Support for Dartmouth Classes

Writing Assistants (WAs) are RWIT Writing Center Tutors who partner with faculty to support students in a specific course. Under the directon of faculty, WAs enrich instruction by providing support during the drafting and revision of writing or communication projects. Depnding on faculty preferences, WAs may offer asynchronous written feedback, one-on-one meetings, or another kind of support for students. Unlike Teaching Assistants, WAs are not involved in grading. To learn more about the Writing Assistance Program or to request a WA for an upcoming course, visit our WA Program Pages.

Writing Assistants can make your assignments and learning goals more accessible to students; they can help students develop new ideas, critically assess their own work, and make more effective plans for accomplishing complex writing projects. 

Affiliated Tutors are RWIT Writing Center Tutors who partner with faculty teaching the Writing 5 course. Whereas Writing Assistants provide feedback or one-on-one meetings to students under the supervision of faculty teaching First Year Seminars or courses across the College, Affiliated Tutors provide a more limited kind of support for Writing 5 courses. They help students understand and use the Writing Center, and they help to educate the Writing Center staff about the specific goals of individual courses and assignments. If an Affiliated Tutor is assigned to your course, they will: 

• Visit Writing 5 classes or send a video greeting, recorded especially for your group, explaining RWIT's mission and offer encouragement and information about booking sessions.
• Study your syllabus and assignments so that they have a deeper understanding of the context of your class; offer to meet with you to briefly discuss those course elements. 
• Share notes on your assignments and course with the rest of our staff so that, should your students schedule sessions with other tutors, those tutors have easy access to information about your assignments and their objectives.
• Send your students a reminder later in term to encourage them to make appointments or to send requests for asynchronous feedback.

This partnership makes it more likely that your students will use our services, and helps our entire staff understand the educational environment you are building for your students. Empowered with that knowledge, tutors are better positioned to help your students understand your goals and work effectively. 

Requesting an Affiliated Tutor

To request an Affiliated Tutor for an upcoming Writing 5 course, complete this request form: Affiliated Tutor Request Form. 

We will do our best to fulfill every request we receive.

Through our Education and Outreach Committee, the RWIT Writing Center offers in-class workshops focused on foundational concepts in academic writing. Workshops are delivered by undergraduate RWIT Writing Center Tutors, and feature a mix of participatory presentation and hands-on exercises. Faculty may request these workshops for any undergraduate course. They are designed with first-year writing audiences in mind, but can be adapted slightly for other curricular settings. Without modification, each workshop takes approximately 45 minutes.

Presentation Descriptions

Crafting a Thesis: Our "Crafting a Thesis" workshop teaches students how to unpack complex assignments that, for example, pose multiple questions or ask the writer to make connections between seemingly disparate ideas. Our workshop identifies three primary pillars of thesis-writing — scope, significance, and stance — and gives students strategies for handling each via interactive discussion of sample prompts and theses. These strategies will help your students prepare to navigate different writing scenarios. This term, we include an option for your students to review their own theses at the end of the workshop.

Writing with Style and Clarity: Based on Joseph William's Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, our "Writing with Style and Clarity" workshop covers concision, nominalization, quote integration, flow, and passive vs. active voice. We will help your students identify stumbling blocks in their own writing, understand the problems they cause, and develop strategies to deal with them. This interactive workshop includes hands-on exercises that help students grasp these important concepts by finding and revising stylistic inefficiencies together. Your students will leave the workshop better equipped to revise their writing for style and clarity.

Custom Workshops: If you would like to develop a specific workshop not listed here - for example, a workshop focused on understanding the genre conventions of a particular assignment for a larger course - please contact us at rwit@Dartmouth.edu. 

Requesting a Workshop

Please Note: We ask that faculty are present in class during these presentations and that only one presentations be requested during a single class period. If you would like to have both presentations given in your class, you will need to submit the form more than once.

Request an in-class workshop via this form: RWIT Writing Center In-Class Workshop Request Form.

We will do our best to fulfill each request we receive, but staff availability may limit our capacity.

Dartmouth faculty can invite RWIT Writing Center tutors to visit their classes and deliver a brief (~5 minute) presentation to your students about our services. Tutors will explain what our Center does, help students understand the learning benefits of peer writing centers, and demonstrate how to make an appointment. We can help students manage complex projects, understand your assignments, develop ideas, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their compositions, and much more. 

Inviting a tutor to your class is a great way to de-stigmatize help seeking and to foster a culture of collaborative learning in your classroom. We know that students are more likely to make an appointment if their faculty member endorses the practice during class.  

Requesting an RWIT Writing Center Advertisement

Make a request for a class visit here: RWIT Writing Center in-Class Advertisement Request Form.

We will do our best to fulfill all requests, but may need to negotiate the timing, depending on our staff availability.