MLK, Jr. Day holiday closing

Image via Walden University's Twitter post.

The Writing Center is closed on Monday, January 19, 2015, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Our services will resume on Tuesday.

Welcome to the new Writing Center website!

Writing Center staff, August 2014. Photo ©Walden University Writing Center.

We're excited to launch our new website at http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter. The Writing Center staff has spent a lot of time rethinking, reorganizing, and streamlining the content on the website to make it more useful. Please take a look around and familiarize yourself with the new menu options. You should be able to find most pages from the old website carried over into the new website. You can search for content in the search bar in the top right corner of each page or consult the spreadsheet that maps URLs from the old website to the new website.


Here are some changes and exciting features of the new website:

• In reorganizing the website, we changed the menu options at the top of the page to reflect the range of our services and instructional content more accurately. This change means that some pages you are used to finding in one particular part of the website may have moved to another place on the website. We also kept in mind how students use our site and included quick links to key features of the website (blue buttons on the left side of the homepage). The main menu options are: Writing Help, Grammar & Composition, Scholarly Writing, APA Style, and About.
• Our new content management system has responsive website design, which means that the website will automatically adapt to the screen size of your browser, whether you are on a desktop computer with a large screen, a tablet with a medium-sized screen, or a smartphone with a small screen. The new website is much easier to browse and search on mobile devices.
• The new website no longer has a quick link button on the homepage for Turnitin. That resource moved to the Academic Skills Center website earlier last year, and you should update your bookmarks: http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/ASCtii.
• The website search feature (in the top right corner of the screen) includes search results from our extensive blog posts. You can still filter your results to see only website content (or only blog content), but this dual-search feature makes a lot of instructional content more readily available.

 For those of you interested, here are a few of the main reasons for moving to the new website:

• The old website was created over 6 years ago with a few dozen pages and had grown to over 200 pages and downloadable documents. It was time to reorganize the content to reflect the new, broader scope of website.
• The old website is maintained in an outdated content management system that is no longer supported by the company that created it. The new website uses an up-to-date system with a highly responsive provider that deals with bugs and other problems quickly.
• Due to the way the content blossomed on the old website and the logistics of the old content management system, there are outdated pages of information and downloadable files that still are accessible to people with direct URLs. However, they have not been actively maintained in years and sometimes contain inaccurate information. The new website includes only actively  maintained content.

The old website will remain accessible for the next few months to allow time for everyone to update bookmarks. You can also leave feedback about the new site online.

New Year holiday

Photo © Melissa Wolff.

The Writing Center will be closed on Thursday, January 1, 2015, for New Year's Day. We will return on January 2.

Winter holidays closing

Snowflake image by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (public domain).

Walden University's Writing Center will be closed on Thursday, December 25, 2014, for the winter holidays. Have a safe and wonderful time off!

Preview of new website

Photo © Rob Brewer.

This past year, the Writing Center staff has been busy reorganizing the website in preparation for a move to a new content management system. We are excited to announce that the new website is now ready for preview and will officially launch in early 2015.

Come take a look at the new site!: http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter.

Thanksgiving holiday closing

Photo © Ben Franske.

The Writing Center will be closed on Thursday and Friday this week, November 27 and 28, 2014. Enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday!

Turnitin maintenance and intermittent downtime

From the Turnitin Team:

Turnitin service may be intermittently unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, October 11, 2014, from 7 AM to 11 AM U.S. Pacific Time.