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Writing Center Support
The UNF Writing Program & Center offers targeted writing consultations and workshops to support writing across many disciplines, from nursing and nutrition and dietetics to political science and public administration to engineering and building construction management and beyond. No matter your project, we're here to help you work on your writing. We offer one-on-one and group writing consultations as well as topical workshops for undergraduate and graduate students at UNF, and our staff are here to support you.
The Writing Center will be closed for intersession and professional development from May 1-12. Consultations will resume on May 13!
Mission
The UNF Writing Center engages writers of all proficiency levels to cultivate effective writing practices. We develop ongoing conversations with writers to build their long-term competency and empower them to realize their academic, personal, and professional writing goals.
Culture
As consultants, we partner with writers in developing their writing practices through conversation. The writer leads this conversation by assessing their own concerns, setting their own goals, and evaluating their own progress while the consultant provides foundational and evolving support. To facilitate this dialogue, the Writing Center offers a welcoming, engaging, and nonjudgmental environment to encourage writers to express ideas freely and try new things.
Values
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Care
Effective communication requires that we appreciate the positions of those in a conversation, and care is a fundamental value, then, to how we approach these conversations. In our writing consultations, we ask writers to pose questions, to investigate and interrogate the choices they make—from how they collaborate with others to how much they appear to rely on themselves, from how many drafts they move an idea through to how many and what kinds of questions they ask about their drafts between stages. -
Consideration
Concerning our consultations and programs, consideration is a primary value as it charges consultant and writer alike to look for and to look at various facets of an idea or a text. Among its many meanings, the idea of consideration entails at least two notions: first, that we be able to dwell on something and take in its features; and, second, if somewhat legalistically, that we be willing to exchange something of value in an unspoken contract. In this practice, we ask our students to commit something of themselves into their study of that object/idea/text, to consider its features, its merits, its problems, its promises, etc. As consultants, we can appreciate that many students are not practiced in these kinds of considerate reading approaches, so we model for students various reading approaches and call on students to share theirs, as well. -
Confidence
Communication is no easy feat, and when students arrive to our consultations they do so with a variety of notions about what communication/writing is and how “good” they are in that kind of writing. For our consultations, we prioritize connecting students with their self-confidence in specific communication domains by removing “writing” from a totalizing definition that allows students to remark, “Oh, I’m not any good at writing” and shifting the conversation to the components of communication in ways that allow students to see themselves on a spectrum of ability in any of these areas of communication. -
Competence
While we aim to support students in growing their various communication competencies, we start from a concern for care. In tandem with confidence, competence entails breaking apart the totality of communication into various areas—rhetorical awareness, stylistic clarity, evidence integration, etc.—and working with students to assess not themselves but their writing as artifacts of their choices.