The Writing Program
Writing at UNF
Writing is at the center of everything you do as a student and everything you will do as a professional. At the University of North Florida, the Writing Program exists to help you get better at it, whatever your major, whatever your starting point.
Whether you are drafting your first college essay, working through a research argument or polishing a capstone project, UNF's writing support is built around one goal: helping you communicate with clarity, confidence and purpose.
The Four C's
Every decision in the UNF Writing Program is guided by four core values. They shape how writing consultants work with students and how the program approaches communication as a skill that can always be developed.
Care
Good writing starts with caring about your reader and your ideas. In writing consultations, you are encouraged to ask real questions about your work, from how you are developing an argument to how you are revising between drafts. The process is collaborative, not corrective.
Consideration
Strong writers slow down and look carefully at what they are actually saying. Consideration means taking the time to examine an idea from multiple angles, weighing its strengths, its gaps and its possibilities. Writing consultants model this kind of deliberate reading and invite you to practice it alongside them.
Confidence
Many students arrive with the belief that they are simply "not good at writing." The Writing Program pushes back on that. Writing is not a single fixed skill. It is a collection of abilities, including rhetorical awareness, organization, evidence and clarity, and every student sits somewhere on a spectrum in each of those areas. Consultations are designed to help you find and build on what you already do well.
Competence
Competence grows when you stop judging yourself as a writer and start examining your writing as a craft. That means looking at specific choices: how you introduce evidence, how you structure an argument, how clearly your ideas move from one to the next. The Writing Program gives you the tools and the language to assess and improve those choices over time.
Writing Around the Curriculum
Writing Around the Curriculum is UNF's Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), a university-wide initiative focused on building stronger writers across every discipline. It is not a single course or a single office. It is a commitment woven into the fabric of how UNF teaches.
The goal is direct: graduate students who can read carefully, cite sources responsibly and communicate their ideas clearly in any professional or civic context. The QEP supports this by expanding writing opportunities across all four years of a student's experience, building writing into internships and careers, not just classrooms.
Faculty across the university participate in the QEP by developing writing-intensive approaches in their courses. Students benefit from more opportunities to write, revise and grow as communicators from their first semester to their last.
For a copy of Writing Around the Curriculum, contact Professor Linda Howell, QEP Director.