If you’ve worked in higher education long enough, you’ll hear the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion—often abbreviated to DEI—thrown around a lot. Intentionally designing or tweaking writing center policies and services can make these abstract concepts tangible in ways that matter to students.

Many doctoral students interpret their struggles with revision, editorial choice, and unfamiliar conventions to mean they are “bad writers.” As a doctoral student, you understand that writing is a process, but you are just now discovering how long that process can take. You need a new baseline for your writing experiences. Hearing about others’ experiences can help create that new baseline.

Do you ever wonder where your hymnal comes from? That was the question that started my research on the Khristiya Bhajan in the first place.

As a music major, you’ve practiced for months for your recital. And then you find out, in addition to completing all the logistical details of putting together a concert, you have to write something about the music you’ll be performing. This blog posts walks you through genre conventions for program notes.

As an English major, I saw myself as a “good writer.” Then, I took a science class. As my experience demonstrates, students who are self-proclaimed “bad writers” are often still learning what is important to a discipline and how that discipline expresses those values in writing.

Finding a balance between talking about other people’s work and your own analysis in an essay can be hard. You want to demonstrate that you’ve done the research necessary to support your points while avoiding accusations of plagiarism. What balance should you strike?Here are four questions to ask yourself to determine whether or not you need more citations—or if you have too many.

Many doctoral students know how to navigate their discipline’s style guide, but they do not always know that they are required to follow their university’s style guide or their program’s dissertation style guide as well. This blog both explains how a discipline’s style guide works with a dissertation style guide and outlines some of the advice I’ve given to doctoral students in the writing center for using these two guides together.

Do you need to quote song lyrics or cite musical sources in APA, but are not sure how to do it? Read this blog post for principles to guide your documentation.

Do you need to quote song lyrics or cite musical sources in CMOS, but are not sure how to do it? Read this blog post for principles to guide your documentation.

The “royal we,” excessive first-person point of view, and rhetorical questions are acceptable in popular writing but not appropriate for academic writing. Let me show you why.

Finding a balance between talking about other people’s work and your own analysis in an essay can be hard. You want to demonstrate that you’ve done the research necessary to support your points but avoid accusations of plagiarism. What balance should you strike? Here are four questions to ask yourself to determine whether or not you need more citations—or if you have too many.

We have talked about why literature reviews are important to the academic endeavor, looked at what components a literature review has, and discussed how to determine its intellectual quality. Now that we understand literature reviews as a genre, we can get practical: how do we write a literature review?