Representatives from NDSU’s Center for Writers will present a panel at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication scheduled for March 13-16, 2013, in Las Vegas. The Center’s assistant director, Enrico Sassi, and English graduate students MK Laughlin and Matt Warner will present “A Writing Center Targets Writing in the STEM Disciplines.”
Warner will discuss a project that placed a writing center consultant in the course ENGL 324 – Writing in the Sciences to lead small-group workshops to foster student learning of course material. Laughlin will share results of a field study she conducted last spring in the Center for Writers, where she investigated how to best prepare graduate writing consultants from the humanities so they can provide effective writing assistance to graduate students in the sciences.
Sassi will present results of a Disciplinary Writing Consultant pilot launched during September in the College of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Natural Resources. The Disciplinary Writing Consultant responds to a need at NDSU to develop graduate writing in the disciplines by hiring writers from within the disciplines and training them as writing consultants. These disciplinary consultants work individually with graduate students on writing their disquisitions and papers for publication. They also will support faculty in writing grant applications.
The Conference on College Composition and Communication is “the world’s largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition.” Its acceptance of presentations is highly competitive, Sassi noted.
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.