Vision, Mission, and Guiding Principles

Mission Statement

The Peer Writing Center provides a respectful space where undergraduate writers of all academic, cultural, and social backgrounds can express their ideas and arguments and receive feedback thoughtfully tailored to their needs from informed and open-minded peer consultants.

PWC Guiding Principles

Empathy in action

As peers, we understand each writer has individual challenges, gifts, and social identities. We strive to meet writers where they are and to work alongside them in the writing process.

Accessible and inclusive environment

We strive through our dispositions, words, and actions to support diverse writers to access our services and express their identities through writing.

Learning through dialogue

We believe that conversation between peers helps writers to engage more fully in their writing process, to develop their writerly identities, and to test and strengthen their arguments.

Developing voices

We strive to connect writers to their rhetorical contexts and modes of expression in meaningful ways that empower their individual voices.

Multiple uses of writing

We recognize that not all writing is academic: we support writers as they craft texts in various modes and media for a wide variety of audiences and purposes.

Academic Integrity

We work with students, faculty, and others in the academic community in respectful and ethical ways, never appropriating a writer’s work and actively helping writers to engage with other texts and writers in integrous ways.

Active community member

Individually and collectively, we strive to be active members of the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor communities. We reach out to these communities with opportunities to develop and celebrate writing and writers.