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Undergraduate Perspectives

Undergraduate Column: How Do We Create Our Writers of Mason Profiles?

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The Writers of Mason, based on the Humans of New York, attempts to capture the diversity of writers on campus by profiling students, faculty, and staff through interviews and photos. To date, we have published 45 profiles on the blog, are currently processing multiple different profiles, and have snapped 189 photos of writers in our Mason community. Because we strive to showcase the human experience, creating a profile for an interviewee takes time and patience; each profile must go through a series of stages: conducting the interview, transcribing the interview and selecting the quotation to publish, taking and adding the finishing touches on the photo, and then editing and publishing the profile. Now that we have been publishing these profiles for a while, we thought we would share a little bit about the process of creating our Writers of Mason profiles. 

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Teaching Writing

Preparing for Writing After College: The Archives of Workplace Writing Experiences Project

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Throughout the course of the school year, faculty members at universities across the country assign a plethora of writing assignments. Whether for an English, Chemistry, or Art History class, professors understand the importance of teaching college students how to write well, not only for the sake of the students’ academic career, but also for their professional careers as well. Upon graduation, however, many students are finding themselves unprepared to write for their new jobs, which means they might not be successfully transferring what they have learned about writing in college to the workplace. This lack of transfer presents a real challenge for faculty members, who find themselves asking: how do we better prepare students for writing in the workplace? Part of the solution, according to Professors Brian Fitzpatrick of George Mason University and Jessica McCaughey of George Washington University, is for faculty and students to better understand the expectations of writers in the workplace, so the two researchers teamed up to explore the numerous types of writing professionals produce in the workplace.

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Evaluating Writing Faculty Writing Graduate Students

Tell Your Writing Story

Join Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program on Friday, October 20th to celebrate the National Day on Writing. Tell your writing story using #whyIwrite #whatIwrite #whereIwrite #whenIwrite #howIwrite to join in the nationwide celebration of writing in our everyday lives.

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Evaluating Writing Faculty Writing Graduate Students

Celebrate the National Day on Writing!

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Friday, October 20th is the National Day on Writing!

The National Day on Writing celebrates the role of writing in our everyday lives. Whether it’s academic papers, email, texts, tweets, or graphic novels, we all write.

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Reviews

An Update on The Writers of Mason Project: By the Numbers

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Since our first interview in February of 2017, we’ve been very busy with the Writers of Mason project. To date, we have interviewed 42 writers, transcribed each of those interviews, and taken 189 profile pictures. We have met and spoken with writers across campus, talking writing in all its messy and awesome glory, with faculty, staff, and students. To date, we have talked with writers from: Fenwick and Johnson Center Libraries, the Students as Scholars/Office of Student Creative Activities and Research offices, Stearns Center, English, Anthropology, B-School, Game Design, Philosophy, Physics, Education, and Mason Korea.

Check in each week as the profiles on our site update.