Writing Center Highlights!

So far this year, the Writing Center has seen:

• 1915 students, for
• 4195 appointments, including
• 953 ESL students, who had
• 2481 appointments.

The Writing Center also conducted:

• 7 different workshops, serving
• 100 students.

International Affairs major Shamama Moosvi, undergraduate research apprentice for the Valuing Written Accents project, presented her research at the Colonial Academic Alliance Conference, the Eastern Sociological Society Conference, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Innovations 2009.

Anna Habib and ESL tutor Eiman Hajabassi presented the next phase of their research on multilingual writers in the US academy at the Conference for College Composition and Communication. Their findings can be accessed at http://writtenaccents.gmu.edu.

ECON major and Writing Fellow Romina Boccia has won the F.A. Hayek Award in Austrian Economics from Mason’s Economics department. The annual essay contest is open to any students enrolled in Economics courses.

The Writing Center trained and sponsored two Spanish writing tutors in a joint initiative with the Department of Modern and Classical Languages.

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

Most people think of accountants as “number-crunchers,” but in truth communication and interpersonal skills are two of the most important determinants of success in public accounting. In fact, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants lists communication skills as a Core Competency in its new Core Competencies Framework. While practicing accountants and accounting faculty generally agree that effective writing is fundamental to success in the field, many accounting classes still rely on numerical problem-solving as the primary means of gaining and demonstrating technical accounting knowledge. ...more...

The Biology and Art History rubrics featured here represent the efforts of faculty in these majors to articulate the writing and thinking skills they believe are important for students to achieve by the time they complete their upper-division writing- intensive (WI) courses. We ask you to notice key differences in the ordering of the criteria and the characteristics used to describe each one. The rubrics were developed in departmental assessment workshops, in which faculty read and discuss a number of sample WI papers to develop context-based criteria for competent writing in their major; using the rubric they’ve developed, faculty go on to score a randomly selected, representative sample of student papers.  ...more...

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2009, excellent written communication skills are especially needed in organizations. ...more...

by Lynne M. Constantine, Art and Visual Technology

Many people subscribe to the myth that artists, as visual thinkers and communicators, are not much involved with the written word. In today’s art world, however, artists and designers need verbal savvy to survive and succeed. Designers must understand and be fluent in writing to integrate word and image and to prepare proposals for prospective clients. Artists must have excellent writing skills to apply for grants, work as curators, and provide context for their own work. Indeed, writing has become an ever-larger part of artmaking itself. A growing number of artists create artists’ books, Internet art, and mixed media artworks, in which the written word is as integral to the work as paint or wood or paper.  ...more...

Four Levels for Rating Students’ Overall Writing Competence
by Sarah Baker, WAC/OIA Liaison

In spring 2007, the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) asked all Virginia state institutions to report on the value added by our academic programs to students’ performance in six competency areas, including writing. Because we were already assessing students’ writing competence in upperdivision writing-intensive courses through a workshop process, the WAC director, the composition director, the WAC/OIA liaison, and the director of the Office of Institutional Assessment designed a similar approach focused on researched essays from English 101: Introductory Composition. To distinguish the “emerging competence” of first-year writers from the competence expected of upper-division writers in the majors, the program directors formulated the four-level definition below.  ...more...