The Workshop’s goal is to participate in fostering a culture of writing on campus; as such, it is our mission to serve all University of Illinois writers, from the first-semester undergraduate to the visiting faculty member. In the last academic year, we provided writing support in over 7000 individual sessions and reached more than 27,000 students in presentations, writing groups, and resource fairs. The students and staff who comprise the Writers Workshop’s community are diverse, and many of our appointments were with first-generation students (20%), students from underrepresented and minoritized groups (41%), international students (37%), and multilingual writers (47%).
Writers have shared their appreciation in testimonials to the Workshop; as one student wrote: “As an international student with no previous experience with academic English, starting a Ph.D. degree that was fully in English was incredibly daunting. I had to learn to review and write scientific articles in my third language, which was a terrifying experience. The Writers Workshop helped and empowered me since the first year in my degree to write class essays, onto writing my qualifying papers and first journal article! Now, as a graduated Ph.D., I want to thank all the work that WW does for the international student community, particularly to those in graduate school!”
In the past year, the Writers Workshop has been active in campus conversations about Generative AI, and we have developed presentations and resources to foster students’ critical, ethical use of writing with GenAI. We also piloted a drop-in satellite location at the Paul M. Lisnek LAS Hub. In the spring, we were proud to be a featured unit during Orange and Blue Week, where we raised nearly $1000 to support our services.
As always, I extend my thanks to our outstanding current and former consultants, our reception and admin team, and the writers who help us learn about their amazing research and creative work. The Writers Workshop is passionate about the work we do, knowing that we provide an inclusive and collaborative environment where we and our writers feel safe to take risks and try out new ideas and skills.
The articles that follow were proposed and written by current consultants. I read these pieces as a joyful celebration of the community we’ve built, and I hope you enjoy their reflections on this work.
Brendan McGovern has long been a legend at the Writers Workshop–particularly among WRIT 300 students: his research poster hangs in the hallway to the Workshop, and his papers have been used as examples of class assignments. After graduating from Illinois in May 2021, he went on to join the Teach for America corps in Chicago, where he taught sixth-grade English and ran an after-school writing center for his ELL students at Neal Math and Science Academy in North Chicago. He is now a law student at the University of Virginia, where he recently was selected for the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review.
Brendan majored in English and political science at the University of Illinois and joined the Writers Workshop in spring of his freshman year when he started volunteering before becoming a peer consultant as a sophomore. He says his time here taught him a lot of transferable soft skills, and he recommends that every consultant “take advantage of the multiple opportunities that the Writers Workshop offers. So I had the chance to engage in professor-led research, independent research [check out his Praxis article here], present at a research symposium, attend conferences. I grew so much in terms of my interests, my writing skills, public speaking, and those were all incredibly helpful as I progressed throughout undergrad and life immediately after graduation. And those soft skills are incredibly impactful regardless of the career that you pick.”
His favorite part of being a consultant with the Writers Workshop was getting to meet and connect with students from across campus and of different grade levels. He says, “I formed really amazing relationships with a lot of writers and got the chance to learn about their interests and passions in engineering and business and help them work both on their academic pieces and a lot of their professional writing, like cover letters and resumes.”
His time at the Workshop helped shape his path after graduation and beyond: “I think I didn’t realize until after I graduated how much my time as a consultant and the work that I did with the other consultants, Dr. Wisniewski, the graduate students, really helped me grow personally and professionally. I credit all the work that I’ve done with the Writers Workshop to the beginning of my career as a teacher, as somebody who’s interested in education, law and policy, and it gave me a really clear path for what I wanted to do.” Looking to the future, Brendan plans to work in education policy. We look forward to cheering him on.
By Elizabeth Scherschel, Classics major, History and Anthropology minors, senior (Class of 2025)
As warm rain fell on the Quad outside, the Orange Room hummed with conversation where Bakytgul, a graduate writer, sat down with Cong, a PhD student and Writers Workshop consultant. A frequent visitor of the Writers Workshop—often with Cong as her consultant—Bakytgul was able to comfortably start collaborating on her presentation slides about AI in teacher education. Together, they dove into the project, “shortening sentences, adjusting the layout, and generating…icons.” Both being non-native English speakers, Cong was better able to understand and discuss the “several nuanced issues about wording and phrasing” present in Bakytgul’s work. As they flipped slide to slide, interjecting with lighthearted quips, their laughter reflected the warm, cheery energy of the Writers Workshop.
Cong and Bakytgul in the Main Library Orange Room
Especially on a rainy day like this one, some writers cannot make the trek all the way to the Main Library. Tucked away in a corner on the top floor of the Grainger Library, Room 402 is home to the Writers Workshop satellite location where two first-year writers walked into the space for help on the “generic constraints of writing a biology research paper.” Because we serve one of the most prominent research universities in the country, we are prepared to help all genres of writing, including the STEM fields. Macy, a sophomore majoring in neuroscience and the consultant in this appointment, had “background knowledge in the material, [giving her] a chance to ask questions of their work” that allowed her to “[draw] out some more depth and complexity in the writing.” Macy’s use of field specialization when scaffolding in the appointment helped the writers to more easily learn the norms of the writing genre and transfer what they have learned to “not only [their] future classes, but also [their] future career[s].” This group had worked together before, and the two writers “are both extremely inquisitive and supportive of one another, which [made the] sessions both fun and productive.”
Writers Workshop session in the Grainger Library satellite location
When a writer attends their first appointment, they enter a new community and become a part of something bigger than themselves. They become intertwined in the web of writing throughout the larger university. Returning writers form stronger bonds with the space, the front desk, and the consultants, furthering their comfort in and out of the physical appointment area. The rain, although not ideal for traveling to an appointment, helped these writing relationships continue to grow, one consultation at a time.
Macy working with STEM students on a biology research paper
By: Lyric Roy, Journalism major, Political Science and Studio Art minors, freshman
Elementary-school aged Macy and her favorite author
My mom jokes that I started writing when I was 16 months old. I would take blank pieces of paper and trace horizontal lines like I was mimicking the words of a novel.
I wanted to be an author from the time I was in kindergarten to around seventh grade. For those seven years, the only thing I wanted to do was read and write. I wrote the first chapters to probably a hundred novels (each rip-offs of whatever book obsession I had that week) and not a single ending. It was the characters that I loved, creating the beginnings of worlds that would be destined to float around the family computer desktop folder titled “writing stuff.”
Going into high school, I changed directions. Years of frustrating English teachers and classes beat the love of language out of me, and I was forced to look for other places to settle.
The transition from humanities to STEM was less stark than I thought it was at the time. The books that urged me towards sciences were novels by Oliver Sacks and Andy Weir, texts that blended storytelling with scientific content, allowing me to begin exploring those interests while staying close to my comfort zone.
As I invested more into scientific writing and moved further away from literature and the arts, I avoided taking creative writing and language classes, sticking to as many science courses as possible. When I started at U of I, I hoped to never take a humanities course again.
However, the amount of academic papers required across my classes took me by surprise. I noticed that my experience with creative writing gave me an advantage in my science courses—I had developed a knack for writing research papers that didn’t feel stunted and boring. My knowledge of storytelling and creative exploration encouraged my writer’s voice to come through even in the most mundane of assignments. I began learning to balance the precise structure of research papers with linguistic complexity, flow, and scientific storytelling.
I wish I could say I was more comfortable tapping back into my creative side, but I’ve yet to come across an opportunity to explore narrative or fictional writing. However, I’ve grown immensely as an academic writer, editor, and teacher through my exploration of the intersection between the artistic and scientific writing disciplines.
Writing a good academic paper is, in essence, telling a story. Not only does it necessitate a clear and complex plot, but it blossoms with creative vocabulary and syntactic intricacies. In the Writers Workshop and as an editor for the Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal, I hope to bridge the divide between these purportedly incomparable—yet vastly interconnected—disciplines.
Emma Ortega
Young Emma and favorite author Fern Schumer Chapman at a book signing
I can trace my love of writing back to hand-made pamphlets for my family about how to recycle and to implement recycling into our home. I would create books out of scrap paper, my first “books” being reasons why we had to take care of the earth: an inspiration I took from my kindergarten Earth Day trip. I believe Earth Day led to my love of the sciences, along with my first trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I remember the feeling of learning so much that my first-grade heart nearly exploded, and, even to this day, I can remember every single exhibit in the museum (and even word-for-word repeat some of the presentations). That feeling of learning was connected to my initial love of science and young aspirations to do anything related to the scientific field when I was older.
Through middle school and the beginning of high school I recognized my love for writing, but simply regarded it as a hobby, placing my love for science at the forefront of my academic ambitions—until my sophomore year of high school, where my foreseen “career” in science abruptly ended in my 8 A.M. chemistry class. It had nothing to do with chemistry itself, but with the instructor who inevitably allowed me to realize my strong suits lie in the humanities.
I was always a kid who was reading. I showed off to my friends the new series I was reading, and during eighth grade, my teacher created a lunchtime “book club” made up of that teacher and one other student (me!). After sophomore year, I poured time into my English courses and other writing-based classes to ensure that when I went to college, I would be prepared for higher-level writing.
My decision to become an English major was a simple one. Despite the somewhat negative reputation of the major, I found it has allowed me to think critically outside of my own writing. Many of the skills I have learned from writing long-form essays come from major-specific courses I have taken over the years; however, where I have learned the most about myself as a writer is through the writers I have helped in the past three semesters working at the Writers Workshop.
Seeing the variety of students who walk through the writing center’s doors has allowed me to understand the importance of the writing process in combination with preserving a writer’s voice. College-level writing is difficult to navigate by oneself and even more difficult to navigate as one jumps in solo as a first-year student. What we as writing consultants attempt to do is make that navigation enjoyable while validating the students in their writing process. As an English major, I have always thought of the writing process as a process that is meant to allow the writer to convey their thoughts and ideas creatively and critically. As a Writers Workshop consultant, I encourage writers and myself to think creatively, critically, and freely when engaging in the writing process.
By Macy Hoeveler, Neuroscience major, Music minor, sophomore, & Emma Ortega, English major, Sociology minor, senior (Class of 2025)
Writing studies research is a cornerstone of the Writers Workshop, aiding the development of consulting and teaching practices. To highlight some of the amazing work being done, I spoke with three students who took WRIT 300: Issues in Tutoring Writing, the course that allows undergraduate students to become peer consultants. As part of WRIT 300, consultants-to-be must complete an IRB-approved research project focused on a facet of writing tutoring. The three students I spoke with are experienced undergraduate consultants whose research projects have made a significant impact on the Writers Workshop community.
Zion Trinidad, a senior majoring in history and Latina/Latino studies (Class of 2025), focused his research on how Latino students who speak Spanish at home and English at school experience writing. He conducted an interview study examining writer confidence in language usage, vocabulary, and grammar, and sense of their own writing skills compared to first-language peers. Zion presented his findings at the Undergraduate Research Symposium and the Latine Studies Graduate Student Conference. As a consultant, he remains open-minded to second language writers’ fears, using motivational scaffolding strategies like praise to build their confidence.
Zion Trinidad (left) and Carolyn Wisniewski (right) at the Undergraduate Research Symposium
Emma Ortega and Virginia Wright, two senior undergraduate consultants majoring in English (both Class of 2025), developed their WRIT 300 research project together and presented a poster at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. They compared how tutors applied discursive tutoring strategies during sessions focused on academic writing and professional writing. They found sessions addressing professional writing like job applications or cover letters required motivational scaffolding be used at a higher frequency than in academic writing sessions where students are more confident. Virginia’s main takeaway is that it’s important to apply motivational scaffolding strategies when students are unfamiliar with a topic to encourage learning and support their growth as writers. Emma said that after conducting research, she feels more comfortable helping students with their own research writing because she understands the process and need for realistic expectations.
Virginia Wright (left) and Emma Ortega (right) at the Undergraduate Research Symposium
Zion, Emma, and Virginia all provided the same advice to those thinking about doing research: go for it! They each had a unique experience learning about the conventions of research through WRIT 300 and ultimately benefited as students and as consultants. Writing studies research drives the innovation of tutoring strategies in the Writers Workshop, improving student writing outcomes across campus.
By Serena Naji, English major, Political Science and Legal Studies minors, sophomore
For most students, the topic of AI seems a bit taboo. As a consultant and an undergraduate student, I experience student wariness while also seeing Generative AI (GenAI) as an intriguing tool for writing center work. Although I may be biased as an English major, I had always viewed GenAI as a tool students used to completely write an essay or assignment for them. However, GenAI has many uses outside of the label of “homework-doer.”
As I have learned through being a consultant, the most important value we pride ourselves on at the writing center is being able to assist students through their writing process. As AI emerged as a supposed “threat” to student writing, we as a writing center had to decide how to approach a technology that had become part of many students’ writing processes. While this technology seemed to sneak up on us, as we move forward into the technological future seeing this kind of technology as the enemy can only hinder possibilities for the writing process.
In several Writers Workshop staff meetings, we’ve developed a philosophy of working with GenAI. Core components of that philosophy include understanding GenAI within the local context of U of I and instructors’ class policies, encouraging students to use GenAI in ways that complement rather than overtake the writing process, maintaining the integrity of a writer’s voice, raising consciousness about use in different writing stages, and taking a nuanced approach when recommending or modelling GenAI writing technologies. Our meetings emphasize ethical and critical use of GenAI, whether it’s being used to help brainstorm and generate ideas or suggest edits to proofread and polish a document. In April, Dr. Wisniewski and Antonio Hamilton (Writers Workshop Assistant Director and Writing Studies PhD candidate) discussed our center’s approach to staff development and student education at the annual Big 10 Writing Center Directors’ Meeting.
Antonio Hamilton and Carolyn Wisniewski at the Big 10 Conference Center in April 2025
At the Writers Workshop, we aim to be a place where students with all different kinds of backgrounds, languages, and writing processes can speak about their ideas and their methods freely. As AI has become a hot topic in academia, we want to approach the subject with care and understand students’ need for using GenAI. We also don’t forget what sets a human writing assistant apart from GenAI: interaction, individualization, listening, motivational scaffolding, and the ability to empathize over a difficult assignment or a sentence you want to get just right.
By Emma Ortega, English major, Sociology minor, senior (Class of 2025)
While the Writers Workshop is best known for its one-to-one writing consultations, we also engage with the University community by providing other writing-support activities, one of which is the writing productivity group.
Our graduate writing productivity groups have become a very well-utilized Writers Workshop service among graduate students and faculty. The writing productivity groups meet twice a week for three hours in a hybrid format so that students can attend in-person or by Zoom. Each group begins with attendees sharing their writing goals, followed by individual work time, and concludes with a reflection and celebration of what writers accomplished.
Regular attendees say they benefit from the structured time and sense of accountability. Chelsea, a doctoral student in psychology who began attending during the lockdowns of Covid-19, explained, “I think having a set time, where I’m going to set aside goals for what I’m going to do during that session, typically writing—which is hard to motivate myself to do—sharing that goal with everyone else, and then coming back at the end, checking in on the progress that we made, just helps me a lot with accountability. It’s like, I know no one is going to be mad or upset or disappointed in me if I don’t actually meet the goal that I said I was, but somehow just saying it and having that group available makes me feel more accountable to doing the work.” Sara, who earned her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese, said, “It’s nice that I can add it to my calendar and just have that time blocked off no matter what, and even if I’m busy, even if I have other things going on, I know that that time is for me and for my writing.” Ashish, a PhD candidate in computer science, referred to writing group as “sacred time that I do not touch for other activities. I do not even schedule meetings with my advisor, because I tell him that, ‘Hey, I am actually writing during this time.’”
Madeline similarly reflected on using the writing groups to build a routine, particularly as a new online master’s program student. She explained, “Now every day, I spend about three hours in the morning mostly doing some kind of writing, or reading to support the writing. And that’s been my writing routine, and that was established because of the workshop, just trying to figure out in my first and second semester, what time of day works? When do I work best? How do I structure my day to allow me to work best? So it was helpful for that.”
In addition to building writing routines, regular attendees benefit from hearing about the writing processes of other graduate students. Nathalie, a doctoral student in anthropology, began attending writing groups during her first year in graduate school. She found “hearing about people’s different experiences throughout the different years and phases of the graduate school journey … has been mental preparation for me, with envisioning myself in those phases in the future.” Nathalie mentioned “learning a sense of grace with myself as a student and setting more realistic goals” through the process of reflection and sharing accomplishments. Kara, who started attending writing groups as a master’s student in Spanish & Portuguese and continues to attend 8 years later as faculty, reflected that “sometimes a successful day can be writing 50 words, and sometimes a successful day can be writing 500 words, and sometimes a successful day is deleting 500 words. And it’s nice to know that my process is similar to others’ processes, and that we as writers, as academics, that it’s okay to have these surges and ebbs and flows in writing.”
Finally, writing groups offer a space for graduate students to build a community of support. Kara acknowledged, “writing can be very lonely, and just having the support from people across campus has been really, really good for my morale.” Ashish has found, whether joining by Zoom or in-person, writing with a “community of graduate students” helps you “kind of ride the wave, you know, if they’re working on a deadline, you can push for it together. And you get to know grad students in the same stage, and that helps because in the back end of the PhD program… having the connection with people who write and are going through the same writing process as you do. … You can make friends.”
Cade, a doctoral student in history, summed up his experience of the writing groups: “One of the great things about it is that … [it’s] a welcoming and encouraging environment. So you go in knowing that you’re going to get positive feedback, no matter where you are.”
By Neal Liu, English, PhD candidate, and Carolyn Wisniewski, Senior Director, Writers Workshop
The Paul M. Lisnek LAS Hub is located inside Lincoln Hall, tucked underneath the stairs; unless you know where you’re going, you might miss it. The tunnel-esque space opened in fall 2022 and now holds benches, cozy chairs, and a coffee and tea station for students to take advantage of between classes. Students often struggle to find an empty seat during the day, and what was once a coffee shop has become a gathering space for students and a center for resources including the Peer Mentors and – as of fall 2024 – the Writers Workshop.
The Writers Workshop received funding as part of a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Investment for Growth proposal to hold drop-in hours when writers can come in for help with application essays, for a quick conversation between classes, or to brainstorm. Consultant Graciela B. says, “the Hub can offer a more casual setting” due to its drop-in format and the fact that writers are likely already familiar with the Hub space, even if they have not heard of the Writers Workshop before. The flexibility of timing for each session makes it a popular option for students who have a break between classes.
Within the LAS Hub, there are usually a few groups hosting drop-in hours, including the LAS Peer Mentors (who offer assistance with finding and applying for experiential learning opportunities) and ATLAS internship programs. This means that students can get their questions answered more easily and all in one place. Often, the Peer Mentors refer students to the Writers Workshop, and vice versa, creating a strong sense of community in the space and encouraging more undergraduates to use the Writers Workshop. Some of the writers I’ve met with had not previously used the Writers Workshop and did not know what help they could find there.
Since its inception, Writers Workshop and LAS staff have been refining the procedures to make it easier for writers to find the consultant and get the help they’re hoping to find. Having held more than 100 sessions in our first two semesters in the space, the future looks bright for the LAS Hub satellite location!
By Elizabeth Scherschel, Classics major, History and Anthropology minors, senior (Class of 2025)
I remember one of the first times a professor marked up my essay in colored ink, more vivid and profound than all the other times my professors had complimented my writing. I shoved my essay quickly in my folder, unable to bring myself to read the comments and stare at the question marks etched at the end of paragraphs. Not only was I embarrassed about my grade, I felt even worse about my own writing skills.
I had walked into my college-level English classes thinking the AP courses I had taken in high school had done more than enough to prepare me. I was a freshman being thrown into the world of academic writing, and academic writing was introduced to me with these words: “Forget everything you learned in high school.” As an English major, this sent me into a small panic. The academic writing typically taught to students in secondary education is structured and rigid, focusing on creating an argument while having the proposed argument be “solved” within five paragraphs. This 5-paragraph structure includes an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. While it may seem like a decent skeleton for students to work off when entering collegiate writing, this structure carries cultural implications because of the rigidity. For students whose first language is not English, the nuances of academic writing are not a reflex; as the director of the Writers Workshop, Carolyn Wisniewski, has said, “Academic English is no one’s first language.”
As a bilingual student, I have come across a mindset that I have found to be constant among second language (L2) students, international students, and first-generation college students: “I need to sound smarter.” This mindset stems from “literacy trauma,” which manifests “as the result of traumatic experiences—those that are negative and disruptive—surrounding writing, reading, literacy, and communication in formal educational settings” (Carvajal Regidor, 2023, p.10). For many students of color and L2 students, “sounding smart” is a notion that creates a negative correlation between a student’s own voice and any rhetorical situation they are meant to tackle—in their writing or otherwise. When working with students in the Writers Workshop, it is disheartening to hear this mindset as a main objective students want to work on during the session. When introduced to a student who is looking to “sound smarter” or had experienced literacy trauma, the Writers Workshop curriculum has prepared consultants to support students through their individual writing process.
The preliminary WRIT 300: Issues in Tutoring Writing class that undergraduates participate in before becoming consultants establishes how to approach a consultation with international and L2 students. The course includes articles by writing center and second-language writing scholars, like Dana Ferris (2009), Carol Severino (2009), Paul Matsuda and Michelle Cox (2009), Vershawn Ashanti Young (2010), Eun-Young Kim (2015), and Harry Denny, John Nordlof, and Lori Salem (2018). These sources provide grounding for consultants to move from locally viewing a student’s paper (grammar, language conventions, punctuation), to a more global focus on the paper (answering the prompt, sentence flow, etc.) to allow the student to improve larger aspects of the paper.
As a consultant, I have learned the importance of a student’s own voice and how they approach a session based on where they are in their writing process. Students’ language stretches beyond the form of daily communication—language is embedded in culture, identity, and the way in which a student expresses themselves. WRIT 300 was an opportunity to recognize the complex intersection of language and identity and even how we as consultants hold that complexity within ourselves as writers.
Many times, in the academic sphere, students seem to be presented with a very fixed and daunting introduction to higher level writing, a sentiment I, too, can relate to. Through finding my own voice as a L2 student who identifies as Latina, learning how to find my own voice in academic writing is a large feat I am still trying to overcome and persist. While any student is concentrated on comparing the tone of their writing and level of their writing to either their peers, professor’s expectations, or even sources they are analyzing, the pressure to sound anything like what they are surrounded by is insurmountable. As a Workshop, we aim to ensure these students are validated in their experiences, while pushing them to enjoy the ways in which they authentically write and move through their own process. Ferris (2009) points out, “even functional bilinguals will sometimes have ‘fossilized’ features in their writing and speaking that mark them as being non-native” (p. 27). While even students themselves see these “fossilized” speaking and writing conventions that need to be corrected through the assistance of something like the Writers Workshop, we as consultants are informed these conventions are anything but a weakness or something that needs to be “corrected.”
By Emma Ortega, English major, Sociology minor, senior
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.”
