NSU's Quality Enhancement Plan April 2017

NSU QEP Literature Review | 13 instruction to help them prepare for their studies, as well as their future careers. Ultimately, students with superior writing skills are considered more professional and, consequently, a greater value to the company than students with insufficient writing skills (Lentz, 2013). Writing Centers U.S. News & World Report , as well as colleges and universities across the United States and around the world, recognize the importance of writing centers when it comes to enhancing students’ written communication skills. Since the 1970s, the writing center field has grown quite significantly, and most U.S. colleges and universities now offer such programs. University-wide writing centers provide individualized writing assistance and extracurricular programming to students at all levels, from first-time in college students learning basic conventions of university-level academic discourse to graduate students preparing dissertations and publications. At the most basic level, there are two types of individualized assistance writing center staff members offer to students: (a) generalist and (b) specialized (by discipline). A generalist writing tutor is recognized as someone who provides writing assistance without disciplinary knowledge or experience; he or she acts as a general, lay reader who has a strong understanding of writing and the writing process. A specialized tutor is someone who understands and has experience using discipline-specific discourse, in addition to having a strong understanding of the writing process; thus, he or she can provide students with specialized feedback in that area. While some early writing center theorists gravitated toward generalist tutors being the most effective (Hubbuch, 1988), a second group of researchers suggested that centers should also employ specialist tutors who can provide discourse-specific assistance to students across the curriculum (Kiedaisch & Dinitz 1993; Walker 1998). Writing centers also provide programming beyond individualized writing assistance, which allows them to diversify their contributions to student learning. Such programming can have direct connections to curricula and courses (Carpenter, Whiddon, and Dvorak, 2014), and can be in collaboration with libraries (Elmborg & Hook, 2005). In addition, writing center programming can be extracurricular, targeting various areas of writing, including general writing groups (Kramer, 2016); creative writing groups (Reid, 2008); writing groups and initiatives for faculty (Eodice & Geller, 2013; Fels, 2008); academic and professional workshops; and other events that attract students, faculty members, and community members (Dvorak & Bruce, 2008). While most writing center praxis has focused on undergraduate students, there has been a surge in writing center offerings to graduate students, both in the form of direct assistance, particularly for dissertations (Barron & Cicciarelli, 2016), and in programming (Brady & Singh-Corcoran, 2016; Reardon, Deans, and Maykel, 2016). Writing center services have become more in demand at the graduate level, as universities have recognized that many graduate students, particularly English language learners, face significant challenges with academic and professional writing. Writing centers also provide critical services to multilingual students and English language learners (ELL) (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; 2016). Writing centers with multilingual staff members can offer specialized assistance to multilingual students (Dvorak, 2016; Ronesi, 2009), as well as discipline-specific assistance to ELL students across the