Our Mission

Official Mission Statement:

The mission of the UNL Writing Center is to provide one-with-one tutoring in writing to all members of the UNL community. We work with writers at all stages of development and at every stage of the writing process. The Writing Center is dedicated to promoting and supporting research in writing and writing pedagogy. We provide a site for ongoing research as well as encouraging engagement in writing research among our undergraduate and graduate staff. The Writing Center acknowledges the integral relationships between literacy education and the democratization of higher education. We are committed both to our role in increasing access to that education for all students and to the development, practice, and evolution of anti-oppression pedagogies. We are committed to cultivating a broad-based recognition of the value of World Englishes to both intellectual and public discourse. We ally with and advocate for writers from historically marginalized or oppressed groups and for writing that counters traditional accounts of “standard” academic English by extending conceptions of audience, purpose, and meaning. (revised May 2011)

The UNL Writing Center also contributes to the English department’s mission of fostering imaginative reasoning, with its emphases on social justice, diversity, community and civic engagement, and belonging--values that are at the heart of the work we do. We ask writers to imagine, within given rhetorical contexts, different possibilities for their writing, and, likewise, to reason through which possibilities will bring the most desired outcomes. By advocating for the mindful use of rhetorical strategies in context and the transfer of writing knowledge across genres, the Writing Center underscores writers’ empowered roles in shaping meaning within broader societal and academic contexts.

Land Acknowledgement

The University of Nebraska is a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples. Source: Center for Great Plains Studies