The UB Writing Center Goes to MAWCA

Attending and presenting at conferences is part of academic life. Professionals in higher education share their research and intellectual interests with communities of peers at local, regional, national, or international meetings of disciplinary organizations. A conference presentation is an important addition to one's curriculum vitae because it shows engagement in an academic community of practice, but it can be difficult to get one's foot in the door and get that first presentation notch in the old academic belt.

Writing Centers, like any other academic discipline, share ideas and practices via a network of regional organizations affiliated with the International Writing Center Association (IWCA). Our regional affiliate is called the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association, or MAWCA, and our regional conference happened over the weekend of March 24, 2018. The theme of the conference was "Activism in the Writing Center: Uncovering Hidden Narratives," and five members of the UB Writing Center community submitted proposals and were accepted to present at this conference, which took place at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ.

In order to help pay for UB students to travel to the conference, the Writing Center hosted a crowd-sourced fundraiser, to which several members of the UB community donated. For that, we are very grateful. The fundraiser generated enough money to pay for the group's hotel room and travel, and the remainder of the costs were covered by the MAWCA scholarship program, for which the UB panel applied and were the sole recipients.

The presenters included Kerrin Smith, an MFA candidate in UB's Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program and a longtime Writing Consultant in the UB Writing Center. Her project included an IRB-approved survey of students in the Writing Fellows program and was titled "Bridging the Gap Years: Non-Traditional Students in the Writing Center." For Smith, the project represented a significant professional development opportunity. She said, "Attending this year's MAWCA conference was a tremendous opportunity to become a better tutor by listening to experts, especially keynote speakers Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young and Dr. Frankie Condon."

The other presenters participated in a common panel discussion about working with diverse learners in the Writing Center. Our work grew out of a conversation about the gap between Writing Center theory and praxis, and our panel was titled "Minding the Gap: Exploring the Spaces between Language, Identity, and Culture." The presenters included:

• Sharea Harris, a graduate of UB's MFA program, former Writing Consultant and Interim Director of the Writing Center, and current adjunct faculty in the Writing Program. Professor Harris' talk was titled "Black Tongues on their Way to Whiteness: Redefining Academic Identity in the Writing Center."
• Jodie Fair, a candidate in UB's MFA program and current Writing Consultant. Jodie's presentation was titled "A Socially Diverse Composition."
• Lauren Campbell, a candidate in UB's MFA program and current Writing Consultant. Lauren's paper was titled "Negotiating Control: Empowering Students with Transparency, Collaboration, and Transfer Theory."
• Mairin Barney, the Writing Services Coordinator for the Achievement and Learning Center and the director of the UB Writing Center. My talk was called "Academic Precarity and the Danger of Being Written Off: Building Solidarity in the Writing Center."

From left to right: Lauren Campbell, Jodie Fair, Mairin Barney, Sharea Harris, and Kerrin Smith

at Rowan University just after our presentations were completed.

For the three graduate students involved, MAWCA 2018 was their first conference experience, and their initial takeaways demonstrate how valuable an opportunity this was for them. Campbell said, "MAWCA was my first conference experience, and I learned so much through the conference sessions and by conducting my own research." Fair agreed, saying, "Attending MAWCA was one of my most rewarding experiences as a graduate student at UB. The opportunity to present provided me a sense of pride that my contributions as both a scholar and writer matter." Smith added, "The conference's theme of activism allowed me to examine the ways I might be perpetuating racism and classism in my sessions with students, and reflect on how to resist that cycle."

Ultimately, sharing ideas among participants in a community of practice is at the heart of academic work, so this conference was more than merely a professional development exercise. For graduate students imagining their careers in higher education, presenting at MAWCA allowed them to add something meaningful to our professional dialog and get a feel for intellectual labor. I have a good feeling that this first conference will not be their last.

Writing Week: Improve Your Writing, Improve Your Life

Writing is hard. It’s work. Love it or hate it, you can’t avoid it! Whether you are a Math major or an English major, writing is something everyone has to learn to do well before they leave college, because employers want to hire people who can handle themselves with a word processor.  As George Anders recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, companies may say they’re looking for people with technical skills, but they actually prefer to hire strong writers regardless of job preparation. And even though Forbes doesn’t explicitly name writing as one of the 10 most important skills employers are looking for, they still acknowledge that “the trick is to communicate clearly that you have those skills,” probably through a nicely written cover letter.

Our motto at UB is “Knowledge that Works,” and improving your writing is probably the best way to make your knowledge work for you and see the payoff promised by your college degree. No matter what kind of job you end up with after you graduate, you are going to need to write to get it, and then write to keep it. Cover letters, resumes, personal statements, and writing samples may help you get a job. Reports, memos, carefully worded advertisements, case studies, and important research publications will help you keep the job once you’ve secured it. You can’t avoid writing, even if you’ve carefully selected a career based on the perception that you won’t have to write much!  Bottom line: writing is a powerful tool that you can put to work to improve your life in direct and indirect ways. If you learn to wield the tool effectively.

The National Council of Teachers of English created the National Day of Writing to acknowledge the importance of writing in our time and encourage literacy education. In anticipation of this big day, Langsdale Library will host a week of activities and workshops to help students participate more fully in the world of writing and learn to be conscious of their writing practice.

 Monday 10/9: From Facebook to First Draft: Academic Language

 4:00-5:30pm

     Tuesday 10/10: UB Writers on Writing (Panel Discussion)

     12:30-2:00pm

     Wednesday 10/11: What's Good Feedback?

     12:30-2:00pm

     Thursday 10/12: How to Cite Right -- Avoiding Plagiarism

     4:00-5:30pm

     Friday 10/13: Writing Retreat

     12:00-6:00pm

Each event is different, and there is something for everyone. The workshop on academic language encourages participants to understand the characteristics of academic writing as a genre and to think about how academic audiences might be unique. Tuesday's panel discussion features UB faculty, who will describe their own writing interests and give students insights into writing in various disciplines. Wednesday's workshop encourage students to improve their technique for peer review, and Thursday's event introduces students to the intricacies of MLA, APA, and Chicago citation styles. 

The festivities culminate in our big writing retreat on Friday, October 13. You don’t have to be a great writer to participate; the point is to exercise your writing muscles and have fun.  Each hour of the event, from 12:00pm to 6:00pm, there will be a different writing prompt meant to engage you creatively or intellectually. If you’d rather work on writing for class or personal fulfillment, you can do that, too! There will be writing consultants and faculty on hand throughout the retreat to help you improve and give you tips to do your best work.

All of this prepares us to participate in the National Day of Writing, which is Friday, October 20. In the time between our writing retreat and the NDoW, we want UB students and faculty to fill social media with the best examples of our voices, our ideas, and our experiences. Share your work using the official NDoW hashtag #whyIwrite and add #UBwrites to share with our community.

Trust the Process

We’ve all been there. It’s midnight the night before a big paper is due. The coffee is percolating 6 hours too early, and I know I’ve got at least 7 hours of work to do before I can submit this bad boy—bad, here, being the operative word. Despite my efforts and my long hours and my sleepless nights, I never got the grades I knew I could earn on my writing until I learned to slow down and trust the process.

Tired memes may be a result of sleepless nights.

I’m talking about the Writing Process: a step-by-step approach to writing that all good writers, in their best moments, employ in different and often unique ways. In its most basic form, the Writing Process starts with prewriting – the steps you take before you begin composing a draft. These steps might include jotting down your ideas, brainstorming, asking questions, doing research, reading, annotating texts, taking notes, concept mapping, outlining, and talking about your ideas with peers and colleagues.

After prewriting comes drafting, and this stage takes on innumerable forms. For most writers, the important thing is to get started. It has been well established that one cannot complete a piece of writing without first sitting down to write. The key is not to become attached to any of the material you produce in the drafting stage, because more likely than not it will get cut to shreds before the end. That’s because the next stage in the process is revision, and many a poorly written sentence has succumbed to its wrath.

Please, metaphorical wrath only.

Revision is a difficult task for almost all writers, in part because it’s nearly impossible to do it alone. Writers need interested, engaged, and knowledgeable readers with whom we can share our work and find out how it sounds in another person’s head. The goal of writing, after all, is to be read by someone else. But how to revise it to make it fit for human consumption? You need the writing process! And that’s where the Writing Center comes in.

We will help you find it.

When you bring a draft of your work to the Writing Center, you’ll work with a peer who faces the same internal struggles as you do whenever they sit down to write. What shall I say? Will my professor think it’s dumb? What’s the best way to organize this discussion? Do my sources even support this thesis? How do I cite a documentary film? Do you think this cheese is safe to eat? While our Writing Consultants don’t claim to know the mysterious workings of professors’ minds, and we probably can’t advise you about the contents of your fridge, we can help with everything else.

So make an appointment at the Writing Center, no matter where you’re at in your work. Your consultant will be happy to talk with you about your thesis, your sources, your organizational strategy, your citations, and even your writing process. We can help you discover new strategies for building an essay from the ground up, and once your process is in place, you can slow down, too, and learn to trust where it will lead you. Writing will still be hard work, but with a little help from the Writing Center, you can get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and get your coffee drinking back in the morning where it belongs.

Coffee and pie not included.

New Semester, New Workshops!

Langsdale and the ALC are thrilled to brag a little about our Fall 2017 semester offering of workshops. We're gearing up for this semester with a full staff and a full list of workshops FREE to UB students.

Whether you're looking to prepare yourself for a statistics course, strengthen your Adobe Creative Cloud skills, learn about plagiarism and APA citation, or set yourself up for the semester with goal setting and time management--the ALC has you covered!

Check out the full selection at ubalt.edu/workshops. Locations and RSVP details can be found at ubalt.edu/calendar.

Make sure you drop by our fall open house and learn about all of services at a Taste of Tutoring:

Academic Support @ Langsdale

Langsdale Library and the ALC are open all summer long and we're here to support you through all your tough summer courses!

Working on a research project? Make an appointment with a Reference Librarian or drop by the reference desk on the fourth floor of Langsdale. We can help you organize your research project, plan your project, find credible sources, and more!

Need to start writing your research project and don't know where to start? The Writing Center can help you outline your writing project, organize your thoughts, and support a thesis or hypothesis. Consultants can meet with you at any stage of the writing process and review writing on any topic.

Taking a tough course this summer? We have one-on-one and group tutoring to review core course concepts and best meet your needs. Depending on the tutor, you can even meet in-person or online! Sign up using the online appointment system. If you don't see your course listed, let us know!

If you're struggling with a computer program, we're here to support you with that too! Not sure how to change your Running head in Microsoft Word? Scheduled for a design course in the fall and need to brush up on your Adobe InDesign/ Illustrator/ Photoshop? Need to make convert a file to a PDF? Not sure how to navigate Sakai? Sign up for an appointment on the Computer Application Skills schedule and we'll get your questions answered!

Research, writing, course, and computer skills support appointments can all be made using the online appointment system. We look forward to working with you!

Happy Writing Wednesday!

For the first Writing Wednesday, help us welcome the Achievement and Learning Center to Langsdale Library! 

The move actually happened back in August, but this exciting merge makes offering services to the UB community even more accessible. The ALC supports challenging courses, writing, learning and success, and computer skills with tutoring, writing consultations, academic coaching, and workshops.

The Writing Center at the ALC offers support through one-to-one consultations, which can be face-to-face or online. You can also submit your work online through the Online Writing Link (OWL) and get written feedback within 48 business hours. If you have a quick question, writing consultants can be reached through Facebook chat and at the Writing Center Mac help desk on the fourth floor of Langsdale.

Writing consultants can assist you at any stage of the writing process—whether you are brainstorming topic ideas, formulating a thesis, need feedback on an in-progress draft, or want to polish that final draft. Every writer benefits from feedback!

Look forward to more general writing tips, advice, and resources every Wednesday! Visit the ALC website (www.ubalt.edu/alc) to register for an appointment or visit them in LC 420 (enter through the third floor of the library).