Copy and paste the following language into your syllabus:

The Center for Excellence in Writing (CEW) is available to help you with your essays through informal one-to-one meetings with a friendly writing consultant. The CEW offers in person appointments in 17 Norton and virtual appointments throughout the week including evenings and Sundays. We can help you to work through any obstacle you are encountering in the writing process including planning, brainstorming, revising and final editing. Go to buffalo.edu/writing to make an appointment through UB's Navigate scheduling system. Should you have any difficulty, email writing@buffalo.edu or drop in to 17 Norton. 

Are you interested in having someone from the CEW visit your class and let students know how the CEW can help them with your class assignments? Click here to learn more and request a visit!

We devote the majority of our resources to one-to-one consultations.  Our consultants shape their work in each session based upon the unique goals and needs of the writer and the particulars of their writing situation. In other words, we are writer-centered. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all approaches. When your student visits us, they will get 45 minutes of our consultant’s time, a listening ear, a chance to talk through their ideas and dilemmas, and thoughtful feedback on their writing.

• Talking out composing decisions is highly developmental.  Students gain new insight into the writing process through discussion with a more experienced peer and learn rhetorical thinking through conversation about the topics about which they are writing, Developing a robust writing process and rhetorical thinking as a habit of mind are elements of learning that tend to successfully transfer from context to context..
• Students receive a level of individualized instruction that is difficult to achieve in the classroom. Consultants note the patterns in the student's own writing and give them instruction and practice that can create significant improvement in their writing, especially through regular visits.  
• In increasingly technologically mediated times, the CEW offers human understanding, time (we give your student 45 minutes!), and community.  Frequent visitors make valuable connections and get "whole person" support that can be vital in stressful times.  

Writing ability is developed through active participation in communication situations and writing processes. Use of the writing center is an increased form of participation. Therefore, our users tend to be among the most hard-working and engaged writers on campus.  Many make regular, even weekly, use of writing support. Many users are working on high stakes projects like personal statements and other application materials. Around 30 percent of our users are graduate students. More than half of our users are multilingual. Faculty and staff are welcome to use our service as well, and our consultants regularly make appointments with each other to “talk out” their writing dilemmas. 

Our staff is comprised of a Director, an Associate Director, a Graduate Assistant, and between 30-40 writing consultants. Our writing consultants are all students.  Our undergraduate consultants have generally been recommended by faculty members and have taken a semester-length course in Writing Center Theory and Practice as a prerequisite to employment. Our MA and PhD level consultants are from a variety of disciplines, and many of them teach writing in the University’s Academic and Professional Writing Program.  Our consultants are not content experts, but they provide thoughtful feedback on both rhetorical and mechanical levels. We aim for ten hours of professional development each semester.

While writing consultations are usually most effective when inititated by students at an authentic point of need, there are some good reasons for requiring or incentivizing writing consultations:

• the process introduces students to a resource that will be there for them throughout their academic journey.
• students who are required or incentivised to visit a writing center are more likely to return on their own.

Because some students, when visiting a writing center to meet a requirement or attain extra credit, can often show up without a goal and sometimes lacking motivation for the visit, we recommend that you schedule a 10-15 minute classroom visit prior to sending your class so that we can provide a little orientation to the experience.  We have found that this helps significantly.  When scheduling the classroom visit, please also let us know if you will be requiring or incentivizing your students to attend, as well as how many students you are sending. Feel free to provide your assignment sheet and we will prepare our staff to support the student with the assignment. 

You can email writing@buffalo.edu or fill our our classroom visit form to make arrangements.  

1. Including information about us in your syllabus: See our syllabus insert above.
   
2. Scheduling a quick class visit.  Having one of our friendly consultants pop in to your class can do wonders for giving the students a sense of the positive ethos of our center, what to expect, and how to connect.  10 minutes should do the trick!  
3. Periodically reminding students about the availability of writing support, and framing writing center use as a habit of hardworking, engaged students. 
4. Directing students to support materials on our website. 

Working on extended projects such as theses or dissertations can be an isolating experience in which many of us begin to lose momentum or get bumped off course.  Our writing retreats, weekly writing groups, and discussion groups are designed to help graduate writers manage both the writing and non-writing parts of graduate work. These contexts also provide space for discussion of the "soft skills" or project management elements of the dissertation journey. Interested graduate students should email writing@buffalo.edu to register for our graduate student list serve and check our website for upcoming offerings.

To promote empowering ideas about getting through the writing process, keep an eye out for the “Write Through: Dissertation Inspiration” article series which is distributed through The Graduate School and is also accessible through our website. 

We love working with international and multilingual students. UB is fortunate to have students from all over the globe studying with us and those doing university work in a second (or even third!) language are really taking on a challenge!  To serve multilingual students, we provide our consultants with a good deal of professional development informed by TESOL and translingualism. We tend to do more sentence-level work with multilingual students, helping them to reformulate confusing sentences and find the words that most accurately convey their intended meanings.  

International graduate students often work intensively with consultants over a long period of time, forming close and mutually beneficial intellectual partnerships. The progress they make regularly astounds us.  In short, do not hesitate to direct your international/multilingual students our way!

On Friday afternoons, we host the Oral Communication Lab to faciliate cross cultural dialogue and allow students to practice professionalizing skills such as networking, presentations, interviewing, talking about their research, cross cultural dialogue, pronunciation, and more! 

17 Norton.   Our remote consultations are held via Zoom.  

Each student is allowed three 45 minute sessions per week and many use these regularly!  If a student needs additional assistance during an intensive period of writing, we usually are able to make an exception to provide more support.  

We provide both in-person and remote synchronous consultations, and we are open Monday - Friday and Sundays including evening hours. 

Students can schedule a remote or in person appointment through the Navigate platform under "writing assistance" or drop into 17 Norton for help scheduling or to access a walk-in appointment. . 

Absolutely!  We want to create closer connections with classroom writing instruction and writing center support.  We can work together in a variety of ways:

1.  Share your writing assignments with us.  We will share your assignment sheet, keep it on file for reference, and discuss it with our writing consultants to maximize our readiness to support your students.  We can get together to discuss it, and you can explain to us the purpose of the assignment, what you hope the students will get out of it, and any form of support that you would particularly like your students to have. 
   
2. If you like, we can give you feedback, from our perspective, on how your students are experiencing your writing assignments -- confusions they have, the most significant challenges, the development we are seeing, and the student’s disposition toward the assignment. 
   
3. Share your feedback with us.  We are always seeking to improve.  While we collect surveys from writers about their experience, faculty have a point of view that can also help us understand and meet the needs of students in their courses.
   

No.  We are not a proofreading service.  However, if the student indicates that they are on the final proofreading stage and that improving mechanical stability of their draft is a goal, we work with students on proofreading processes and identifying patterns of error or stylistic problems in their writing.  In other words, our practice is pedagogical. 

No!  Students can make an appointment at any stage in their writing process.  Many students come in with their assignment sheet and the consultant can help them to interpret it, formulate an effective topic, brainstorm, and even do preliminary research.  Sometimes students run out of steam or get stuck in the middle of a draft and come in to work on development.  And of course students are welcome to come in for a final lookover before they turn the paper in to you.

You may not.  Particularly engaged students frequently integrate a writing center visit into their writing process.  Students are of course free to self-report a visit to the writing center.  If for some reason you need verification, with the student’s permission we can send you a session summary or a verification of their visit.  Just email writing@buffalo.edu to request.  We always welcome conversations with faculty about how best to support students, so do not hesitate to reach out.

No. Writing Center staff members will not discuss  grades or make evaluative comments about assignments or papers during appointments.

The writing center is a resource, but students are still in charge of their own revision decisions. You never know what state the paper was in when the student visited the center. Many times students come in early in their drafting phase and the writing consultant never even gets to see the final draft.  (Though they can always make multiple appointments.) 

First, the writing center is not a proofreading service. Second, if the writer engaged in revision after the visit (which is great), then they have likely created new sentences which are vulnerable to error. As students’ expression of ideas grows more complex, their sentences can get more wobbly.  It’s a sign of growth! 

Absolutely!  Many students choose to be regular users of writing center support.  They can reserve up to three appointments per week, greatly accelerating their writing development. They can schedule regular appointments, and we’d love to work with them on their writing skills and process. Ideally, students working on overall writing improvement or a large writing project should work with a consultant once a week.