Welcome to the English Department Writing Program!
My role as director means I have the unique privilege of working with hundreds of talented instructors and thousands of talented students from across the university. It also means I get to work with an excellent EDWP staff: Assistant Director Nick Harp, award-winning staff members Denise Looker and Lisa Curtis, Lecturer Mentor Tricia Khleif, and Graduate Student Mentors Andrew Moos and Ruth Li. Individually and collectively, we work to support writing instructors and students and uphold our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice through a research-driven Program dedicated to best practices in instruction and assessment.
Our writing courses are designed to help students learn how to write effectively for academic and other audiences, and to recognize ways that writers use language to do so. Especially in our early undergraduate writing courses, students practice analyzing and using different writing strategies in their own and others’ writing, so that no matter their course of study, they are able to recognize how writers navigate different writing expectations.
Because writers learn so much from grappling with others’ written ideas as well as their own, peer review and self-reflection are central components of our courses. We keep our class sizes small—our first-year courses have a maximum of eighteen students—to enable students to work closely with each other and their instructors in a community of writers.
Please feel free to contact me or the Associate Director directly if you have any concerns, questions, or feedback about the Writing Program.
Regards,
Laura Aull, Director, English Department Writing Program
