For Faculty

Informational Visits

Peer writing consultants welcome the opportunity to visit your class and tell students about our services. The visit takes about 10 minutes and can be scheduled for the beginning or end of class. Contact Leadership Team member Rachel Gass '23 (rgass) to arrange for a tutor to visit your online course or to request a video message to post on Moodle.

Workshops

Contact the director, Jen Callaghan, to develop an in-class or outside-of-class writing workshop for your students.

The following blurb may be copied and pasted into your syllabus. Feel free to edit it.

The Writing Center: Professional writers and scholars routinely seek feedback on their work from trusted peers. I encourage everyone to schedule conferences at the Writing Center to discuss, plan, or revise drafts. To schedule an appointment, go to brynmawr.edu/writingcenter or click "Make a Writing Center Appt" from the Library and Academic Support dropdown menu at the top of every Moodle page.

Your nomination matters!

Each spring, the Writing Center accepts applications for the next academic year's staff. The hiring process is open to anyone who wants to apply, but a faculty recommendation is required and the hiring process is competitive.

If one of your students would make a great tutor, please email Jen Callaghan the student's name and class year. Our goal is to assemble a staff that represents the diversity of the student body and its academic interests. Nominations of students with underrepresented identities, multilingual writers, and STEM/Economics/Psychology majors are especially welcome.

Critical Thinking
The ideal candidate thinks quickly, formulates clear, concrete explanations of complicated ideas, and is able to analyze the claims, underlying assumptions, evidence, or implications of an argument.

Writing
Tutors tend to be strong, but not necessarily flawless, writers. The student you nominate is thoughtful and articulate when discussing drafts with you and is willing to revise holistically.

Interpersonal Skills
The ideal candidate works well with peers (e.g., is friendly, approachable, patient, empathetic) and is generous during class discussions by listening, asking questions, and building on others' comments.

Responsibility
Tutors work independently, so they must be reliable and mature. The ideal candidate was a responsible citizen in your course, attending class, arriving on time and prepared, and meeting deadlines.

Pluses

• Fluency in a language other than English
• Interest in writing, teaching, and mentoring
• Creativity
• Intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for ideas

The best way to find out if your students are visiting the Writing Center is to tell them to ask the tutor for a copy of the objective summary that is written after the meeting. The tutor will email the report to the student, who can then share it with you.

You can also email the director to inquire about individual students. If a writer has given permission to share the tutor's report with you, the director will send a copy upon request. If no permission was given, you'll receive confirmation of the day/time that a conference took place and the name of the tutor.

Students tend to be more engaged during conferences when they come to the Writing Center voluntarily. Announcing in class and on your syllabus that you encourage everyone to use the Writing Center and repeating the recommendation privately to individual students usually convinces them to try it.

If you decide to require a Writing Center visit, please keep the following in mind:

• Before requiring all of your students to visit the Writing Center for a single assignment within a particular time frame, contact the director to see whether we can accommodate your class. Sometimes our schedule is too full to permit it.
• If you require one visit at any point in the semester (i.e., students get to choose when to go), advise the class not to wait until the last minute. Students who wait until the last week of the semester to make an appointment are unlikely to be able to fulfill the requirement, and we won't make special arrangements for them.
• If you award extra credit for Writing Center visits, make it clear to students that to earn credit, they must stay for the entire session and actively participate in the conference.

When it comes to grammar, mechanics, syntax, and word choice, Writing Center tutors focus on process rather than product. That is, we teach students strategies for editing their work and helping them practice identifying and fixing errors. To increase the likelihood that the student will internalize what we're teaching, we focus on a limited number of types of errors per session. Even after hours of hard work, the final product that the student hands in might not be perfect. However, students who visit the Writing Center consistently will improve their writing on the sentence level from semester to semester.

To discuss options for supporting students who need extra help with sentence-level issues, contact Jen Callaghan or Director of Multilingual Writing Vanessa Petroj.