Walden University Writing Center

Where instructors and editors talk writing.

Here at the Walden University Writing Center, we're embracing the spirit of this time of renewal as we turn over the final page in our calendars and welcome a new and exciting year into our lives. In the coming weeks on this blog, we will share some of our stories about times when we learned things about writing and ourselves.



We hope these stories will inspire you to keep working hard at developing your academic writing skills. As we work with students here in the Writing Center, we see the struggles and challenges that accompany the process of learning to write at a scholarly level. Even when it feels most hopeless, we encourage our students to keep working, keep practicing, and keep their eyes on the broader goal.

So, Dear Reader, if you are ever feeling like your writing will never improve, we hope these narratives from our Writing Center Instructors and Editors will show you that there is hope. Even the most highly-trained writing experts had to work hard to achieve the skills and knowledge that they currently possess. 

Take heart! And please enjoy our stories. If you would like to share your "How I Learned...." story about your writing journey, please send an email to WritingSupport@waldenu.edu. We'll reach out to you and you might be featured on this blog! 

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• When we close out the year, our Writing Instructor Team will have conducted almost 11,000 paper reviews. Assuming each essay submitted was at least 6 pages long, that team will have read roughly 66,000 pages of student work or roughly 16.5 million words, meaning that our instructor team has read the equivalent of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings over 35 times in the last 12 months!

• Not to be outdone, our team of editors will have reviewed nearly 1,400 dissertations this year. Assuming each dissertation was around 150 pages long, that team will have read 210,000 pages of student work or roughly 52.5 million words, the equivalent of reading the entire Harry Potter series nearly 50 times in 2016!

• Ever wonder what sorts of folks read all those words? Consider this: The Walden Writing Center employs 46 full-time writing professionals who hold over 95 degrees!

• As many of you know, our professionals and our Academic Writing Assistants are available in others ways, too. We responded to over 12,000 e-mails in 2016 and chatted with over 3,000 students, just more than the entire population of Afton, Minnesota, a 30-minute drive from our Minneapolis offices!

• Or perhaps you attended a webinar this year; if so you’d be one of nearly 7,000 students. And if you watched an archive of a webinar, you’d be in good company: Another 7000,000 viewed one of our recordings, the equivalent of every domestic employee working at McDonald’s attending or watching one of our webinars at least once!

• Or maybe you’ve seen us in a course. We visited over 280 courses; that’s over 5 times as many national parks as you can visit in the United States!

• Or did you download one of our templates? Those were downloaded over 250,000 times, the equivalent of the entire populations of Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, and San Marino downloading our files at least once over a 12 month period.

• You might be in a smaller subset if you accessed one of our interactive Modules this year, but you’re certainly not alone. About 4,000 students took our modules this year, about the number of passengers that can fit on a Boeing 747-400.

• The Writing Center’s website, which houses many of the resources listed above, had over 3.5 million page views this year; that’s a view for every resident of Chicago.

• Our social media accounts (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and our humble Blog) were no slouch either. We reached over 1.3 million people in 2016, a bit more than the entire population of San Diego.

• If you saw us at a residency this year, this may or may not surprise you depending on where you attended: The Center worked with over 16,000 students at residencies; that’s about as many folks that can fit in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, home of the Islanders and Nets, without having to notify the fire marshal!

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We have many reasons to celebrate in December. It is a time of transition, a time to enjoy personal interests with a little extra time off work, a time to gather for the holidays, a time to hunker down and read a new book. During this transitional time of year, it seems only appropriate that our 33rd episode of WriteCast would be titled "Tackling Transitions."

In this episode of WriteCast, Beth Nastachowshi and Brittany Kallman-Arneson discuss both local and global transitions, with a focus on how you can create more effective flow in your writing by incorporating strong transitions throughout.



For a list of all of our WriteCast episodes, visit the Writing Center website for Interactive and Multimedia writing resources. Here, you can also access download information and transcripts for each of our podcast episodes. Happy Listening, WriteCasters!

As a reminder, the Writing Center will be closed on Monday, December 26th. During this time, we will not be checking in to our social media pages, and we will not offer chat services. We will return on Tuesday, December 27th, eager to work with you for the last week of 2016. 





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So you’ve written your paper, you’ve submitted it to your writing instructor, and you got an email notifying you that you can collect your paper and your feedback.  What now?  If you’re like me, one of the hardest parts of the revision process is to figure out what and where to start.  With that in mind I have created a list of the things I found most helpful as both a student and a writing instructor to help you through your revision journey! 

So no matter how many times you have visited the writing center, remember there is always something new we can help with!  And never forget that the help we give you does not end with the closing message of our review.  We are here to help you with all elements of your revision process. Happy writing, and I look forward to seeing you all in the writing queue! 

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Hello Walden students! Can you believe we are already two weeks into December, and two weeks away from 2017? With the New Year quickly approaching, many of us begin thinking about New Year's resolutions. I know I am. How will I try to be more mindful this year? How will I meet my goal of not eating all the cookies? 

At some point or another, all of us at the Walden University Writing Center have been students, with writing goals to work towards and writing deadlines to meet. So, as 2017 approaches, I'd like to take a trip down the Writing Center's memory lane, and share two of my favorite tips from my colleagues to inspire your writing resolutions. 



In a blog post about crafting discussion posts, Jes Philbrook shared with Walden students that it's best to break down discussion prompts into paragraph sized chunks. Jes says, "Once you know what questions you’re being asked, you can choose how to group them into topics that will guide your paragraphs." While this technique applies to discussion posts, it also applies to larger writing tasks... and to life in general. You can always break down a daunting task into its smaller parts. 

In another blog post, Sarah Prince provides some great tips for writing against the clock. We've all watched deadlines approach, knowing our day-to-day schedules won't allow for much writing time. In this post, Sarah mentions again the great idea to break a big task down into chunks, but she also tells students to "determine your golden hour of productivity." Sarah tells students to figure out when they can be most productive when writing so that the time they spend writing is time well spent.

With all this said, I plan to go into the New Year with a resolution to break down big, daunting tasks into their smaller parts, and to commit to being most productive when I have the time to do so. 

We at the Writing Center hope to be a source of support for you in the New Year, and we can't wait to hear about your writing resolutions!


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