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Regional Writing Centre: Who We Are and What We Do

Lawrence Cleary, Director Regional Writing Centre,

C1065 Main Bldg.,

www.ul.ie/rwc

Regional Writing Centre

The Regional Writing Centre at UL offers a free and friendly place for all students (undergraduate and postgraduate) and staff to come and address any aspect of their writing for academic assessment or publication. The RWC is not a service, but a learning resource dedicated to helping students develop strategies to become more confident, critical and autonomous writers. We don’t work on your paper. We work on you, the writer. We focus on helping the writer to better understand the writing situation, what is working or not working in their research and writing process and what strategies they might use to overcome obstacles that impede the student from reaching their research and writing goals.

To find us, go to the A-Z directory on the University of Limerick homepage and click on either R for Regional Writing Centre or W for Writing Centre to find our RWC Homepage.

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Who we are

Our tutors are students like you, writing for academic assessment
The RWC employs both undergraduate and postgraduate student writers.
Our tutors are proven good writers who have benefitted from reflecting on:

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What we do

We talk to writers about writing

Tutors don’t talk about hypothetical writing situations, but only situations that are real. Tutors can talk to students about any aspect of writing, from the time they get something to write to the time they submit it, and even afterwards if they wish to talk about the feedback received on a graded paper. You must be working on an assignment or thesis if you wish to speak with a tutor. We don’t do ‘academic writing classes’. Also, remember, our writers are good writers in their disciplines. They are not English teachers and the majority work with a tacit understanding of how their own language works, so may understand that something is ungrammatical, but couldn’t explain why it is ungrammatical. For that kind of feedback, a student would need to consult the UL Language Centre.

Click on How to Book a Peer Tutor Session to access the appointment software. Click on the Quick Queries link to submit a quick query.

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Our ethos

The RWC is constrained by Western ideas about academic integrity, authorship and intellectual property rights.
RWC tutors do not edit or proofread papers.
They do not suggest ways of rephrasing a student-writer’s sentences so that they are more ‘native-speaker like’.
Peer tutors must maintain a distance from the production of a student’s text in order to preserve the trust of those who assign the written work and who assume the work to be the sole production of the student for whom the paper serves as a measure of their performance.

Referencing Mark Rose’s 1993 Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Martin Fredriksson, in his 2018 article in Open Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, titled ‘Authors, Inventors and Entrepreneurs: Intellectual Property and Actors of Extraction’, observed that “The history of copyright adds empirical substance to Foucault’s observation that “The coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas” (205). Furthermore, it provides a concrete example of how the author function is enforced and materialised as a legal and economic practice, to the advantage of certain actors and the disadvantage of others” (321-22).

It is because of this requirement that submissions for assessment must be authentic contributions, the RWC practices a non-invasive, inductive approach to writing development, utilising peer-tutors and experts that work with both undergraduate students, postgraduate students and staff respectively to identify their writing practices in order to assess and improve strategic effectiveness.

Our tutors do nothing to your paper, their job is to treat you, the writer, not your paper. They will talk to you about any issue you are having. They will ask questions and try to understand what you are doing and what is not working. Once they have identified where you are going wrong as a writer, they can talk to you about your options and share the strategies, processes and understandings that work.

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