About the Center

Mission

The mission of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence is to assure that Miami fully prepares all of its graduates to excel in the writing they will do after college in their careers, roles as community and civic leaders, and personal lives.

The Center's primary goals are as follows:

• To foster a culture of writing in which students welcome the writing instruction they receive in their courses, seek additional opportunities to write outside of class, and strive continuously to improve their writing skills.
• To help faculty increase the amount and quality of writing instruction and practice that students receive throughout their studies at Miami.
  
• To help faculty tap writing's tremendous potential for assisting students in mastering the content and thinking processes their courses are designed to teach.
  
• To assure that all students—from the most accomplished to the most needful—have ample help outside of their classes as they strive to improve their writing.

We welcome your ideas and suggestions, and we invite you to contact us if you believe there’s any way we can help you.

Staff

Director

• Paul Anderson

Student Writing Center Administrative Assistant

• Kate Francis

Assistant Director

• Stacey Runion

Administrative Assistant

• Maurica Allen

Advisory Committee

The Center enjoys the advice of an Advisory Committee that includes the following members:

• Bruce Cochrane, Associate Provost and Dean of the Graduate School and Scholarship
• Linda Dixon, Director, Bernard J. Rinella Jr. Learning Assistance Center
• Joyce Fernandes, Zoology
• Carolyn Gard, Senior Director, Academic Technical Services
• Julia Guichard, Theatre
• Kimberly Hamlin, American Studies and History
• Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, University Libraries
• Alice Kahn, Speech Pathology and Audiology
• Fazeel Khan, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
• Heidi McKee, English
• Kate Ronald, Director, Howe Writing Initiative in the Farmer School of Business
• John Tassoni, Director, First-Year Composition Program
• Rich Taylor, Chemistry
• Ex Officio Member: Paul Anderson, Director, Center for Writing Excellence

National Advisory Board

The Center benefits from the advice an National Advisory Board of prominent authorities on university-wide writing programs.

• Chris Anson, University Distinguished Professor and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University. An internationally respected scholar of writing, language and literacy, Anson also served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and as a member of the executive committee of the Conference of College Composition and Communication.
• Andrea Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and Claude Louise Rosenberg Jr. Fellow and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her research includes pioneering studies of the writing in the nonacademic world, ways students can be prepared to write successfully after graduation and developing student abilities in college writing. She has chaired the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
• Martha Townsend, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, is former director of its Campus Writing Program. Next year she will move to the University of Vermont, where she will serve as director of Writing in the Disciplines. Townsend's publications have played a central role in the conceptualization and development of writing-across-the-curriculum programs in the United States and abroad. She is former literacy consultant to the Ford Foundation.
• Kathleen Blake Yancey, Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. She is the lead researcher for the national study, "Portraits of Composition: How Writing Gets Taught in the 21st Century"; co-founder and co-director of the National Research Coalition on Electronic Portfolios; and consultant to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, among other positions.
• Art Young, Professor of English and of engineering and Bob and Betsy Campbell Chair in Technical Communication at Clemson University. After earning his doctorate in English at Miami in 1971, Young co-founded the writing-across-the-curriculum movement while at Michigan Technological University. In 1987, he moved to Clemson University, where he helped build the campuswide writing program that earned Clemson Time magazine's "Public University of the Year" award.