Who We Are
The Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication employs both professional and student staff, all of whom are passionate educators, writers, and researchers. Visit this page to learn more about staff at the Centre and to find our contact information.
What We Do
The Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication is an educational support unit at UBC Vancouver dedicated to helping facilitate the writing of undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, staff, and faculty. Since our establishment in July 2016 in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, we have been guided by our pedagogical foundations in Rhetorical Genre Theory and Writing in the Disciplines (you can learn more about what this means below). We offer a variety of services, workshops, events, and programs all dedicated to helping members of the UBC community from across the disciplines to enhance their academic literacy and accomplish their writing tasks. Further details on all our programming can be found throughout our website.
How We Do It
All of our programming is guided by Rhetorical Genre Theory and Writing in the Disciplines, which are research-based pedagogies for writing instruction. In practice, what this means is that our model of writing instruction focuses on the writing task in its social context; on questions of genre as determined by the discourse features of the text; on questions of discipline as exemplified by the methods and findings of subject area experts; on the fundamentally communicative function of academic writing; and on crucial rhetorical considerations such as audience and purpose. In all of our work at the CWSC, we are concerned not only to improve the written text at hand, whether that be a lab report brought by an undergraduate to a peer Writing Consultation or a dissertation chapter brought by a graduate student to a Graduate Writing Retreat, but also to equip the writer with the rhetorical self-consciousness to become a more effective communicator for life.
