How reading makes you smarter

On the eve of our Library visit, a reminder.

https://www.threads.net/@importanceofbooks/post/C2vn5FNS38a/

Questions JAN 30

In CoPhi it's time again for Aristotle. A couple of years ago, on August 30, that serendipitously coincided with the lead-off slot I'd been asked to fill in the Honors Fall Lecture Series [slideshow]. It also coincided with the kickoff of our Environmental Ethics course's discussion of the Kentucky sage Wendell Berry, so I found myself looking for points of intersection between Aristotle and Wendell--specifically on the subjects of friendship and happiness. Having already noticed some affinity between Aristotle and Socrates, I then also detected an Aristotelian strain in the farmer-poet from Port Royal. That again leaves Plato the odd man out... (continues)

==

LHP 2

1. What point was Aristotle making when he wrote of swallows and summer? Do you agree?

2. What philosophical difference between Plato and Aristotle is implied by The School of Athens? Whose side are you on, Plato's or Aristotle's?

3. What is eudaimonia, and how can we increase our chances of achieving it, and in relation only to what? Do you think you've achieved it?

4. What reliance is completely against the spirit of Aristotle's research? Are there any authorities you always defer to? Why or why not?

FL

5. What did Sir Walter Raleigh help invent (other than cigarettes) that contributed to "Fantasyland" as we know it today? Was he a "stupid git," as the Beatles song says?

6. What was western civilization's first great ad campaign? Does advertising and the constant attempt to sell things to people have a negative impact on life in the USA?

7. What did Sir Francis Bacon say about human opinion and superstition? Do you ever attempt to overcome your own confirmation bias?

8. Which early settlers are typically ignored in the mythic American origin story? Also: what about the early "settlers" who were brought here against their wills and enslaved?

9. What had mostly ended in Europe, but not America, by the 1620s, and what did the Puritans think would happen "any minute now"? Why do you think people keep making this mistake?

HWT

10. What is pratyaksa in classic Indian philosophy, and how does the Upanishads say to seek it? 

11. There is widespread belief in India that the practice of yoga can lead to what? Do you think it can?

12. What is metanoetics, in Japanese philosophy?

13. What does ineffable mean?  Is it possible, though paradoxical, to use words to indicate something you can't put into words?

14. Unlike the west, religion in Japan is typically not about what? And what is it about to you?

"Beyond the reach of social anxiety"

As Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You wouldn't worry so much about what other people think of you, if you realized how seldom they do."

"...in order to feel social anxiety, you have to believe that other people’s negative opinions of you are worth getting upset about, that it’s really bad if they dislike you and really important to win their approval. Even people who suffer from severe social anxiety disorder (social phobia) tend to feel “normal” when speaking to children or to their close friends about trivial matters, with a few exceptions. Nevertheless, they feel highly anxious when talking to people they think are very important about subjects they think are very important. If your fundamental worldview, by contrast, assumes that your status in the eyes of others is of negligible importance, then it follows that you should be beyond the reach of social anxiety."

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald J. Robertson

Gen Z angst

Mark Twain said there's nothing sadder than a young pessimist... except an old optimist. (I'm neither, I'm a meliorist.)

Members of Gen Z, ages 12 to 27, are significantly less likely to rate their current and future lives highly than millennials were when they were the same age, it found.

Among those 18 to 26, just 15 percent said their mental health was excellent. That is a large decline from both 2013 and 2003, when just over half said so… nyt

Aristotle on the work of a human being

"If we posit the work of a human being as a certain life, and this is an activity of soul and actions accompanied by reason, the work of a serious man is to do these things well and nobly. …
But, in addition, in a complete life. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day. And in this way, one day or a short time does not make someone blessed and happy either."

https://open.substack.com/pub/figsinwinter/p/aristotle-on-the-point-of-a-human?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Aristotle on slavery and the subjugation of women

Aristotle was generally a brilliant ethicist, BUT…

"Aristotle wrote Europe's greatest foundational works of ethics and politics, but only in the context of free Greek males: everyone else was of a lesser nature. This meant women, of course, but also those he categorized as naturally born for enslavement. The way to identify such a person, according to Aristotle, was this: "Someone is . . . a slave by nature if he is capable of becoming the property of another (and for this reason does actually become another's property) and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself." This last clause was mainly to distinguish enslaved people from non-human animals, who could not even recognize reason when they saw it. With that proviso, the main point here was that you could spot those who were meant to be enslaved from the fact that they were currently enslaved. For them, clearly, "the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just." Aristotle further clarified the situation by comparing enslavement to the equally natural dominance of men over women. Aristotle's "slave nature" theory was used to justify centuries of later exploitation."

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
https://a.co/5P2FlBk

Bertrand Russell’s teapot and the problem with “authority”

"Russell considered it "undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." He supplied a good metaphor for this in 1952, though it was not actually published at the time. In response to a journalistic question, "Is there a God?," he asked the reader to consider an orbiting teapot:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

 Here we have one of Russell's strongest convictions: that accepting assertions on the basis of authority alone is never good enough. We also get a wonderful example of Russell's tone. He had, as Thomas Paine once wrote of Voltaire, a high capacity for spotting folly, combined with an "irresistible propensity to expose it.""

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

On the other hand...

 

Albert Camus on the Will to Live and the Most Important Question of Existence – The Marginalian

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/07/camus-myth-of-sisyphus-suicide/

Doomsday clock

An ominous tiktok-

https://www.instagram.com/p/C2iFPm1so0g/?igsh=MXRtZjVpa2hscTA4eA==

The Future of Academic Freedom

…Over time, Harvard, like many other universities, has allowed the core academic mission of research, intellectual inquiry, and teaching to be subordinated to other values that, though important, should never have been allowed to work against it.

Sometime in the twenty-tens, it became common for students to speak of feeling unsafe when they heard things that offended them…

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-future-of-academic-freedom

Books and looks: gen Z is ‘rediscovering’ the public library

But have they rediscovered books?

...Gen Z seems to love public libraries. A November report from the American Library Association (ALA) drawing from ethnographic research and a 2022 survey found that gen Z and millennials are using public libraries, both in person and digitally, at higher rates than older generations.

More than half of the survey's 2,075 respondents had visited a physical library within the past 12 months. Not all of them were bookworms: according to the report, 43% of gen Z and millennials don't identify as readers – but about half of those non-readers still visited their local library in the past year. Black gen Zers and millennials visit libraries at particularly high rates... Guardian

Growing up, Gen Z, is not the same thing as growing older

Why Does Gen Z Believe It's 'Aging Like Milk'?
Some say they fear their generation is aging more quickly than others. But as Gen Z-ers enter their late 20s, it's more likely that they are simply getting older. nyt

Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?

...Ages ago, Aristotle thought it did, but these days a lot of people seem to doubt it. Surveys show that Americans are abandoning cultural institutions. Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say that they visit art museums and galleries, go to see plays or attend classical music concerts, opera or ballet. College students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences, having apparently decided that a professional leg up is more important than the state of their souls... 

I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.

The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, argued that we consume culture to enlarge our hearts and minds. We start with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire more expansive ways of seeing the world. Peer pressure and convention may try to hem us in, but the humanistic mind expands outward to wider and wider circles of awareness...

Consuming culture gives us the emotional knowledge that can make us better people. David Brooks, How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society

If you like to listen...

 We've noted the wealth of philosophy-themed podcasts. John Cleese (of Monty Python) did some entertaining little PSA-style radio spots that are worth a listen.

There are lots of great philosophy audiobooks too, including Eric Weiner's Socrates Express, Nigel Warburton's Little History of Philosophy, and many more. Check our library, the public library, audible.com, or wherever you get your audiobooks.

And look for a series called World of Philosophy, which features text written by some of my best friends and colleagues from grad school (because my mentor John Lachs was in charge of recruiting content-providers for the project). One example: my best man, the recently retired prof in Carolina who now devotes a great deal more time to his master carpentry. He wrote the Stoics and Epicureans volume (adeptly but somewhat psychic-dissonantly read by the actress Lynn Redgrave). Other volumes are read by Moses (Charlton Heston, I mean).

Where we begin

 Here's where we'll begin each class with a glance at history, literary history, and current events.

How to activate your free digital subscription to the New York Times

Digital access to The New York Times is available to current MTSU students, faculty, and staff. Thanks to the support of the College of Media and Entertainment, Honors College, and Academic Affairs, users have access to regular content of the newspaper as well as archived articles and a large library of videos.

Here's how to do it...

Navigating this site

 It's pretty easy. Use the site searchbox, or open a page searchbox (CTRL-F) and search for the archive in the right sidebar. It's arranged by month, with all the post titles listed. 

The day before each class, look for my post Questions [+ tomorrow's date] and post your thoughts on the day's assigned topics & readings in the comments space at the bottom of the post.

Utopia, dystopia

Utopia means no place, as we were saying... But it's still good to dream and entertain visions of a better world. Unfortunately, dystopia looks a bit more threatening lately.

I mentioned Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward...

And was trying to remember William Morris''s News from Nowhere:

News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris and the only significant English utopia to be written since Thomas More's. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these "Chapters from a Utopian Romance" recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx...

More reading recommendations on the subject (and its opposite):

UTOPIA & DYSTOPIA

The concept of a perfect world has been with us since ancient times, but it was Thomas More, in his book Utopia (1516), who first coined the phrase. The humanist—who went on to become Henry VIII's chancellor and also a Catholic saint—was making a pun in ancient Greek. Utopia is a place (topos) that's both good (eu) but doesn't exist (ou).

Since then utopia and its opposite, dystopia, have inspired countless books as human beings try to make the world a better place, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing in spectacular fashion. As tech policy adviser Mahlet Zimeta reminds us, "It’s worth remembering that utopia is an impossibility, and yet we still feel compelled to think about it a lot."

... fivebooks.com

Just drop an “r”

"…The South is littered with memorial battlefields, state parks and memorials and the federal acreage — 4,600 acres at Chancellorsville, 9,500 acres at Chickamauga, 5,000 at Manassas, 2,500 at Vicksburg, rows of rusting cannon, and then the monstrosity that is Gettysburg, a 6,000-acre junkyard of obsolescent obelisks and meaningless mind-numbing monuments and sentimental statuary, a National Park of Bad Art, so cluttered it's hard to walk through and imagine the ferocious battle that took place. Very few people under the age of 60 care about the war it commemorates, and the junk should all be trucked away to a landfill and the land developed into nice neighborhoods with hiking trails and flower gardens and finally put Pickett's Charge and the Lost Cause behind us and go on to more interesting things. You want a memorial, put up a podium on the spot where Abe Lincoln gave his speech and let visitors press PLAY and listen to it..." GK

This reminded me of our brief discussion in CoPhi yesterday of the problem of Forrest Hall. I have a fix, which I've shared with GK's readers:

The ROTC building on my campus in middle Tennessee, and any number of residential streets hereabouts, still bear the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Old misplaced sentiment dies hard, administrative wheels grind glacially. But this could be a relatively easy fix: just drop an r, and commemorate the trees instead of the racist.

I  once taught a class in Forrest Hall, and had some Opening Day fun with my classroom's militant decor.

 

Several students captured the moment when I raised my flimsy Phillip Toy Mart sword and contradicted the writing on the wall with Brian Cohen's balcony pronouncement: "You don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody. You've got to think for yourselves..." 

 

Gold!

There's an interesting discussion of the fantasy aspect of the California Gold Rush in Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland…

"…On this day in 1848, a man named James Marshall, standing in the South Fork of the American River in northern California, yelled out "Boys, by God, I believe I have found a gold mine!"It was the start of the California Gold Rush…" WA

Questions Jan 25

Questions pertaining to the assigned reading will normally be posted the day before each class. Try to find the answers in the text, and post your thoughts in the comments space below. Some of these questions will be on the exam. Questions pertaining to the recommended texts will appear as bonus questions, with correct answers also earning full credit (a point for each correct answer, up to a total possible of 25).

LHP

1. What kind of conversation was a success, for Socrates, and what did he mean by wisdom?

2. What theory is Plato's story of the cave connected with? Do you think some or all humans are naturally, in some allegorical sense, stuck in a cave?

3. What did Socrates say his inner voice told him? Do you think "inner voice" is literal?

Weiner

1. "Philosopher" means what? Philosophy was what, in ancient Athens? (Introduction) 
2. What did Camus say is the one truly serious philosophical problem? Do you agree?
3. What did Marcus Aurelius need, at dawn, to remind himself of? (And ask me about his morning mantra, which I daily remind myself of.)
4. What was the first question young Needleman experienced? Have you experienced it? Do you think it is a good question? How do you answer it?
5. What kinds of questions most interested Socrates?
6. The Socratic dialogues consisted of what kinds of conversations? Do you enjoy participating in such conversations?
7. What did Socrates say about the unexamined life? What corollaries does Weiner propose? Do you think Socrates was wrong?

And check out:

Virtual tour, map, & glossary of Ancient Athens

"Rescuing Socrates"

Socrates documentaries, podcasts

• 
  

Rec-

HWT

1. What's one of the great unexplained wonders of human history?
2. Do you agree that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others?
3. What was Descartes's "still pertinent" conclusion?
4. Why did the Buddha think speculation about ultimate reality was fruitless? 
5. What aspects of western thought have most influenced global philosophy?
6. What do Africans not have, according to Kwame Appiah?

FL

1. What statement by Karl Rove began to "crystallize" Fantasyland, in Kurt Andersen's mind?

2. What are half of Americans "absolutely certain" about? What do a quarter believe about vaccines?

3. What is Andersen trying to do with this book?

See you in class!

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The gift of time

 And that was the week that was. Don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened.

…In "The Book of (More) Delights," the poet and essayist Ross Gay writes about the gift of time that opens up whenever he unexpectedly arrives at an appointment early, or when the person he plans to meet is running late. Such unplanned changes in agenda can feel, he writes, "like the universe just dropped a bouquet of time, and often a luminous bouquet of time, in your lap."

That's what a snow day feels like here. A snow day in the American South on an overheating planet is exactly like an extravagant bouquet of luminous time that comes out of nowhere and lasts as long as it cares to, on a schedule we cannot entirely predict, much less control. Last week the sky offered an unexpected gift of time. Thank God I had no choice but to take it.

—Margaret Renkl

And be glad it's finally time to get on back to school. Sure was pretty though.

Phones

 Put them away during class. Don't make me bring out the cones.

New Yorker, HuffPo

Deadiines

 They're firm. See the policy statement in the sidebar. 

"Corks" available only in exceptional circumstances, and only for a short time.

Navied Mahdavian, New Yorker

A wealth of podcasts

 There are so many great philosophy-themed podcasts these days, it's been called a Golden Age of public (as distinguished from remote and inaccessible Ivory Tower) philosophy. Philosophize This! is good. And In Our Time... History of Philosophy without any gaps... And the Overthink podcast, also on YouTube. Here's their recent episode on the great French pre- and anti-Descartes essayist Montaigne, on friendship. (Do you have favorite philosophy-oriented podcast recommendations to share?)

Nigel Warburton, author of Little History of Philosophy

His long-running podcast (with David Edmonds), featuring short conversations with contemporary philosophers: Philosophy Bites...

His "favourite philosophers":

 

Hannah Arendt

Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

https://www.threads.net/@openculture/post/C2GN3N4Snaj/

Socrates Express author Eric Weiner

Here's a nice Zoom-facilitated conversation with Socrates Express author Eric Weiner. (Thanks for sharing, Ed). We'll be reading and discussing his early chapters next week. [There's an expanded version of this at substack...]

 

I've enjoyed Weiner's previous books, in particular his happiness travelogue The Geography of Bliss (2008). “Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.” Maybe "the greatest source of happiness is other people" (Sartre's "hell" and the wrong other people notwithstanding).

In Socrates Express's Introduction, Weiner mentions The Story of Philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant (1926). That was the first philosophy book I recall reading. Like Weiner's, my curiosity was piqued. And here I am today, anticipating another semester's opportunity to transmit the philosophy virus to a fresh crop of student subjects.

Weiner's first chapter skips ahead (past Socrates et al) to the Roman emperor/stoic Marcus Aurelius. Weiner says he and the emperor share an aversion to early-rising. But Marc's morning meditation inspires me, very much a morning person (I rarely fail to rise before dawn, when I most like to post my blog Up@dawn)... 

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."

That puts things in the right perspective, no matter how big a mess others may be making of their precious privilege. It reminds me to do better, to be a good meliorist--someone committed to doing what he can to make things better, and to be happy doing it. The emperor is thus for me a patron saint of the dawn.

And as Weiner admits, mornings set the tone for the day. For the life. Having a good morning is the best way I've found to get on with the work (at its best indistinguishable from play) of being human.

Another patron saint of morning was Henry David Thoreau, who Weiner and we will get to later. He concluded Walden:

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

So here's hoping the sun melts the snow and ice by Tuesday and we can finally get on with the dawn of our sluggish-to-start semester.  

Opening Day's been postponed again...

 So I had time to have fun in the dentist's chair this morning.

See you on Tuesday the 23d. 🤞

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Quick quiz

Just for fun, and to illustrate how we'll track participation in the course. Good participation will be the difference-maker for you, if your final grade straddles (say) B+ and A-. Good participation will then get you an A. But it's not just about the grade. It's about having fun and learning.

First person to give us a correct answer (in the comments section below) to each of these questions gets an extra "base" (a participation point) on our daily scorecard, which I'll explain in class (just one question to  a customer, this time):

1. What does "philosophy" mean, broken into its etymological components philo- and -sophia?
2. After Socrates, who are the two most famous ancient Greek philosophers? 
3. Which of those two famous ancient Greeks began as a student of the other, before breaking away to found his own school? 
4. What were those schools called?
5. Can you name a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher?
6. Can you name another?
7. Can you name the French philosopher who said Cogito, ergo sum? What does that mean?
8. Can you name the 20th century French Existentialist philosopher who wrote The Second Sex?
9. Can you name the 19th century German philosopher who wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra?
10. Can you name the 20th century German philosopher who wrote about the Nazi war crimes trial, totalitarianism, and natality?
11. What did the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra say he came to proclaim?
12. Can you name the American philosopher who wrote Self-reliance?
13. Can you name the American philosopher who lived in the same town as the author of Self-reliance? What was that town? Where did he go so that he'd not forget to live before he died?
14. Can you name the American philosopher who wrote Principles of Psychology, Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism?
15. What kind of philosophy did the author of Pragmatism say takes the strongest hold on reality? (Look to the top of this page.)
16. Can you name the Indian philosopher of non-violent resistance who inspired MLK Jr.? Can you name another philosopher Dr. King said was an inspiration to him? 
17. Can you identify the lake and mountain at the top of Dr. Oliver's personal blog? 
18. Can you name the contemporary American philosopher who spoke at MTSU in the James Union Building last February, and who is currently running for President of the United States?

The day before each class, look for my posted Questions for that date. Post your thoughts (not simply the answers you find in the text) about as many of them as you like, and take a "base" for each posted comment. But NOTE: you have to get to first base before you can claim extra bases, and the only way to do that is to come to class. Your goal should be to "score a run" in every class: show up, and claim 2d base, 3d base, and then come home to score. (If you haven't guessed, your professor is a fan of the game that calls itself our national pastime.)

 

Again: don't forget to scroll down to Introductions and tell us who you are and why you're here.

Texts

REQUIRED:

• Nigel Warburton, LITTLE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY [full text linked in sidebar]
• Susan Neiman, WHY GROW UP: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
• John Kaag, SICK SOULS, HEALTHY MINDS: How William James Can Save Your Life
• Kieran Setiya, LIFE IS HARD: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way
• Eric Weiner, THE SOCRATES EXPRESS: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

(The ones you'll need right away: Warburton & Weiner... and of the recommended, Andersen and Baggini. Feel free to get audio and/or etext versions if you prefer.)

RECOMMENDED (and available for 3-day checkout at the library, on reserve): 

• Kurt Andersen, FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
• Julian Baggini, HOW THE WORLD THINKS: A global history of philosophy
• John Kaag & J. van Belle, BE NOT AFRAID OF LIFE: In the Words of William James
• Robert Richardson, THREE ROADS BACK: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives

   

Don't forget to scroll down to Introductions and tell us who you are and why you're here.

Introductions

The Spring '24 semester, scheduled to begin January 16, has been postponed by the weather. See you on  Thursday. Students, introduce yourselves in the comments section below. Who are you? Why are you here (at this school, in this course, on this earth...)? Include your section # (1, 2, or 3). See you TuesThursday.

 

Dr. Oliver

300 James Union Building (JUB)

phil.oliver@mtsu.edu *

* A note on OFFICE HOURS:

Spring '24 T/Th 11:15 am--12:45 pm on campus (in 300 JUB or at another designated location, call to confirm location before coming in)...  (615) 898-2050... (615) 525-7865-only during office hours please. Other days on Zoom, by appointment.

Honors 218

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Writing Center

The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center (UWC) team is looking forward to the spring semester! Trained writing tutors are available both in-person and online to support students writing D2L discussion board posts, dissertations, and everything in between...

The Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center is located in LIB 362 and online at www.mtsu.edu/writing-center. Here, students can receive valuable  (and FREE!) one-to-one assistance in person or online on writing projects for any course. Please make your appointment by stopping by LIB 362, calling 615-904-8237, or visiting the UWC website. Visit early and often! 

Below are some other suggestions for making the UWC a part of your course:

 The UWC is a place for ALL writers, regardless of level or writing experience.  

-We help at all stages of the writing process. We recommend that students come to the UWC for at least two visits for each writing assignment. Multiple visits allow students to address a variety of concerns, such as development, content, organization, and grammar.

- Students with assignment sheets in hand are more likely to have productive sessions that help them to meet their needs as writers. Additionally, tell students that we provide a peer-audience for writers, offering thoughtful, knowledgeable feedback throughout the writing process in order to help students grow their skills and become more confident, independent writers.

-Online and nontraditional students are encouraged to attend online sessions if they cannot come to campus. We offer both synchronous and asynchronous online sessions. 

-Clear and ethical written and spoken communication (written/spoken by you, not AI)  is imperative.

-Students who are working on long-term projects or specific writing goals are encouraged to set up a Writing Partnership. Writing Partnerships allow students to work once a week at the same day and time with the same writing consultant. Find more information about Writing Partnerships here.

-Request a UWC class visit early in the semester or at the beginning of a major writing assignment. Sometimes seeing a friendly face makes the difference in getting students to seek help. Request a class visit here.

How else can the UWC support your student writers this semester?  

We also support writers through course-specific or assignment-specific 45-minute writing workshops. Please take a look at our workshop request page for more information. 

We look forward to working with all students!