The Writing Centre is introducing its new in-class-visit program, Demystifying Academic Writing, which furthers the Writing Centre’s mission to support student success across the curriculum.
The program offers an opportunity for instructors to contribute to their student's success by introducing them to the Writing Centre’s resources and its process-based approach to understanding and managing university-level academic assignments.
It supports all students to become better academic writers by learning how to navigate and negotiate the demands of academic reading and writing, learn the dominant codes and apply those codes to discipline-specific registers of English. The Demystifying Academic Writing in-class visit program is designed for all levels of academic English learners who are in the process of gaining fluency in the registers of their fields.
This new program works to demystify the process and practice of academic writing by revealing how actively integrating reading and writing as tools for learning disciplinary content can help students become better writers. The program takes a “strengths based” approach that draws on students’ diverse skills and talents, that supports their plurilinguistic competencies as they work toward becoming better academic – and professional – writers. This new Writing Centre initiative has a direct impact on student engagement with coursework and assignments. It teaches students to be active users of the academic dialect and to make use of it by consciously and critically applying its codes and conventions. The Demystifying Academic Writing in-class workshop provides practical strategies using sample texts from the field/syllabus to show students how to make informed and rhetorically effective writing choices through active processes of reading.
The Writing Centre's one-hour in-class visits introduce students to the Writing Centre and its resources, followed by a customized, interactive workshop that focuses on helping students respond to their coursework more effectively, showing them how to understand and approach their written assignments in strategic ways that connect the topic to the course material. It focuses on how to clarify a research path, how to incorporate critical, analytical thinking into the act of writing, how to organize material, and how to recognize the role of repeated review and revision as an integral part of the writing process. Learn more about the Writing Centre Classroom Visits online.
Follow-up workshops are also available should instructors wish to consult with the Centre on assignment design and strategies for integrating academic literacies into their teaching as they continue to help students develop their writing skills across assignments.
To learn more about the services and workshops available, visit the Writing Centre website.