The mission of the Walden Writing Center’s faculty support is to provide personalized training, advice, and resources that assist Walden faculty members in effectively communicating scholarly writing guidance to their students, which supports improved student and faculty experience, progress to degree completion, and development of strong scholar-practitioners.  

Would you like to be notified of Writing Center services, events, and helpful tips? Sign up for one of our mailing lists!

• A monthly e-mail for faculty is available by contacting Amber Cook. See the updates to the right of this column for the most current message. Archived updates are here.
• A weekly newsletter, with upcoming webinars and a writing resource and tip of the week, is available by contacting our webinar coordinator at wcwebinars@mail.waldenu.edu. This newsletter is primarily student-facing, but many faculty members subscribe and use it to copy and paste relevant tips into their classrooms.

Visit our student-facing website by clicking the image below:

If you'd like to subscribe to monthly updates like the ones below, please contact Amber Cook to be added to the e-mail list.

New Course Visit Curriculum

• We have recently tweaked our approach to undergraduate and graduate course visits to make them more applicable to your students’ specific writing needs. Now, in addition to daily Q&A and introductions to the Writing Center’s various resources, writing instructors visiting the course will also ask you, the course instructor, to pinpoint four specific writing topics on which your students might need more guidance. Our instructors will then present on each of these topics, asking students direct questions to facilitate pointed writing discussion. If you are interested in arranging a course visit for your class, please fill out our course visit request form.

Paper Review Requirements in Courses

• We know it is tempting to require students to make a paper review appointment when creating writing assignments in a course. However, because the Writing Center’s weekly paper review schedule is limited, we cannot guarantee that students will be able to secure an appointment in a given term week or receive feedback in time to meet assignment deadlines. In addition to uncertain availability, we have found that required paper review appointments often mean students are not fully committed to the process. As a result, students don’t review the suggestions, which is not in the best interest of the reviewer or the student’s time. For these reasons, course materials and faculty should strongly encourage, but not require, paper review appointments.

Links to Purdue OWL

• If you refer students to Purdue’s OWL for help with writing concepts, note that their website will be retiring its current URL and shifting to a new one by the end of this month. This would be an ideal time to update your records with Walden Writing Center links instead, as our site includes content that is designed specifically for Walden programs and students. You can use our site’s search bar, or reach out to me to find content that matches your needs.

Writing Center at the National Faculty Meeting

• We are excited to see many of you at the National Faculty Meeting in Minneapolis! Because of the location, we have a full slate of Writing Center staff who are able to attend: Amber Cook, Brian Timmerman, Martha King, Sarah Prince, Paul Lai, Ellen Zamarripa, Kelly Chermack, Tobias Ball, Amy Bakke, Amy Kubista, Beth Nastachowski, Rachel Willard, Anne Shiell, Jes Philbrook, and Dan Fleischhacker. Look for us at the Office of Academic Support booth at the Faculty Information Fair and throughout the events. Also be sure to seek out the panels on which Writing Center staff are presenting (Developing Students’ Literacy Skills: How the Office of Academic Support Can Help and How Do I get Research Done at Walden?) and the Writing Center’s contribution to the Innovative Teaching Practices Showcase, How Walden Students Write: A View from the Writing Center’s Website.

Cut-and-Paste Announcement: Weekly Writing Center Newsletter

• This month’s announcement for students reminds them to sign up for the Writing Center’s newsletter to stay informed about upcoming events and services:

• The Writing Center has migrated its student newsletter to a new platform, so it’s a great time to sign up! You will receive weekly updates on upcoming webinars, writing tips, and writing resources, now with an updated look. You can sign up for the newsletter using this link.

Writing Tip of the Month: Avoiding Bias

• Writers often struggle to keep bias out of their writing, especially when writing on a topic about which they are passionate or confident. In our blog post Banishing Bias: A Guide to Reducing Bias in Academic Writing, we condense eight pages of the APA manual’s guidance on the subject into bite-sized bullet points that explain how to catch and reduce unintentional bias.

Welcome to the Writing Center Toolbox for Faculty! I'm Amber Cook, the Writing Center's Associate Director of Faculty Outreach and Support. In this role, I receive frequent questions and requests from faculty who need strategies to help support Walden writers. This toolbox contains resources developed by the Writing Center for this purpose, along with resources developed by your fellow faculty members. Can't find what you need? Want to request a resource? Contact me any time at amber.cook@mail.waldenu.edu.