the teaching of writing

For the past month, I have been heavily involved in the teaching and tutoring of writing. Not only, I have taught and tutored students in a traditional classroom, but I have also taught and tutored students online. I'm continuing to expand my "practice" as I like to call it. This little Ashlea Campbell Writing stuff is taking off, as I am giving more seminars and workshops as well.

I continue to provide writing assistance to those outside of academia, usually in the form of resume help. I charge a small fee (very small compared to resume-creating companies I've researched), but I started to wonder why we don't have community writing centers.

In almost every major metropolitan area, community literacy centers exist. These centers might carry the name "Adult Literacy center," but the mission is still the same: teach community members to read. The name literacy is somewhat misleading because it implies that reading and writing will be taught together. This is not the case as most exclusively help community members to read.

While it is imperative to have reading skills in order to think critically and secure and maintain a job, isn't developing writing skills just as necessary? What are writing centers limited to postsecondary institutions? What if adults could come to a place where they could develop their writing skills. In that center, adults could receive FREE, quality resume help. In fact, a writing center is just the kind of place our economy needs to get people thinking, writing and working. I thought I'd share a link the the Albuquerque Community Writing Center. I only found two writing centers like this when I did a quick Google search. Hopefully, more will spring up around the nation. Who knows? Maybe I'll get the gumption to start one here!

In an effort to promote skill development in writing, I will post links to some of my things from time-to-time. I cannot post too much because I am attempting to go through the publishing process again. This time instead of focusing on reading activities for middle school students, I hope to publish some the original writing tools I created for college level developing writers.

For now, I leave you with a link to APA running head formatting. This has been an ongoing issue with many of my online college students. It is such a tricky thing to master as the rules seem to change, especially if you are like me. I was an English Education major. All of my English papers had to be formatted to MLA standards while all of my Education papers had to be formatted to APA. Luckily, when I entered graduate school, I was exclusively APA.