Writing Centre Supports Students Remotely
As faculty at Dalhousie University continue to move to remote teaching, they may be wondering whether their students will be able to access any academic support for their assignments. The Writing Centre will continue its work supporting all undergraduate and graduate students as they complete assignments, papers, reports, posters, presentations, theses, or dissertations. The Centre staff have worked online with distance education students and graduate students for 15 years with great success (as defined as improved grades and an increase in writing confidence). They have a team of faculty, staff, and senior tutors ready to work with students so that, while they’re practicing social distancing, they can continue to successfully complete their course assignments.
How It Works
The most common form of remote writing support happens when students provide drafts of papers via email. The students indicate the deadline dates and provide the instructions for the assignment. The Writing Centre staff typically completes the review in 24-48 hours, depending on volume of submissions. Reviewers read through the submission, provide comments and pose questions to help guide students toward clear writing and disciplinary expectations. For example, they might recognize that the thesis statement needs work; they would offer guidance and, if appropriate, guide the student to online resources that will offer explanation. There might be passages that seem out of place or require better paraphrasing. Again, the Centre staff would alert students to the passages and offer guidance. The assignments are then returned, the students read the papers and comments, and they revise.
Online Consultations
The Writing Centre will also offer video chats or phone calls with students about their writing either before the work is started or after the review is done so that comments and questions are understood. In the end, the students will produce a better paper. In the long run, we know that writers develop through practice, directed feedback, and revision.
Staff at The Writing Centre will review or discuss papers at any point in their creation. For example, students might not entirely understand expectations for papers. That can happen in first year and it can happen in graduate school. Often, the difficulty is that the required document (e.g., a literature review) has not been written before. Students benefit from a short back-and-forth discussion of the assignment leading to an outline. That discussion, too, can be done online.
Faculty Considerations
When faculty communicate their expectations for a writing assignment, they can consider the following factors:
What’s the main purpose of the writing assignment? Do you want them to describe or analyze?
Do you expect students to use secondary or only primary sources of information?
Have you named the genre (e.g., an annotated bibliography), so that students can obtain online information about the kind of document required?
What length is the assignment in word counts or page counts?
Have you described how many and what types of sources the students should consult? Can they use grey literature? Do they know how to evaluate sources of information? (There are excellent LibGuides that help students learn about information credibility.)
Do you expect students to follow a specific style guide and citation format? What version of that guide do you use?
Could a rubric or detailed instructions communicate expectations to the students?
Other virtual writing resources for students include the Writing Centre Resource Guide, individual departmental LibGuides, and the Purdue Online Writing Lab.