About CWE

Mission

The mission of the Center for Writing Excellence (CWE) at Baylor University is to collaborate with students from any discipline to develop writing and rhetorical knowledge and skills that aid them in becoming effective, confident, and ethical communicators. We also provide support for faculty who teach writing in their own discipline or who want to add more writing to their courses.

Who We Are

The Center for Writing Excellence is a department in the College of Arts and Sciences that includes a Division of Undergraduate Writing and a Division of Graduate Writing. We are staffed by both undergraduate and graduate consultants who act as an audience for writing in progress. We are also staffed by a managing director, director of Graduate Writing, director of Undergraduate Writing, assistant director of Undergraduate Writing, and staff coordinator who are trained in rhetoric and writing studies. Our front desk is occupied by our undergraduate office assistants. 

When We're Open

We are open during the Fall, Spring, and Summer semesters. We are closed during break periods before each semester begins (August, January, and May). During Summer sessions, we operate with reduced hours and fewer appointment slots available. 

Beliefs

The CWE believes that:

• Writing is an indispensable part of the intellectual life of the university, both as a means of communication and as a tool for learning.
• Learning to write is a lifelong process and that all writers—no matter their skill level or academic, linguistic, and cultural background—benefit from discussing their work with thoughtful readers.
• Writing is a skill that can be developed and strengthened over time.
• Writing is a process of revision.
• Writing and learning are social processes. All of us are learners and teachers expected to learn and change as we interact with differences in perspectives and experiences.
• The individual writer’s goals, experiences, and voice should be central to all writing instruction.
• The writers who come to see us are hard-working writers who want to learn and grow as writers, thinkers, and humans.

Goals and Practices

In order to achieve our mission, we:

• Offer one-on-one and group consultations with undergraduate and graduate peer writing consultants. We tailor our consultations to meet the needs of each individual writer with whom we work.
• Assist writers with all aspects of the writing process, such as close reading, note taking, summarizing, understanding the assignment, using models, posing questions, organizing, developing arguments, working with sources, revising, outlining, editing, and proofreading.
• Collaborate with writers in supportive, nonjudgmental, and encouraging ways to facilitate discovery, pose meaningful questions, wrestle with problems, inspire confidence, and help them advocate for themselves within the larger university community.
• Help writers examine the expectations of particular genres and disciplines and empower them to question these expectations and make deliberate, informed choices in their writing.
• Maintain the high quality of our services by requiring consultants to undergo rigorous tutor education on a variety of writing-related topics, including the writing process, writing across the disciplines, genre, online tutoring, multilingual tutoring, and antiracism.
• Value difference and strive to enable writers to enter new discourse communities while preserving their own voices. We also promote racial and linguistic equity in order to serve all writers by valuing multilingualism.
• Provide faculty with support as they teach writing, develop assignment prompts, and evaluate and respond to student writing.  
• Offer classroom visits or on-site workshops on a variety of writing topics.

Services

The CWE seeks to implement this mission through one-to-one writing consultations—both in-person and online—that are designed to help writers with writing projects at all stages of the composition process. Our work includes help with the following:

• understanding assignment guidelines
• generating ideas (e.g., brainstorming, invention)
• content development
• organization
• research strategies and source selection and evaluation
• revision strategies
• citation and documentation
• sentence structure and technical errors
• page design
• connecting writers to external writing resources
• feedback on all kinds of print-based writing, including research papers, grant proposals, conference papers, book reviews, scientific reports, theses and dissertations, and application materials (personal statements, resumés, and cover letters), to name a few
• feedback on digital, visual, and multimodal compositions, including audio and video essays, posters, brochures, flyers, and websites

The CWE also endeavors to support and supplement the instruction of writing at Baylor and to encourage the practice and appreciation of good writing and thinking on the BU campus. As such, we design class presentations and conduct workshops on a variety of writing topics to meet specific needs of BU students, faculty, and individual courses. 

Ultimately, the CWE is a place for dialogue, for generative collaboration that brings writers and tutors into conversations that can, and do, change both participants and their writing.