Graduate Programs: WRITING STUDIES

Note: See also the Center for Writing Studies web site.

NOTE: This document was generated from the 1995-1997 UIUC Programs of Study. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, but be advised that requirements may have changed since this book was published. Errors may have also been introduced in the conversion to a WWW document. Thus for items of importance, it might be wise to seek confirmation from either the paper version or a live human being.

Director of the Center for Writing Studies: Gail E. Hawisher

Correspondence and Information: Center for Writing Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 English Building , 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801

The Center for Writing Studies facilitates research and promotes graduate study in the areas of rhetoric, written composition, language, and literacy. The center offers graduate students pursuing M.A. or Ph.D. degrees in participating departments a program leading to a specialization in writing studies.

ADMISSION

Students are invited to apply through participating departments and programs, including the Department of English, the Department of Speech Communication, the Division of English as an International Language, and the College of Education.

Faculty and students in CWS focus their interests around three principal areas: the historical, the theoretical, and the empirical study of writing. Specific faculty interests include research in computers and composition studies, methods of rhetorical and functional language analysis, cognitive processes in message production, the development of language and literacy theory and policy, and problems in technical and scientific writing. Graduate students affiliated with CWS may also explore the aesthetic, social, and cultural dimensions of language and relate theories of writing to theoretical work in criticism and linguistics, as well as to anthropology, psychology, reading, and education.

Graduate training in scholarship and research is accompanied by an equally thorough preparation for teaching. Students who affiliate with CWS are eligible for a teaching or research assistantship as soon as they begin their program and are assisted through a week-long orientation and advising program. They also participate in professional seminars in the teaching of composition, business and technical writing, the tutoring of writing, and other courses related to writing across the curriculum and composition studies. Graduate students may work as tutors in the writer's workshop as writing instructors, as teacher trainers and supervisors in the Writing across the Curriculum program, and as research assistants to the faculty of the center. CWS is also home to Computers and Composition, a journal for teachers of writing, and the CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric.

FINANCIAL AID

Graduate students are eligible for teaching and research assistantships in several different areas of composition studies and are given full responsibility for their own sections. Tuition and fees are waived for graduate students who hold assistantships.

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