Faculty
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why does the Odegaard Undergraduate Library have a writing and research center?
Q: What happens during a typical writing center conference?
Q: Can I require my whole class to bring their papers to the OWRC?
Q: How can I encourage my students to use your center?
Q: Should I give extra credit points to students who use the OWRC?
Q: Will I know if one of my students uses the OWRC?
Q: Many of my students are terrible proofreaders. Can I suggest that they bring their papers to the OWRC for proofreading?
Q: Can the OWRC help students who are struggling because English is not their native language?
Q: Will the OWRC help students to document their sources properly?
Q: Can a student drop off a paper and pick it up later?
Q: What about group papers?
Q: I’ve sometimes had students visit the OWRC and still turn in poorly written papers. How do you explain that?
Q: How do I know that the OWRC’s evaluation of a student’s paper won’t contradict mine?
Q: Can I arrange to have the OWRC staff do workshops or presentations on writing in my class?
Q: What are the full range of services you offer for faculty members on campus?
Q:
Why does the Odegaard Undergraduate Library have a writing and research center?
A:
The
purpose of OWRC is to help students write better for all kinds of class
assignments. Because many college assignments depend upon finding and analyzing
specialized information, we have created a center that helps students work with
the library’s resources as well as put together a successful paper.
This means we help students in three ways. First, we help students understand
fully what any given assignment is asking them to do; second, we help students
plan clearly how to complete assignments successfully; and third, we help
students execute that plan from the initial writing of research notes through
the submission of a successful draft.
Our partnership with the library thus enables us to be a comprehensive writing
AND research center—offering students expert help with all aspects of paper
writing.
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A: The
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Q:
Who is on the staff?
A: The OWRC staff includes graduate
and advanced undergraduates who have received special training to prepare for their
work at the OWRC. They come from
departments across campus and were chosen because they demonstrated all the
qualities of a good tutor. Tutors are trained to respond to writing across the
curriculum. You are welcome to stop by our center and become acquainted
with our staff. For more information about particular tutors, please visit our
staff page.
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Q:
What happens during a writing center conference?
A: Although each conference is
different (because each writer and paper are different), you can get a
general idea of what happens when students visit the OWRC by reading the link What
to Expect
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Q:
Can I require my whole class to bring their papers to the OWRC?
A: Please don’t! We appreciate your
support of the OWRC, but we know from experience that when students get a
blanket requirement of this kind, most of them wait until the last minute and
then come in simply to get us to verify their presence; they don’t plan to
make any substantial changes in their papers. This creates a traffic jam in the
center and may prevent other students, who are serious about improving their
writing, from getting the help that they seek on their own. Please see the next
question for suggestions on how to encourage your students to take advantage of
our services.
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Q:
How can I encourage my students to use the OWRC?
A: Here are some suggestions:
- Add
a description of the OWRC on your syllabus. and your view of our
service. Feel free to copy the following paragraph and paste it on
your syllabus:
SHORT
VERSION: The
LONGER VERSION: The Odegaard Writing & Research Center offers free, one-one-one help with all aspects of writing at any stage in the writing process. To make an appointment or browse the center's online resources, please visit: http://www.depts.washington.edu/owrc. Located on the third floor of the Odegaard Library, the OWRC is open Sunday through Thursday from 1:30-4:30 p.m. and 6:00-9:00 p.m.. To make the best use of your time there, please bring a copy of your assignment with you and double-space any drafts you want to bring in. The OWRC will not proofread papers or talk with you about grades.
- Direct
them to our website: http://www.depts.washington.edu/owrc
- Bring
your class to the OWRC for a 10-minute “get acquainted tour,” or request
for one of our tutors to visit your class.
Please send an e-mail to owrc@u.washington.edu
or call Tish Lopez at (206) 543-2990 ext. 273 to arrange either option.
- Make an appointment for yourself so that you can experience firsthand what students do. Faculty and TA's can work with tutors on drafts of assignments or articles. Follow the directions on our homepage to make an appointment with a tutor.
- Tell
students you are impressed when you receive a note from the OWRC showing
that they were motivated and conscientious enough to go in for a visit.
- Get students who have visited the OWRC to tell others in the class about their experience. In addition, feel free to share comments from past students about the effectiveness of writing center services.
- Without
using names, share anecdotes about your former students who have used our
services and improved as writers.
- Describe
your writing process and when and why you seek feedback from others.
Bringing in multiple drafts of your work can provide a powerful visual
illustration of the writing process. It’s
good for students to know that even experienced writers need good readers.
(That’s much better than telling them to go to the OWRC if they “have any problems”; no one wants to admit to having writing problems!)
- Remind students that the OWRC will provide conference summaries to instructors upon request. Reinforce to them that you value these summaries and see them as evidence of initiative and seriousness about the course. Alert them that they are welcome to have copies of these summaries as well.
- Remind students that they can get help online as well as onsite. Some students feel comfortable sampling writing center services through the relative anonymity and distance of our online services. Currently these services take the form of our Writing Resources section, a self-help databank of handouts addressing common writing issues. This service is available at any time.
- Pick up a flyer from the OWRC and post on your office door, pass it out in class, and/or send it to all of your students via e-mail.
A:
No. While awarding extra points may give students extra incentive to
visit, our past experience indicates that most make appointments simply to get
the points without the intent to improve as writers. Students who make
these perfunctory appointments block other students who have actively and
independently chosen to get help from using our services.
A: Yes, if your student wants you to know. With their permission, we like to send a brief summary of each
conference to the instructor, but occasionally students ask us not to. (And
occasionally they don’t know their instructor’s name or the course number!)
If you would like to know whether or not one of your students came into the
center, please send an e-mail to owrc@u.washington.edu
or call Tish Lopez at (206) 543-2990 ext. 273.
While we cannot disclose what was discussed, we can check our records and tell
you whether or not he or she has been in to visit one of our tutors.
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Q:
Many of my students are terrible proofreaders. Can I suggest that they bring
their papers to the OWRC for proofreading?
A: No, but you can suggest that they
go to the OWRC to learn how to recognize and correct their errors.
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A: Yes, ESL students are some of our
best customers. We are happy to contribute what we can to their process of
learning to write in English, but both they and you should understand that we
will not be rewriting their sentences or correcting every error in their
writing. Writing in a second language (and for many of these students, English
is a third or fourth language) is a difficult and sometimes frustrating process;
it takes time, practice, and persistence. Those who are willing, as many are, to
come in repeatedly and to work hard between sessions to apply what they learn in
the OWRC will gradually make progress, but please don’t expect instant
results.
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Q:
Will the OWRC help students to document their sources properly?
A: Yes. If students keep track of all
the necessary bibliographical information, and if they know which system of
documentation they are supposed to use (APA, MLA, CMS, CBE, AMA, Turabian,
etc.), we will help them look up answers to their questions about citing
particular sources. We may not always be able to find the answers, but we will
try.
If you
have a class full of students who need instruction in the basics of using and
identifying sources properly, you may want to work with the OWRC director to
create and schedule a class presentation. Call Tish Lopez at (206) 543-2990 ext.
273 or send e-mail to owrc@u.washington.edu
for more information. See also our link Writing
Resources.
Q:
Can a student drop off a paper and pick it up later?
A: No, we don’t work on a
student’s paper in his absence. The OWRC is all about conversation. Both the
student and his or her consultant will be asking and answering questions --
reading the paper together and engaging in a dialogue about what is working and
what isn’t, looking for solutions to problems, and exploring different options
together. (See What to
Expect for more information about what goes on in a writing center
conference.)
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Q:
What about group papers?
A: We are happy to help with group
papers if all the group members come in to ask and answer questions about the
parts they have written, and to learn by correcting errors they might have made.
Delegating one group member to bring the paper to our center defeats our purpose
of trying to work with students to improve their writing.
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Q:
I’ve sometimes had students visit the OWRC and still turn in poorly written
papers. How do you explain that?
A: You’re right. Not every writing
center session is an unqualified success. We are often frustrated at not being
able to help students as much as we would like to. Students at many different
levels of writing ability and experience come to our writing center at many
different stages of their writing process. Many of them are good, strong writers
who want to be even better. One visit is enough to help them identify and
address the issues that need to be resolved in a paper, and they are able to
improve it significantly. But frequently we see papers with more writing
problems than we can address in a forty-five minute session. As much as we might like to
“take over” a student’s paper and “fix” it, that is not our mission
– and while that might give you a more pleasurable reading experience when you
see the paper, it would neither help the student to improve as a writer (which
is our ultimate purpose), nor be consistent with UW’s Academic
Integrity Policy (which is extremely important to us).
Our
objective in each writing center conference is to make students feel ready and
able to tackle the next step, or the next few steps, in writing or revising the
papers they bring to us. That means we have to set priorities and make
judgments. We may, for example, show a student how to restructure his paper so
that the parts of it fit together more coherently, or how to bolster his
argument with more evidence, or how to use and identify his sources properly, or
how to correct some persistent errors in usage or punctuation. But we are often
aware that even if he uses what he learns to improve the paper in some ways,
there will still be other problems remaining. In that case we encourage the
student to come back for additional sessions as he is revising –and hope that
he has the time and inclination to do that.
If you
have concerns or questions about a particular session, or if you want to send
information to our staff about your own priorities and expectations for your
students’writing, Tish Lopez would love to hear from you. (Please send email
to owrc@u.washington.edy or call
(206) 543-2990 ext. 273.
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Q:
How do I know that a tutor’s evaluation of a student’s paper won’t
contradict mine?
A: You don’t know that, and neither
do we. That’s why OWRC consultants are trained to avoid evaluating papers. We
try to encourage writers by taking an interest in their work and by responding
enthusiastically to their ideas and their effort. But we also react honestly as
readers – pointing out problems, raising questions, encouraging writers to
examine their options. It’s a fine line – trying to be supportive while at
the same time helping students to look critically at their own writing. When
they ask us (as they often do) to evaluate their writing, we try instead to get
them to identify its strengths and weaknesses in relation to their intentions or
to the criteria given them as part of the assignment. And we always tell
students that we are not in a position to anticipate or explain their
instructor’s response to a paper. Our mantra at the OWRC is that students
are responsible for the papers they turn in, and their instructors are
responsible for evaluating them.
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A. Yes.
While our primary purpose is to work individually with students, with
enough notice, we are willing to work with instructors to develop targeted
workshops/presentations on specific topics that will be helpful to a class (such
as avoiding plagiarism, or doing meaningful revision, or using the MLA or APA
system of documentation). Please e-mail Tish Lopez at owrc@u.washington.edy
or call (206) 543-2990 ext. 273 if you want to pursue this.
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Q:
What are the full range of services you offer for faculty members on campus?
A:
In order to provide the best possible support for student writers, the OWRC
provides support, resources and consultation services for faculty who assign
writing in their courses. Our services for faculty include:
·
In-Class
Visits –
Would you like your students to hear about our services first-hand?
Request one of our tutors to visit your class and perform a 5-10 minute
presentation about our services! Handouts and Powerpoints regarding our services
are also available upon request.
·
Workshops
– You can save
valuable planning time by asking one of our tutors to come to your classroom to
conduct specially-focused writing workshops. We've developed workshops and
materials on a wide array of writing topics and can even customize a workshop to
meet your specific assignments and writing needs!
·
Handouts/PowerPoints
–
Do you need helpful handouts or PowerPoints on writing and/or research for your
students to use in the classroom? We’ll
be happy to send you a copy of our resources.
· Private Consultations – Are you interested in adding more writing or writing instruction to your courses? We can help! We are more than willing to work with you one-on-one to assist in the creation of writing prompts and/or finding ways to make writing more central to your course.
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