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Support for Faculty

The Writing Studio primarily assists undergraduate and graduate writers across the curriculum with free, one-to-one conferences. We help students understand assignments, develop ideas, support arguments and claims, cite sources, and revise papers.

Information For Your Syllabus

Feel free to copy and paste the following for your syllabus:
At the Writing Studio, located on the main floor of the library, writing consultants are available to work one-on-one with you at any stage of your writing process and with any kind of writing you are creating. Whether you need help understanding an assignment, brainstorming ideas, revising a draft, or developing editing strategies, Writing Studio consultants are a valuable resource. Appointments can be reserved up to six days in advance via their online scheduling program, WCOnline. Walk-in appointments are welcome if a consultant doesn’t already have an appointment with someone else. Students in online courses can also use the Online Writing Lab (OWL). Visit the Writing Studio website to make your appointment and to find more information about the Writing Studio and its resources.

Referring Students

We hope that you encourage all students to visit the Writing Studio! If you do require a student to seek support, please encourage them to consider us a writing resource rather than a remedial lab. Students who feel as though they’re being sent to the Writing Studio because they’re “bad” writers who need to “fix” their problems often come to us unwillingly and make our goal of helping students become more effective, confident writers difficult to achieve.

If you need to know that a student has visited the Writing Studio, ask the student to request we send you an email confirmation following the session.

Classroom Visits

For those instructors who would like to introduce their students to the Writing Studio, we offer a brief 10-15 minute presentation by one of our staff members. Information is also available for you and your students on the Prezi presentations Writing Studio 101 and OWL 101.

If you would like to schedule a visit, email the Writing Studio director at [email protected] with the following information: your name, course title and time, location of the class, number of students in class, and 1st and 2nd choices for scheduling a visit. Please wait for confirmation while we make every effort to accommodate your request.

Workshops

We offer a workshop series in the Writing Studio during the Fall and Spring semester. Topics and dates are listed under Workshops on the left-side menu. If you would like us to deliver one of our workshops in your classroom, a request can be sent to Kristen Schmidt. The course instructor must be present for the workshop. We encourage instructors to discuss how the workshop directly applies to the students' assignments.

Writing Studio Sessions

Consultants work first on higher-order concerns (thesis, argumentation, organization, paragraph development) and then work their way toward lower-order concerns (punctuation, grammar, spelling, citation). Will your student walk away from their session with a perfect paper? No. But if the student has taken the time to revise the paper according to what was covered in the session, we can guarantee that it will be a better paper and that your student will have learned something in the process. Becoming a strong writer is something that occurs over time and with practice. We hope to help students become more effective, confident writers who are able to assess their own writing rather than help them create a one-time “perfect” paper. That way they will turn in better papers all the time rather than turning in just one good paper that someone else has “fixed.”

Grammar Consultations

Writers (and faculty) can request a session that focuses primarily on grammar issues – they are the clients, after all. In that case, the consultant will reverse how time is usually spent during a session, addressing the lower order concerns first and pointing out issues related to content as needed.

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