The Writery

“The Writery” was a printed publication of the Campus Writing Program from 1994 – 2005. “The Writery” was a place for discussing the writing process and its role in learning in all disciplines. Published three times each semester, it is distributed to MU faculty, and to students and friends by request.

 © The Curators of the University of Missouri.


Past Issues

  • January 1996, “A Terminal of One’s Own: Finding a New Voice, Finding a New Text”
    • Elaine Lawless and co-teacher, Virginia Muller, used email and World Wide Web technologies in their WI course, Historical Survey of Women Writers.
  • March 1996, “A Tale of Two Universities: the Intersection of Sharing New Ideas
    • Nicoleta Raileanu is a visiting scholar from the University of Sibiu, Romania, where she teaches English language and literature. At MU under the auspices of a major U.S. Information Agency grant obtained by political science professor Jeff Chinn, Nicoleta is one of 15 Sibiu and 13 MU exchange faculty. She became interested in MU and the Campus Writing Program after meeting Marty Townsend, CWP Director, last spring during Townsend’s visit to Romania. In the spirit of continuing CWP’s commitment to international students and supporting their writing, we asked Nicoleta to reflect on her MU experiences.
  • May 1996, “Portrait of a Radio”
    • Whether it’s a slinky, plastic top, radiometer or child’s view of radio operation, Haskell Taub, Professor of Physics, uses innovative teaching approaches, including Writing Intensive methods. After several friendly discussions with Marty Patton, CWP Natural and Applied Sciences Liaison, we invited him to share his thoughts on curiosity, radios and the complexity of the scientific world.
  • October 1996, “One Potter’s Way With Words”
    • “You can’t say what art is. It’s like electricity. You can describe what it does. You can talk about the nature of art, but you can’t point to one quality and say, “this is it.”’
  • December 1996, “The University as a Crime Scene: Multimedia Forensics in English 102”
    • “As I tell my students in English 102 Media Bandits, scholars and detectives are more or less in the same business.”
  • April 1997, “Engineering Writing:  A Formula for Success”
    • Campus Writing Board member, Aaron Krawitz, a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is a staunch advocate of using writing-to-learn principles in his classes. In this interview Campus Writing Program’s Chris Semansky asked Dr. Krawitz to reflect on the challenges and rewards of teaching in this innovative way.
  • January 1998, “Planning Growth and Planting Trees”
    • Sometimes group projects falter because students lack a plan for working together and for managing their time. John Dwyer has borrowed a strategy from management to help his forestry students successfully complete group projects.
  • May 1998, “Getting Students to Take Rough Drafts Seriously”
    • “For most of my 25 years’ teaching, I’ve fought against students’ reluctance to write more than one version of any assignment. While not pretending to have infallible answers, I offer here a half dozen tips we discussed at a Campus Writing Program brownbag titled, “Listen up! Getting Students to Take Rough Drafts Seriously.”
  • February 1999,  “Writing The Impossible”
    • “We could think of no better way to get students to confront the Holocaust than as the focus of a WI course.”
  • May 1999, “Plaid Skirts, Common Threads”
    • “Studious, social, and rebellious: That’s how the women now describe their personas in the days of “those plaid skirts” at St. Teresa’s. Ironically, we believe these qualities are also the makings of a good Writing Intensive tutor. We’ll let them each explain why…
  • November 1999, “Commenting on Commenting”
    • Commenting on students’ drafts can be a daunting task. We have to decide not only what to write but how much to write and in what order. And we have to do all of that student by student, paper by paper, again and again. Anyone who has ever done it is likely to look charitably at another teacher’s efforts.
  • November/December 2005, “Twenty-Year-Old Campus Writing Program Moves to Conley House
    • Alive and thriving in its new surroundings, Campus Writing Program (CWP) is gearing up to celebrate twenty years of WI curriculum at MU. As CWP adds the finishing touches to the planned festivities for our December 9th open house, we look back to the origins of the Program, its governing Campus Writing Board, and the outstanding faculty and instructors who made it all possible.