University Writing Program

First-Year Writing

First-year writing courses are the centerpiece of the First-Year Experience and are part of the Core requirements at Brandeis. In these courses, students engage with writing as the practice of advanced learning and communication.

A student with Bofang Li in the writing center

University Writing Center

The University Writing Center is the driving force of writing support on campus. We offer one-on-one consultations for writers of all levels in all subjects, working on anything from your first college essays to lab reports, senior theses, dissertations, and job and fellowship materials.

Writing Resources

The University Writing Program offers writing resources for faculty and students at all levels — teaching and learning tools developed here at Brandeis and at writing centers and programs across the country.

Prof. Lab standing in the front of an engaged classroom of students

Writing-Intensive Requirement

Writing-intensive courses introduce students to the writing conventions and intellectual traditions of their major. Every academic discipline has its own requirements concerning form, style and methods of citation, which writing-intensive courses teach.

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About the University Writing Program

The University Writing Program is dedicated to creating and sustaining an equitable and inclusive writing community in which students can thrive. To that end, we welcome the life experiences, social identities, and knowledges that students and instructors embody. We especially value voices that have been historically marginalized, minoritized, or silenced as we promote understanding and engagement with written communication.

Advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion informs our approach to writing as both a product and a practice. We realize that this commitment requires interrogating our teaching and learning practices with continual, communal reflection. Through ongoing conversations, we seek to draw on insights from multiple communities and disciplines regarding teaching and learning.

As a community of readers and writers, we confront social, racial, and environmental injustices of the past and present. As we engage these challenges together, as instructors and students, we foster an equitable and inclusive culture for sharing experiences, resources, and ideas. In these ways, the Writing Program contributes to Brandeis University’s vibrant campus culture and embraces the diversity of our larger society.

Land Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that Brandeis University occupies the homelands and territories of the Nipmuc and Massachusett people, and that the very existence of our university in Waltham has been facilitated by the dispossession, enslavement, and dispersal of Native communities by settler colonialism.

(Adapted from the land acknowledgment presented by Dorothy Hodgson on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2020)

“I could not believe how effectively my colleagues had designed classes with a series of linked short writing exercises. It's changed how I design both undergraduate and graduate classes.”

John Plotz

Professor of English