Tim Johnson, Director

Hello and a belated welcome back, everybody!

For months, I’ve been thinking about this week. The week after Labor Day. The laptops are charged, the handouts are printed, the coffee is brewed, the toner in the copy machine is…toning? We’re ready to go. All we need now…is you.

Yesterday, our full staff of consultants—all graduate students from the English Department—went live on the schedule. This blog post is an introduction and an invitation.

tl:dr version: We’re great, we’re free, we help anyone in the Card Community with just about anything related to writing. You should come to the Writing Center. Sign up for an appointment here.

Now, for the longer introduction.

The heart of what we do is one-on-one writing consultations at our location on the first floor of Ekstrom Library and online (in both live, face-to-face sessions or asynchronously).

 For those of you on the Health Sciences Campus, Jess Gottbrath—the Assistant Director of Graduate Writing—is also holding hours in Kornhauser library from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM.

Here’s the link for setting up an appointment at any of these locations: https://louisville.mywconline.com/

Some tips:
•	Appointments are 50-minutes long, but you don’t need to take all of that time. 
•	Help us help you. For best results, please leave detailed notes about what you would like  to work on when making the appointment (and for written-only online appointments, the more specific the request, the better). 
•	No appointment? No problem, we take walk ins. 
•	You can make multiple/regular appointments a full semester in advance. This is ideal for bigger projects.
•	There’s a waiting list if we fill up (and we do fill up particularly quickly during midterms/finals season, so consider working ahead or signing up early). 

Check us out on our website and on social media for information about events and workshops all year long: uoflwritingctr | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok | Linktree

What happens during a session?

We support writers in a lot of ways. During a Writing Center session, you and your consultant will spend some time chatting about how we can best help you. We don’t judge, we don’t assess or diagnose, we just try to help you to make progress toward your goals and support you during a busy semester. While we set to work on the immediate writing challenges you’re facing, we also hope to help you develop strategies and practices that will help you grow as a writer throughout your time at UofL. Here’s a few examples of what that might look like:

• Need a little help thinking through expectations for academic writing? We’re happy to have those bigger picture conversations and talk through strategies for meeting these expectations.
• Struggle with procrastination? Let us work as a coach and accountability site to help you avoid writing at the last minute. Make an appointment a week before the due date, it can make a world of difference.
• Know what you want to say, but just can’t quite get the words to match? Having a conversation about the project with a consultant can be a great way to work through things like writer’s block, fear of the blank page, and the catch-all problem of wanting a paper to “flow.”
• Struggle to get started with a project? Come in both to give you momentum, but also to talk through approaches to beginning writing processes and thinking through writing challenges.
• Looking to improve your editing, citation, and proofreading skills? We’re happy to talk through and model strategies for that as well.
• Have a big project (a paper for publication, a culminating paper, a dissertation) and need a sounding board or support structure? Set up an ongoing set of appointments with one (or a few) of our consultants to keep that momentum going.
• Have a passion project? We love working on these! Scripts, personal narratives, outreach materials for a club, a piece of creative writing, a social media/blog post, you name it.

That’s just a small sample of what we can help with. If you’re wondering if we can help you, just make the appointment, come on in, and we’ll see what we can do.

We do a lot more than individual sessions, however. We also have:

Open Writing Times

Sometimes it’s just nice to be in the company of other writers. On Mondays and Fridays from 9-11 we have open writing times at the Ekstrom Library location so you all can start your week off hitting those writing goals or get that assignment well under way before heading off for the weekend. We’ll provide the coffee, tea, and ambience.

Writing Groups

Writing for publication, grants, public talks? Working on a dissertation or book review? Come join our community of academic writers! On Wednesdays from 9:00-11:00 we have our faculty and graduate student writing group which meets at the Ekstrom library location. You can also join online for the Youtube live session:

https://www.youtube.com/@universityoflouisvillewrit3055/streams

Working on a short story, a novel, a poem, a rock opera? The creative writing group also meets at the Ekstrom Library location from 10:00-11:00 AM every other Friday.

Writing can hard, but rewarding, work. You don’t have to face it alone. It can also be a lot of fun to create new ideas and then to get those ideas out, and we’re even happier to help make that happen. Whatever brings you our way, though, we’re here for you.

See you around!

• Working in the Writing Center