Students are tutored in the Writing Center by other students inside room 221 of the Information Commons on April 8, 2015. ( photo by Natalie Battaglia)
Dear Department of English faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students,
Recently, while serving as Assistant Director of the LUC Writing Center for the Summer and Fall semesters, I have developed several new or improved pages of the Student Resources section. These are intended to support all stages of essay-writing and revision, academic research, publication, and teaching for undergraduate and graduate students and postgraduates, faculty, and researchers. While professors and graduate students can use this resource for their own research, they as instructors can also direct their students’ attention to a tool for presenting and publishing careful, intelligent research, resume-building, and acquiring valuable public speaking and publishing skills at the undergraduate level.
The “Online Resources” page contains links to citation manuals from all disciplines, plagiarism-checking websites, source-finding links and databases, vocabulary aids, and writing and formatting guides. Within the Loyola Online Writing Lab (OWL), there are now seven pages dealing with various kinds of writing from the “ESL/ELL & Grammar” page containing links to campus aid and pdfs of online grammar learning websites and practice sheets, to the “Major-Specific Writing” page providing online links and guides to different kinds of writing, to the “Application Portfolios” page explaining how to construct job portfolios and apply to graduate, law, and medical schools. The “Writing an Essay from A to Z” page guides students through the process of writing all kinds of essays from understanding the prompt to researching, outlining, citing, editing, submitting, and much, much more. Of especial use to UCWR 110 instructors is the “UCWR 110 Course” page, which helps students plan out and compose the four essays assigned in the class: Summary Response, Rhetorical Analysis, Synthesis, and Research.
The “Undergraduate-Level Professional Writing” and “Graduate-Level Professional Writing” pages include original guides to 1) finding CFPs relevant to research in all disciplines on pertinent listservs, 2) writing and submitting abstracts, 3) drafting and presenting a conference paper, and 4) revising and lengthening said conference paper for submission to a relevant journal. Links to CFP multi-disciplinary listservs in the Arts, Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences appear at the top of each page along with pdfs of peer-reviewed journals by discipline as a starting place for a scholar seeking publication. Both pages contain links to various essay competitions funded and held by both LUC departments and international institutions and organizations in various disciplines and subject-areas. The page for graduate writing also contains guides to formatting a thesis or dissertation according to LUC university standards.
Another new resource is the greatly expanded Faculty Resources section, which contains two pages specifically supporting the work of instructors in teaching and grading writing, and publishing on the topic of pedagogy and writing composition. The “Classroom Workshops and Visits” page provides details for teachers on how to request a free visit from a Writing Center graduate tutor, who can conduct workshops on thesis writing, organization, drafting, revision, or any other writing issues that require attention. The “Writing Support for Instructors” page not only supports instructors’ construction of such useful classroom documents as syllabi, handouts, and assignments, but also provides helpful links to ongoing theoretical, pedagogical, and political debates in the field of college composition as well as pdfs listing relevant articles on various writing composition strategies for teachers and journals that publish articles authored by teachers of writing composition.
We at the Writing Center hope that you will scout out our expanded website over Christmas Break and use its new resources in the spring semester to both aid your own academic inquiries and assist your students to proactively research and apply new information to their writing and research projects. Happy Holidays!