Why Support the University Writing Program?
Each donation made to the UWP supports ALL student, staff, and faculty writers across every discipline at ECU, by providing support from the individual level through consultations that provide tailored support to each writers’ needs, resources to support every step of the writing process, workshops designed to improve writing and the teaching of writing in every discipline ECU serves, and much more.
How do we do this?
The UWP is the umbrella that houses both the University Writing Center, created to support student writers in the classroom and out, and Writing Across the Curriculum, created to support faculty and staff as writers and teachers of writing. Follow along as we take a deep dive into how each program serves the ECU community, and what impact your gift will have on our ability to serve.
The University Writing Center
Our Mission
The University Writing Center is a place for writers to share and discuss their projects at any stage of the writing process with our passionate writing consultants. We believe in providing individualized, tailored support for each UWC visitor; focusing not on remedial services, but on supporting Pirates on their journey to become better writers, no matter their background or discipline.
Our Impact
Supported 4,060+ writers in individual sessions.
Supported 1100+ writers through events and presentations.
Our Initiatives
Write On The Lawn was our first-ever on campus meet-and-greet, offering an inviting space to answer questions about the University Writing Center, sign students up for appointments, and offering drop-in 15-minute mini-sessions for specific writing questions and concerns.
The event was a great success, with 40 drop-in consultations and connections made with over 200 students. The funds that are donated to the University Writing Program support our future outreach events.
Graduate Writing Support
- GradWAG is our new graduate Writing Accountability Group (WAG) where students meet once a week to write, set goals, and achieve them by establishing productive writing habits, sharing with others, and holding one another accountable.
- Jump Starting the Dissertation is an 8-week program that helps PhD Candidates write Chapters 1 and 2 of their dissertation and begin to draft Chapter 3.
- Almost Ph(inishe)D comes next as an 8-week program that helps PhD Candidates write Chapters 4 and 5 of their dissertation and begin to revise their dissertation for defense.
- Dissertation Boot Camp is designed to give students 3-4 hours of focused writing time per day. Dissertation Boot Camp creates a quiet, supportive location that will help students make progress on their dissertations.
The UWC also seeks to enrich our professional and student staff through professional development designed to enrich and inform consultants on topics that not only empower them as consultants, but as writers themselves.
Beyond the physical, the UWC also curates guides for every step of the writing process, created by our student writing consultants for our student writers.
We are committed to serving not only ECU, but the Pitt County community and Eastern North Carolina (ENC) with our Community Writing Center, which provides supports to writers of all ages with things like resume review, cover letters, and college applications, and more. Donations to the University Writing Program directly impact our ability to extend our network of support beyond ECU to ENC writers.
Writing Across the Curriculum
Our Mission
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is a program that sits at the heart of supporting students, faculty, and staff through innovating the way we think about and teach as writing instructors. While WAC began across the US in the 1970s and 1980s as a grassroots educational reform project, the goals of WAC remain central to our understanding and application of writing at ECU.
WAC is centered on three core assertions:
- Writing is both an art and a skill that requires ongoing practice; no one ever finishes learning how to write.
- Writing is a method of learning, not merely a method to report on learning; as we compose and revise, we make connections, we synthesize ideas, and we extrapolate from them. Writing (and revising) is a practice of continually thinking on paper.
- Writing is essential to a university education; all disciplines use writing to generate and distribute knowledge. Therefore, the teaching of writing is the responsibility of all faculty across the university.
At ECU, our WAC program encourages faculty engage with students in Writing Intensive courses through three interconnected approaches that increase the use and value of writing for students: writing to learn, writing to engage, and writing in the disciplines.
Our Initiatives
Each semester, we offer a series of online and face-to-face WAC workshops to help you think through some of the major challenges that come with teaching writing, as well as multiple academies and focus groups.
WAC Academies
The WAC Academy is a 6-week, face-to-face workshop in which faculty explore three key questions: What is good writing? What is effective writing instruction? And who says so?
This professional development provides a unique opportunity for instructors to explore their own writing processes, study effective teaching and writing strategies, and connect with peers across disciplines.
The Advanced WAC Academy is designed provide faculty with the unique opportunity to re-evaluate their course curriculum of writing intensive courses, while at the same time creating useful guides and supplemental materials for other faculty in the future. Faculty are also awarded a stipend to further their ability to research and present in their specialized fields.
Critical Friends is a peer review protocol we use each semester to help grant writers get feedback on their writing.This small group, online feedback sessions are open to writers at any point in their writing process.Critical Friends is a peer review protocol aiming to support the development of ideas and writing strategies to assure writing is clear and persuasive.
Additional Faculty Support
- Our WAC-facilitated Writing Accountability Groups (WAGs) serve across disciplines on campus each semester. These groups function as a focused writing space for staff and faculty, creating a unique space of camaraderie and focus for faculty and staff to focus.
- Faculty Writing Retreat Each spring, WAC offers faculty and staff at ECU the opportunity to write in unique, relaxing spaces designed to support their writing. Our Faculty Writing Retreat offers faculty the unique opportunity to focus while resting to the sounds of the ocean waves off the NC coast.
- Book Groups WAC hand selects exciting new books for a cross-disciplinary Book Group series every Fall and Spring semester. Staff and faculty are able to read about teaching and writing with other faculty across the disciplines to learn and discuss new methods, struggles and successes, of teaching writing.
Beyond all of these things, WAC is the critical hub for evaluating and re-evaluating our efficacy as a college on writing and teaching writing, through the creation, maintenance, support, and evaluation of the University Writing Portfolio.
UWC
- Creates funding to support further initiatives that improve the education of writing across disciplines at ECU (Write on the Lawn, Graduate bootcamps.)
- Helps the UWC reach more students with funding for material outreach (giveaways, prizes, retreats, printed information, and more.)
- Supports our student consultants’ research dreams by sending them to present their research at writing conferences.
- Impacts the entire ENC community with your support that funds our Community Writing Center initiatives.
WAC
- Helps WAC provide support to faculty in their own fields of writing with stipends & unique opportunities to focus on their research (Writing Retreat, WAGs.)
- Helps WAC provide material support to faculty (printouts, pamphlets, worksheets, etc.)
- Your funds will help us continue to expand our writing & teaching support into digital mediums like podcasts, videos, and online workshops.