University Writing Program

First-Year Writing

In first-year writing courses, students engage with writing as a practice of advanced learning and communication. The University Writing Seminar offers essential writing, thinking, and research skills. It is part of the Brandeis Core and is the centerpiece of the First-Year Experience. Many students begin with the Composition Seminar, which builds on students' existing skills in advance of UWS.

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.

Writing Center

The Library's University Writing Center is the driving force of writing support on campus, offering consultations for all writers. Work on anything from brainstorming and refining your first college essays to lab reports, senior theses, dissertations, and job and fellowship materials.

The Research Help Desk in the Library Info Commons.

Library Research

Since research is an integral part of college writing, the Library offers direct support from research librarians, in person and online. Subject specialists work with first-year writers and students at all levels.

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

Writing-Intensive Courses

WI courses, taught by faculty in every department, build on the generalized instruction in UWS to teach students the conventions and requirements of writing in their chosen discipline and major. Faculty: explore our newly expanded Writing Intensive Instructor Resources.

Hangyu Du '21 from Nanjing, China.

English Language Tutoring

The English Language Programs offer free tutoring services for international students and others leaning English as their second (or third or fourth) language. Tutors provide vital support for English Language Learners enrolled in UWS, CSEM, and all Brandeis schools and subjects.

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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)