The Northeastern Writing Program is an award-winning program dedicated to engaging students as writers
Welcome to Northeastern’s Writing Program.
Each area of our Program, including First-Year-Writing, Advanced Writing in the Disciplines, and the Writing Center, shares 12 learning goals. The first, “Students write both to learn and to communicate what they learn,” captures our process-oriented and reflection-based approach to writing. Rather than seeing writing as a way to show or prove knowledge, we embrace writing as a way of producing knowledge via exploration, curiosity, and conversation. It’s a dynamic process that encourages members of each writing community – a class or a tutoring environment, for example – to ask questions and examine various rhetorical situations.
When we discuss rhetorical situations, we’re thinking about the writing occasion – to whom are we writing and for what purpose(s)? By answering these questions, we begin to understand important considerations like audience and genre. And by asking, clarifying, and answering these questions through self-reflection and in conversation with others, we explore our own unique writing processes and foster lifelong confidence in writing across varied situations, including educational, professional, and personal environments.
We value the individual academic, linguistic, and personal experiences that students bring to each facet of the program, and with this in mind, we provide learning opportunities that meet student needs across the university, including on-ground, online, multilingual and service-learning sections. We encourage all students to share their experiences, languages, and interests in our classes and tutoring sessions.
Our innovative instructors also bring their own research and professional development expertise to the classroom, resulting in courses that explore anti-racist work, visual literacy, accessibility, community-based writing, and multi-modal composition among other areas of inquiry.
This dialogue between instructor and student experiences enables our program to create unique and dynamic writing communities across and beyond Northeastern. We look forward to working with you.
With best wishes,
Laurie Nardone
Director of the Writing Program
