to be awfully hard to decipher if he doesn’t learn to analyze texts critically the way we do in a rhetorical analysis. Plus, if those dreams are not realized, he will more than likely work at a great job that requires written communications via email, and written reports or evaluations.

Addressing complacent or disinterested students was difficult, but it was a great lesson not only in how to explain why writing matters, but also in adopting and understanding alternate perspectives.

No Right Way to Write

Having so many opportunities to see others’ thought processes and communication styles has been invaluable to me as a writer and as a person. My approach to writing is distinct to me, and may not be useful to all of my students.

While I’m an external processor and think out loud, especially in dialogue with others, many students are internal processors. As a result, I have discovered the value of silence.

Another thing I learned was the way structure—like required outlines, rough drafts or format suggestions—factors into various writing styles. Paralysis was a common accompaniment to structure—students were either paralyzed by fear of not filling structures in correctly or by the rigidity of the structure itself weighing upon them with no way to get out. So for some students, an outline was a creative block, not an organizational aid. Many, however, found comfort in structure, and used it as a foundation for their writing.

The writing process is simply not a one-size-fits-all framework, and while I still have a lot to learn, I think the lessons I’ve learned so far in teaching writing have allowed me to gain experience myself in understanding how others think, and how I can improve my own writing.

From Undergrad to Grad at UAB: Teresa Davis’ Transition

By Kayla Light

four people standing behind a podium — Davis’ Undergrad Thesis Defense Day (pictured left to right: Professor Vines, Dr. Chris Minnix, Teresa Davis, Dr. Jaclyn Wells)

Let’s face the facts—graduation will happen. Whether you’re like many of the undergrads who are still frantically searching for answers, or if you’re like the ones who nonchalantly “swagger” their way into the unknown, graduate school has probably crossed your mind.

So, how exactly does a UAB student studying rhetoric and technical writing advance their education? What are some of the myths and facts about that advancement? Well, after asking around, I found the perfect student to answer these questions: Teresa Davis, a recent UAB undergrad who is transitioning into UAB’s graduate program.

About Davis and How Her Decision Could Help You

Davis graduated from UAB in December of 2015 with a Bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Professional Writing and Public Discourse. As the fall began, she felt the pressure to make some big decisions: to stay at UAB to pursue her education or to leave and experience a new school with a new atmosphere. After much thought and consideration, she picked UAB, and this is why:

UAB’s Cost and Practicality

UAB’s graduate program offers a package deal to exceptional, hardworking students who are seeking higher education in the English field. This package is referred to as their Assistantship program. The Assistantship program offers students tuition remission, an $8,500 yearly stipend, and the opportunity to tutor at the Writing Center and teach English Composition 101 and 102.

For Davis, this plan meant being able to balance her busy family life and would save her time and money. Some schools only have limited teaching positions while others offer them after a period of time. UAB’s competitive stipend can greatly reduce, or even eliminate student debt.

Davis not only saw their financial aid as a huge bonus, but she also felt particularly partial to UAB’s program because of the close-knit faculty.

UAB’s Family Atmosphere

Davis found the transition from the undergraduate to the graduate program to be a fluid process because she was already familiar with the program and the professors in the department. She describes this familiarity as a family atmosphere and attributes that atmosphere to the fact that UAB has a smaller graduate program.

When talking about the advantages of a smaller program, she says, “Most [returning students] drop out because balancing school with work and family is hard, and we’re very much out of practice.”

Davis reflected on her decision to return to UAB after being in the workforce for 15 years. She has been living near Birmingham with her husband, Terry Davis. They will celebrate their 7 year anniversary in June of 2016.

When Davis was faced with the question to relocate their family, she gave it much consideration. Her answer is easily summed up in her final statement on UAB’s program: “I know that at UAB, I have the support to help me succeed.”

Davis’ plan to attend UAB to further her education was a difficult decision, but in the end, she knew she wanted a school that was able to provide her with a competitive stipend and a close-knit atmosphere that allowed her the time and flexibility to be with her family.

To learn more about the UAB’s graduate program, visit their webpage.