The end of September is near, so you know what that means! The Michigan Writing Center Association (MiWCA) will be having its 23rd Annual ideas Exchange Conference soon! We know that you are just as excited as we are, so we have compiled a quick list of ways to prepare for the festivities!
Posts Categorized: Quick Tips
Creating Ownership in Your Writing
I am always reading. By reading, I don’t mean that I’m simply reading my favorite Kurt Vonnegut book or articles about the Detroit Lions. I’m reading advertisements, texts messages, quotes posted inside of high school classrooms, and 140 character tweets. These readings may seem diverse and disconnected, but they all have a common factor. They
Advisory Warning: Creative Writing
This semester, I did something crazy: I signed up for a creative writing class, on purpose. The reason this is insane is because while I do some creative writing, I, like many writers, do not want to share it. My creative writing is personal more often than not and it can be tough to
Creative Writing and Writer’s Block
When it comes to creative writing all students have trouble starting off at some point or another. Something to help that is to think of stories that they like and to have spin-offs of what they may have wanted to happen. You can do this for Netflix shows, movies, books or pretty much anything else.
Wit and Wisdom Celebrating a Semester’s End
When a semester begins and academic energy runs high, we in the writing center sign up to lend something insightful to our humble blog archives. Invariably, I sign up for a late-semester date anticipating by then I’ll have something so original—nay, profound—splashing in the mental bucket, it will forever alter the lives of those who
Know Thy Self: altering your writing process so you can get the job done
By the time I got to my senior year in college, I was so sick of learning about the writing process. Pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading. All right, all right, I get it. Do we really need to go over this again? One thing that we have to pick up from all this repetition is
Never Wrong: Or How to Listen to Your Reader
A few semesters ago I took a poetry writing class. For one poem, I was trying something different with my line lengths and rhythm. The teacher commented on the first draft that the rhythm was not working, and that I should try to break the lines up more. Breaking the lines up more was exactly
Using Writing Assignments to Your Benefit
Sometimes, there’s no way around it. You have to write a summary or analysis of a reading handed to you by your professor. Yep. Gotta write it. Go on. Just do it and think about how you are sharpening your skills. Sometimes though, assignments give you some choice. Assignments can be broad prompts that make
An Apology (or two)
As I sit here marveling at my latest compositional masterpiece, I find myself filled with self-doubt. Does the essay fulfill the requirements of the task assigned to me? If it does not, I humbly apologize. Speaking of apologies, this apology reminds me of several other actions in my life for which I probably
Stepping Away and the 3AM Wake-Up Call
Writing is a stop-and-start process for me. Yeah, groundbreaking stuff here folks. This is true for most writers I talk to, but I’ve found my own stops-and-starts can be identified by category, or conspirator. I’ll explain. Some are interruptions. I’m a husband and father of three, so even if I’m barricaded in my office with