Online Writing Centers Community Seeks Contributors

Call for Submissions

Do you work at a center that supports writing through online services, such as online consulting/tutoring, webinars, or quick question submissions? Or, is your center looking to start offering these types of online support? If so, we want to hear from you! The OWC Community website brings together tutors, consultants, professionals, and administrators from writing and learning centers to establish online writing support as a professional area of study.

If you have something to say about online writing center work, then the OWC Community is offering new opportunities to join the conversation.

We are looking for two types of submissions on a range of topics that impact the work we do online.

Submission Types

1. Program Profiles. These profiles encourage an in-depth explanation of your institutional context, the logistics of your online writing support, and the structure of your online training, among other areas. We hope these profiles will help record all of the different shapes that online writing centers can take and inspire others who are starting or revising their online writing support.
2. OWC Conversations. This is our general blog category covering all aspects of online writing center work, especially those that help us to rethink or reconsider traditional theories, practices, technologies, and methods in online writing support. This is also a great space to share past, current, or future conference presentations with a larger audience or to share your ongoing research with other stakeholders in your field, as you build work for publication.

Possible Areas of Focus

• Effective practices for OWC consulting/tutoring, training, recruitment, or administration
• Results of OWC research projects
• Reflections on personal OWC experience or lessons learned
• Theoretical frameworks for OWC work
• Descriptions of training programs, innovations, or materials
• Tips for proposing or arguing for an OWC
• Critiques of common OWC arguments/assumptions
• New ways of analyzing or doing OWC work
• Calls for OWC action/research
• OWC technology recommendations or critiques
• Scholarship critiques

Submission Formats

We accept submissions in the following formats, with accessibility in mind. If you’d like to submit in a different kind of format, please contact us to ensure it can be made accessible:

• Text-based submissions. Submissions can be all or mostly text and can include images with textual descriptions. On our site, text-based submissions will be available in both HTML and Microsoft Word document format.
• PowerPoint. PowerPoint presentations should convey information through text (in addition to images) and also include a written transcript of the presentation.
• Video recordings. Videos can be recordings of your presentation slides, images, your center, or other areas you would like to show visually. Any documents (such as presentation slides) included in your video should also be submitted. Videos will need a written transcript so we can create closed captions.
• Podcasts or other audio recordings. These submissions must include a written transcript.

Submission Guidelines

• For the time being, our submissions have no minimum or maximum word counts.
• Please send all questions and submissions to submissions@onlinewritingcenters.org.
• As part of our mission at OWC, we will not publish perspectives that do not show open-mindedness to OWC work. For example, we will not publish blogs that attempt to de-legitimize an aspect of OWC work or that argue that one modality is better than another. These perspectives have permeated the literature since the 90s, and it is difficult enough to find helpful scholarship on OWC work that doesn’t continue to advance such problematic views.