Bronwyn T. Williams, Director

In some ways, this semester is starting like many others at the University Writing Center. We gathered as a staff for the first time at our Orientation last week and started to get to know each other. We have a great new group of consultants, as well as new faces as Associate and Assistant Directors.

With the start of classes this week we’ve been busy meeting with students and doing presentations about the Writing Center for classes and student organizations. If you want to make an appointment, we are open for business and happy to meet with you. In the year to come we will also continue with the programs we have established in recent years such as our Dissertation Writing Retreats, Junior Faculty Writing Groups, and workshops about Graduate Student Writing concerns. There is a great deal of anticipation about the year ahead. The photo of this year’s staff is in the familiar setting in front of the windows on the Third Floor of Ekstrom Library. So, yes, in some ways this year feels like many others.

And yet, two floors below us, is the evidence how much is about to change. On the first floor of the Library the construction continues on the new space for the University Writing Center. At the moment it’s still a work in progress, but in the skeleton of wall frames and electrical wires you can see our new space taking shape. Sometime, then, near the beginning of October, we’ll be moving into our brand new space.

What’s exciting about the new space (besides getting new furniture), is that we will be much easier to find, as well as have more space in which to meet with students. What’s more, we’ll have digital consulting rooms that will make it easier for us to help writers with multimodal projects and to do online video chat appointments with distance education students. Our new location will also allow us to collaborate more easily with reference librarians, REACH, and the Digital Media Suite.

We also want to use the move to the first floor as an opportunity to do

more to make the University Writing Center a place where we develop and sustain a culture of writing on campus. So keep an eye out for announcements of other kinds of programming about writing to come in the year ahead. We’ll keep blogging about the changes and new programs in the year ahead and will be posting about it on our Twitter and Facebook pages as well.

We wish everyone a successful semester and we hope people will let us help them make their writing as effective, engaging, and creative as possible.

• Space