Writing Fellows

Honors Writing Fellows Program

Applications for the Fall 2024 program are due by 5:00 pm on Friday, March 29. 
See here for the application form.

Honors students, find out more about the program at an information session on Friday, February 23 at 4:00 pm in 110 EPB. Program directors and current Fellows will be there to answer your questions and refreshments will also be provided!

The Honors Writing Fellows Program is a peer tutoring/writing across the curriculum initiative. Our 25-30 Writing Fellows are undergraduate students in the Honors at Iowa Program who are assigned to courses across campus every semester. They provide written feedback to students in these courses on two writing assignments during the semester, and also meet with students for individual conferences. All Writing Fellows are required to take Writing Theory and Practice (143:102), a three-semester hour course taught every fall by our program directors, Carol Severino and Megan Knight. The application process for new Fellows takes place in March each year.

Instructors interested in having Writing Fellows assigned to their courses, please contact Carol Severino (carol-severino@uiowa.edu) or Megan Knight (megan-knight@uiowa.edu).

How the Program Works

Each Writing Fellow works with 10-12 students who send them drafts of two writing assignments during the semster, the first around midterm and the second towards the end of the semester. The Fellow provides written comments and suggestions and then meets individually with students to discuss the comments and how best to revise the paper to make it stronger. The goal of the Honors Writing Fellows Program is to emphasize the importance of feedback and revision to the writing process, so working with a Writing Fellow is part of the assignent requirements. A course with 36 students is typically assigned 3 fellows while a course with 24 students would be assigned 2. Because of logistical and scheduling difficulties we generally do not assign Fellows to courses with more than 40 students. Due to the limited number of Fellows available, this services is not currently available to TAs.

After the commenting and conferencing cycle, the professor reads both the first drafts and the revised essays and grades the latter. Fellows do not do any grading, they comment and tutor only. For their first year, fellows receive $700 per semester, and thereafter, $800 a semester. Interested Writing Fellows can also receive additional training to become Undergraduate Tutors who are available for one-on-one appointments in the Writing Center.

To be eligible to participate in the Honors Writing Fellows program, professors must be willing to schedule two assignments that are submitted to the Fellows for commenting and conferencing two weeks before the final versions are submitted. They must also be willing to meet with their Fellows to discuss assignment goals and relationship to the course. They also meet with the Fellows during the commenting process and after the first commenting-conferencing-grading cycle to evaluate and fine tune the procedure for the second paper cycle. All Fellows have commenting mentors who are Rhetoric faculty or Writing Center staff. These look at drafts of papers and commenting letters and advise and support the Fellows.

Writing Fellows programs began in the 1980s at Brown University and has since spread to many other colleges, small and large. The goals of the Honors Writing Fellows Program are to improve student writing and writing processes, to promote collaborative learning, and to encourage instructors to use writing to learn in their courses. Because Iowa has no required writing courses beyond first-year Rhetoric, the Writing Fellows program extends writing instruction beyond the departments of Rhetoric and English and encourages instructors in departments across the College to consider writing instruction part of their professional responsibility. Writing Fellows are assigned to professors' courses and work with all of their students on drafts of two major course papers.

Since the program began in 2003, UI professors from American Studies, Anthropology, Classics, Dance, English, Exercise Science, Geography, Geoscience, Health and Sport Studies, History, Leisure Studies, Literature, Science, & the Arts, Political Science, Religious Studies, Rhetoric, Russian, and Women's Studies have worked with Writing Fellows to help more than 2500 students improve their papers.

The program director is Carol Severino and our assistant director is Megan Knight. The program is supported by the Honors at Iowa Program and the Department of Rhetoric.