Writing Center Highlights!

This Fall, the Writing Center will
have seen:

• 1150 students, for
• 2150 appointments, including
• 570 ESL students, who had
• 1240 appointments.

New WAC Website Launched:
http://wac.gmu.edu

We’re proud of the clean new design of our WAC site, created by Robb St. Lawrence, and of several new features on the site.  Check out “Faculty Resources” and “A Culture of Writing” (under Program Info”).

Speaking of Mason’s writing culture, our WAC program has been ranked for the seventh year in a row among the top 23 programs for Writing in the Disciplines in the U.S. News
College Issue (2009)!  We are one of only nine public institutions making the list in the company of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, and others.

Writing At Center
Director/Editor: Dr. Terry Myers Zawacki
Production Editor: Robb St. Lawrence

Writing History on Wikipedia: Students Constructing Knowledge in Collaborative Space
by Mills Kelly, History and Center for History and New Media

Not long ago, the faculty in the History Department at Middlebury College banned (or at least tried to ban) their students from using Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) as a source for history essays. Leaving aside the question of whether or not banning a web resource might actually work, plenty of professors, regardless of discipline, would agree with the goal of encouraging students to veer away from malleable sources such as Wikipedia. Why then, you might ask, do I require students in virtually every class I teach to write for Wikipedia? ...more...

by Rick Reo, Instructional Designer, DoIT/LSS

Web 2.0 or the Read/Write Web are popular terms used to describe a pattern of web technology innovation and mass adoption of free, easy-to-use tools and services that has spurred novel ways of social interaction beyond those of the 20th century "read-only" Web. Here I want to identify a few of the lesser-known Read/Write Web (R/W) web tools with interactive writing features, which can, when combined with good pedagogy, provide the potential to foster writing skills. My focus will be on R/W web tools and associated environments with strong text-based interactivity that are not explicitly designed for writing growth. Wikis and blogs are obvious examples of this kind of R/W web tool, but let's look at some less familiar tools.  ...more...

In IT 103, students learn that writing for the Web is different than writing on paper. Web readers scan for information on websites; they do not read every single word posted on a web page, so the writing and presentation style must change when the audience is accessing information online. The goal of our course project is to teach students the difference between web writing and more conventional writing.  ...more...

Safe Assign and Turnitin: A Comparison of Two Plagiarism-Prevention Services
by Susan Campbell, Learning Support Services, DoIT

While some plagiarism may be deliberate, often it is unintentional and occurs for many reasons, including students' forgetting to keep track of sources; not understanding the distinction between quoting, paraphrasing and expressing original ideas; lack of clarity about how to cite sources; cultural differences between our country and others or between generations about what constitutes plagiarism; and so on.  ...more...

Writing-Intensive Faculty Across 5 Colleges and 11 Disciplines Participate in First TA C/WAC Learning Community
by Sarah Baker, Assistant WAC Director, & G. Morgan, TAC Director

This Fall, Mason's Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program is collaborating with the Technology Across the Curriculum (TAC) program on a semester-long faculty learning community to explore approaches for incorporating technology when teaching Writing-Intensive (WI) courses.  ...more...