From Writing Clinic to Writers Workshop: Supporting students 30 years later
The Writers Workshop has fostered the growth of strong writers across campus since opening in 1989. We have stayed committed to the Workshop’s founding mission while changing to meet the latest research standards and student needs.
In 1991, Instruction at Illinois prominently featured an article titled, “Writing center to teach how to incorporate writing into courses,” which was accompanied by a photo of then-current directors Gail Hawisher (Center for Writing Studies) and Michael Pemberton (Writers Workshop) smiling behind a desk. The article introduced the Center for Writing Studies’ plans to impact campus curricula by helping professors incorporate writing into their courses following the newly-implemented Advanced Composition general education requirement.
Within this article, Hawisher articulated how writing is a necessary part of the learning process for all students, no matter their major. “Students can make knowledge – inform, develop new ideas, synthesize subject matter in a course they are taking – through writing,” she argued. “They are capable of discovering ideas through this process.”
A key component of this push to include more writing campuswide was the presence of the Writers Workshop. The writing center was conceptualized as a place where students help students. The 1991 name change from the Writing Clinic to the Writers Workshop signaled a shift from “fixing” or “perfecting” the final written product to helping writers improve their writing practices overall. As Pemberton explained, it was a distinction meant to signify that consultants aimed to “work with students” rather than to “heal or fix” their writing. Pemberton elaborated that the Writers Workshop emphasized such an approach to more effectively address higher order concerns such as focus, development, and organization explicitly because grammatical and lower-order concerns can be resolved “[if] we can help them get a clearer sense of what it is they’re trying to say, or how to develop their ideas.”
The Writers Workshop retains this philosophy 30 years later. Much like the 13 graduate consultants supporting writers in 1991, today our 30 undergraduate and graduate consultants continue to focus on helping writers express their own ideas and arguments. As we have grown in staff size and outreach to writers across campus, we have also increased our disciplinary representation to better help all students. We remain committed to assisting undergraduate writers with their class assignments, research projects, resumes, job materials, and more. We also have worked to stay up to date on emerging writing tools and trends, such as AI. Graduate students, faculty, and staff members are also welcome and frequent visitors whom we have worked to better serve. We have especially sought, for example, to assist with dissertation writing and academic job materials, and graduate writers now account for upwards of 40% of all appointments.
The Writers Workshop hopes this growth and expansion will continue. As Pemberton underscored, the Writers Workshop is a special place because “we are not there to judge, or to evaluate, or to point out errors, per se, in a student composition, as much as we are there to be a sounding board.” He further reinforced the necessity of this experience because writing consultants can help student writers “turn [their writing] into something that they really want it to be.”
By Martha Larkin, English, PhD candidate, & Liz Matresse, English, PhD candidate