Why Writing Centers Work: Address Delivered at the South Central Writing Centers Association Conference, 13 February 2015

My title contains the first of many generalizations I will issue. I forewarn you that I will be painting with a very broad brush, more like a road roller than a paint roller. That said, I do believe that writing centers do work for the most part, and I take as primary evidence their popularity among those who come to writing centers and the enthusiasm among those who work in writing centers. My experience is confirmed by many surveys that conclude people who visit writing centers are overwhelmingly satisfied. To say that writing centers are usually successful for all involved is not to say that they inevitably succeed; they don’t. The demise of the first writing center at the University of Texas at Austin is one counter example, a center brought down by a lack of staff, low visibility, a miniscule budget, and, decisively, by a lack of administrative support. You know the story. Nonetheless, I hope you grant my premise—that while writing centers are not epiphytes, living only on what they can draw from the air, they still can blossom on the thinnest of soils on rocky cliffs.University Writing Cente

Identifying Editor Roles in Argumentative Writing from Student Revision Histories

We present a method for identifying editor roles from students' revision behaviors during argumentative writing. We first develop a method for applying a topic modeling algorithm to identify a set of editor roles from a vocabulary capturing three aspects of student revision behaviors: operation, purpose, and position. We validate the identified roles by showing that modeling the editor roles that students take when revising a paper not only accounts for the variance in revision purposes in our data, but also relates to writing improvement

The composing processes of three Southeast Asian writers at the post-secondary level: An exploratory study

The purpose of this study was to explore the writing processes of Southeast Asian students with different educational backgrounds. The secondary pur-pose was to determine if the methodology used was valid and reliable. Stu-dents were given an article to read and then asked to write their opinion about the topic. Students were videotaped as they wrote, with the camera focused specifically on the movement of their pen on paper. They were then interviewed about their writing process and about what they had been think-ing during selected pause times, which had been captured on videotape and were played back to stimulate recall of the students ’ thought processes. Their responses were transcribed and then categorized according to what aspect of their writing they had been attending to during their pauses as well as what strategies they used to help generate a solution to a perceived problem in their writing (Cumming, 1989). The students differed in their degree of metacognitive awareness, their ability to integrate information from the read-ing into their writing, the amount of attention paid to different aspects o

Literacy After the Revolution

Englis