UA News

The Writing Skills Improvement Program has been helping members of the campus community hone their writing skills for 30 years.

As those first essay assignments of the spring semester start rolling in, instructors at the University of Arizona are reminded that the Writing Skills Improvement Program can help their students hone their writing abilities.

The program offers themed workshops throughout the semester, as well as one-on-one tutoring services to help students brush up on their technique.

University employees also can take advantage of the program's free services, whether they are looking to improve their work-related writing skills, need help authoring a grant application or are taking classes for the first time in years and find that they're rusty in the essay-writing department.

A presence on campus for 30 years, the program aids approximately 2,000 people annually, said Donna Rabuck, assistant director of the Writing Skills Improvement Program, or WSIP. It's estimated that since the program's inception in 1980, it has aided more than 20,000 students individually and more than 40,000 students in group workshops.

Unlike the UA's Writing Center, which provides the option of peer tutoring for students, the WSIP only employs teachers and professional writers with master's degrees or doctorates in English or English as a second language.  

"We are the professional writing source for students and for faculty and for staff," said Rabuck, one of the program's four instructional specialists and professional tutors.

With offices located in two converted old houses on Helen Street, the WSIP offers a variety of workshops on campus in the Modern Languages and Education buildings. They include weekly writing workshops geared toward freshmen and sophomores, upper-division writing workshops to help with more advanced writing, and international writers workshops for individuals who aren't as accustomed to writing in English.

But it's the one-on-one tutoring that many instructors, in all subject areas, turn to when they have students struggling with their writing. "If they can send them to us it takes a big burden off of them," Rabuck said.

English professor Roger Dahood, who started at the UA in 1970, has referred several students to the WSIP.

Dahood, who has taught a variety of literature classes and is now teaching courses on Chaucer, said he simply doesn't have the time to spend with students on basic writing skills.

"I have other priorities in the subject-oriented classes," he said. "There's not a lot of time to teach them what a subject or a verb or a noun is. I can't do that and teach what I'm supposed to teach in my classes."

Dahood said the WSIP is a helpful resource for students who don't qualify for special assistance from entities like the Disability Resource Center or the S.A.L.T. Center, which work specifically with students who have learning and attention challenges, or programs geared toward specific student populations, such as student-athletes.

"I don't want people leaving the U of A with B.A.'s who don't know how to write sentences or write paragraphs," he said.

Students who get tutoring from the WSIP are assigned a tutor and can work with that person as often or as little as they want, whether they need assistance with a current assignment or wish to go over graded papers to better understand how they can improve.

Leslie Dupont, an adjunct English instructor who teaches freshman composition and business writing for juniors, said the program has helped her students overcome common writing mistakes like wordiness, redundancy and basic punctuation errors, helping boost their in-class performance by one to two letter grades on average.

"My miracle child, quite a few years ago, earned a D on her first paper and an A for the semester" after taking advantage of the program's tutoring services, she said.

When the school year ends, Dupont is one of three faculty members who work with the WSIP summer programs, which include the Graduate Writing Institute for graduate students interested in improving their writing and the Summer Institute for High School Writers and Teachers, an outreach program for a limited number of high school students and teachers.

In addition to tutoring, workshops and summer programs, the WSIP also offers to give lectures on special writing topics in campus departments and offices by request, Rabuck said.  For more information, contact Rabuck at 621-5849.

A complete list of the program's services and a calendar of workshops is available on WSIP Web site.