UW-Madison Writing Center

In this week’s Another Word blog post, “On Being Cringe: Hospitable Tutoring and Caring Too Much,” Izzy Alexander (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) acknowledges that “Writing is embarrassing work.” As a first-year writing consultant, Alexander has landed on a persona of being the cringiest person in the room, viewing tutoring as hospitality work and cringe as a method to alleviate the embarrassment that accompanies writing. “But by exposing that we as writing consultants care deeply about the tutoring situation—by being a bit cringeworthy—,” she writes, “we might achieve our goal of making students feel at home in their writing.” Read more here: https://go.wisc.edu/13dvgn.

Today, in conjunction with the UW–Madison Graduate School, we're celebrating our 2026 Grant Writing Camp participants on a thoughtful and productive camp. Thank you to our panelists from across the university and throughout the Madison community for sharing their expertise!

Grant Writing Camp provides selected graduate student participants with a structured introduction to the nuts-and-bolts of writing funding proposals to support a wide range of humanities and social sciences work, from research travel and dissertation writing to public humanities projects.

Looking for writing accountability this summer? Join our drop-in Summer Writing Space. Tuesdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. through July 21! Check in at The Writing Center, room 6171 Helen C. White Hall.

https://writing.wisc.edu/writinggroups/

Happy Summer, Badgers! Writing Center appointments are available! Make an appointment today: https://writing.wisc.edu/make-a-writing-appointment/

Drawing on personal experience with cancer survivorship and writing center practice, Maggie Hart’s blog post for Another Word reframes writing centers as spaces of recovery and argues that writing and recovery are nonlinear, relational processes shaped by care, flexibility, and “crip time.” Through concepts like access intimacy and ethics of care, Hart positions writing centers as places where writers can rebuild confidence, voice, and belonging within academic life. Read more here: https://go.wisc.edu/3q8lz

Finals are coming! Join us this Sunday evening for late night Writing Center hours at College Library. Make an appointment here: https://writing.wisc.edu/make-a-writing-appointment/

In their blog post "How to Discuss GenAI in Writing Consultations,” Brady Hall and Emma Bapst (Miami University of Ohio) presents questions for writing consultants to reflect on their experiences discussing GenAI, introduces frameworks to aid in these discussions, and relays some consultant experiences from a 2026 writing center conference. "We hope this will help consultants feel better prepared to address GenAI use in consultations,” they write, especially in "a manner that supports effective, ethical, and developmentally appropriate use."

Read more on Another Word: https://go.wisc.edu/03j5wv.

This week’s Another Word blog post posits that the “low-stakes” nature of writing center work is not guaranteed; it heavily depends on the broader sociopolitical contexts within which we operate. In the U.S., these contexts are increasingly shaped by heightened immigration enforcement, racialized surveillance, and growing anxieties surrounding documentation and visibility. Drawing on writing center scholarship alongside public resources developed by immigrant advocacy and higher education organizations, this post offers several considerations for writing center tutors and administrators navigating the present moment. https://go.wisc.edu/1xoj06

Are you working on a cover letter for a summer internship application? Are you finishing a draft of a paper for a class? Do you need some help brainstorming for an upcoming final project? We have appointments available before spring break!

https://writing.wisc.edu/make-a-writing-appointment/