CWC – FAQs

The Centre for Writing and Communication (CWC) works closely with the academic community at Ashoka University, to develop interdisciplinary writing and communication skills and build critical thinking competence. Our support includes one-on-one consultations, core academic workshops, course and discipline-specific workshops and English Language Learning.

Sessions are highly dialogic, focusing on students’ explanations and tutors’ questions and suggestions. They can also include short writing tasks. Feel free to take running notes during the session!

These sessions cover the following components:

• Ideating for arriving at an outline that can be used to structure your draft when you begin writing.
• Becoming proficient in drafting focused thesis statements.
• Revising and editing for focus and clarity and learning how to write concisely.
• Restructuring where necessary to make the draft more streamlined.
• Discussing good writing practices and useful techniques for argumentative and persuasive writing.
• Learning how to ensure a smooth transition between arguments using signal phrases.
• Understanding how to properly back all claims with evidence for greater credibility.
• Learning how to use sources, and build on research, both primary and secondary sources.
• Working on grammar and punctuation to ensure well-written papers.

Yes, CWC has an interdisciplinary team with ample research experience. They regularly publish their work at various academic portals, and they are well equipped to guide students with all formats of academic and research writing. This support can be in the form of one-on-one appointments or in the form of schools and workshops the centre holds for students writing a thesis. Each year, the centre holds a Winter School on Research Writing for students at Ashoka University (ASP, Masters and PhD). The centre also has a Summer School on Research Writing open to both Ashoka and non-Ashoka audiences.

Yes. The support is provided through (i) courses that the centre offers and (ii) regular one-on-one sessions. The centre also provides discipline-specific English language support where a student can seek reading and writing support for a specific course that they are enrolled in.

CWC tutors and fellows are capable of providing feedback across disciplines and courses. During your session, you can work on brainstorming, clarity of argumentation, structure, and flow. The sessions are not designed to evaluate or comment on the technical concepts in the paper. Please speak to your TF/ Professor/ peer tutor for any questions regarding discipline-specific content/ “material”.

To book an appointment, you must first register on the MyWCO portal with your Ashoka email ID. Please note: without first registering, your email ID will not appear in the drop-down email menu and you will not be able to book an appointment. You can also watch this video guide: Booking Appointments with CWC.

All fellows and tutors can guide transferable writing skills. However, if there is someone with a particular interest area/ disciplinary orientation you would like to speak with, please see the tutor profiles on our website.

CWC helps everyone with an active Ashoka ID (except alumni): regular and exchange students, staff members, researchers, faculty, etc. across all disciplines and levels.

Students can book appointments at a frequency suited to their needs. At the same time, students should book appointments keeping in mind the time required to incorporate the feedback received.

You may not book appointments with different tutors on the same writing task/ query. However, you can book with different tutors for different tasks.

CWC is not open on weekends. We work during the academic semester, from Monday to Friday, 10 am to 5.30 pm. The last appointment can be booked at 4.30 pm.

All CWC appointments take place in person. When you book an appointment you are expected to arrive five minutes before your appointment. The Centre is located on the third floor of the Administration Building.

You don’t need a written piece to come to CWC. You can visit us even in the pre-writing or ideation stage. You may also book CWC appointments for sustained support in critical thinking, and academic and professional writing. CWC instructors are also equipped to provide feedback on creative writing.

Ashokans can seek help with any queries related to writing and communication, including papers, presentations, writing for popular media, creative writing, college and job applications, and personal pieces they wish to publish or improve.

Yes. The centre provides sustained academic writing support. You can visit the centre and we will design a plan as per your needs and specific requirements where you can meet a tutor on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Yes, it is recommended that as you begin writing an essay or working on an assignment, you schedule an appointment with CWC, so that you can gain clarity on your idea and/or argument. These sessions will primarily support you in brainstorming and narrowing down your argument so that you can begin the process of writing with ease. More importantly, brainstorming and ideation sessions will help ensure you are not over-reliant on AI, particularly Chatbots to write your essays and assignments.

Yes, CWC can address specific queries related to academic integrity and ethics, including how to avoid plagiarism and cite correctly. All incoming undergraduate students will also take a mandatory Introductory Course on Academic Integrity & Ethics. In addition to this course, students can book an appointment to resolve any queries they may have in the area. Please note that CWC cannot help students with a plagiarism check. However, they can support students to learn and practice effective strategies for avoiding plagiarism in their assignments including ethical use of Chatbots.

CWC tutors can provide general advice (and caveats) on the ethical use of AI with your classroom policy on using AI, especially Chatbots.

Yes. You may book an appointment with a CWC instructor for a one-on-one session addressing difficulties you may be experiencing while reading your class-assigned texts. We also conduct academic workshops on critical reading to help students develop the relevant skills crucial to their education at Ashoka.

CWC can provide writing feedback on a piece of work you may want to publish. However, for publication, students need to approach publishing venues on their own.

The centre does not teach course material or edit/proofread your documents for you.

Yes, any faculty member or student society can reach out to the CWC for workshops related to any aspect of interdisciplinary writing and communication.

CWC policy does not allow us to share presentations. But you can ask for reading resources after a workshop. Moreover, if it is an academic writing or critical thinking workshop, you can also schedule appointments with a CWC tutor, who can cover the material with you on an individual basis.

Students can book an appointment with a CWC tutor or fellow using the MyWCOnline portal. As a faculty member, you can recommend students book a session with CWC or attend our workshops. You may also invite us to conduct a CWC orientation session for them.

CWC instructors provide feedback on academic and professional writing, including (but not limited to) academic integrity, ethics, citations and statement of purpose. In academic writing, discussions are largely oriented towards helping students develop a transferable reading and writing toolkit by sharing useful strategies and practices, including writing style and tone. It is recommended that Faculty members mention the critical reading and writing support CWC provides in their course outlines/syllabus. 

Students can book appointments to develop and deepen their critical thinking and reading skills, including citation and academic integrity. One-on-one consultations also extend to genres like Statement of Purpose, Cover Letter, and Resume. The sessions cover the following stages in the writing process: 

• Pre-writing: Ideation and brainstorming sessions to help students understand their prompts thoroughly, outline their ideas, and structure their writing. Resources and templates are also shared. 
• Thesis statement: Sessions focus on establishing background and context for a clear, concise thesis statement. Students learn to succinctly convey the purpose of their writing by identifying the main topic and establishing their paper’s positionality. 
• Claims & Evidence: Emphasis on supporting claims with evidence and specificity in writing. 
• Conclusion: Students understand how to craft concise, persuasive summaries, with examples of effective conclusions. 
• Transition and flow: Students learn to structure arguments for seamless transitions, avoiding abrupt shifts in style and tone. They are introduced to signal and transition phrases to write more cohesively. 
• Grammar and punctuation: Sessions focus on syntax, grammar, vocabulary, consistent tense usage, punctuation, determiners, and connectors. 
• Using sources: Students are taught how to summarise, paraphrase, and integrate sources effectively, as well as build on primary and secondary sources productively. 
• Citation: Discussion on academic originality and citation styles like MLA, APA, and Chicago, with examples via Purdue OWL. We are also equipped to help students to understand the ethical limits and possibilities of using Artificial Intelligence for their assignments.
• Revising and Editing: Students learn how to revise and edit using a checklist.

Yes, CWC can support students and develop their skills for critical and interdisciplinary writing. CWC instructors are trained in varied disciplines and have substantial research expertise. As experienced writers in various academic and popular fields, they are equipped to handle queries regarding critical thinking and writing across disciplines and genres. The profiles of CWC instructors are available on our website here.

Yes, throughout the academic year, CWC holds workshops emphasising academic writing and critical thinking skills stressing on listening, reading, speaking and writing skills. Examples of past workshops include “Critical Dreading: Reading without Fear”, “Critical Listening in the Classroom”, “They Say/I Say: Discussions in the Classroom”, and “Writing Academic Essays: Breaking down prompts and structure” among others. We also hold workshops on writing Statements of Purpose and Grant Writing. These workshops are advertised through posters, emails and our social media channels. Faculty can encourage their students to attend workshops to improve academic writing and critical thinking skills.  

Yes, CWC can develop modules and workshops to meet critical writing, reading and communication needs in your classroom. All courses involve reading, writing and communication whether one is reading texts, working with visuals or writing commentaries on equations. The faculty may consider embedding modules on reading, writing, and communication as part of their courses – this has the advantage of meeting the course objectives along with improving students’ academic writing skills. CWC works with the faculty to design these modules. 

We have held workshops on academic integrity and citation, how to respond to essay prompts, and structuring your assignments, essays and dissertations to more specific workshops on critical reading of discipline-specific texts, writing with data and images, visual representation of data, and approaching a research proposal. We have worked across the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, Physics, Visual Arts, Environmental Studies, Media Studies, the Young India Fellowship, and The Centre for Studies for Gender and Sexuality (CSGS). 

Yes, faculty members at Ashoka University can mandate sessions for students with CWC, to ensure essays are submission-ready. This includes analysing and recognizing various choices – formal, tonal, organizational, and rhetorical – and relating them to the goals of writing class assignments. In these sessions, students work with CWC instructors to ensure they have responded to their prompts adequately, and have a clear structure, and logical argumentation while following the principles of academic integrity. Faculty members can integrate CWC consultations as part of their assessment by coordinating with CWC beforehand. 

Yes, the centre can work with students requiring long-term academic writing support through tailored plans and resources. Based on student needs and availability, these sessions take place on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, spanning a semester or the academic year. Following an initial goal-setting meeting, the sessions methodically address elements of academic writing, including close reading, note-taking, formulating effective research questions, crafting theses, and more, utilising their coursework or writing exercises. 

Yes, CWC holds a Winter School and Summer School on Research Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and schools on Research Writing in the Sciences. The Winter School is held offline on the Ashoka University campus for ASP, Masters and PhD students. The Summer School is held online for audiences at Ashoka University and beyond. These schools cover broad elements of rhetoric and composition for writing a thesis across different levels of graduate study. They also include workshops on writing for publication, research ethics, and editing and proofreading. Additionally, the Winter and Summer Schools also include workshops on niche areas of research writing, expanding on specific needs. Examples of these workshops include “The Diary in Humanities” “ Feminist Research” and “Artistic Responses to Forced Migration and Displacement”. Faculty members should encourage their students to attend the Winter and Summer School Programmes. 

CWC provides support for students who may need assistance with English language proficiency to succeed in their academic endeavours. We work closely with the students, Faculty and the Teaching Fellows (TFs), to support individual students’ reading, writing and communication. Faculty members may expect communication from CWC at the beginning of an academic semester informing them of any student who is already on the centre’s regular English language support. We encourage faculty members to work with our English language teaching programme to ensure the student’s meaningful engagement with the course. To learn more on how you can support your students in English Language Learning, refer to CWC’s instructive document here. 

Here are some ways to identify students who may need support: 

• In the case of speaking, when the student does not participate and is mostly a passive listener, or speaks but is highly diffident, this could be because of a problem with English. Intelligible but grammatically incorrect sentences and unintelligible and grammatically incorrect sentences will hint that the student needs support with language. 
• In writing, instances of missing articles (a, and, the), incomplete sentences, incorrect use of punctuation marks, incorrect or non-existent verb forms and use of inappropriate synonyms (often with the help of a thesaurus but without understanding the contextual meaning) will tell the TA/TF that the student is struggling to express themselves in English. 

We suggest Faculty members write to us at cwc@ashoka.edu.in regarding any such student in your course so that we can work together to ensure inclusive learning.

CWC holds pedagogy workshops for Teaching Fellows, Teaching Assistants and Ashoka Staff and Faculty. The emphasis in these workshops is on creating inclusive classrooms for linguistically diverse students. Discussions cover thoughtful vocabulary choice, alternative texts, the use of students’ first language, and assessment strategies. The sessions aim to rethink pedagogy to better engage students with varying English proficiency, recognizing the limitations of a one-size-fits-all teaching approach. Additionally, CWC can work with Teaching Fellows and PhD students on a one-on-one basis to advice on designing course outlines and classroom discussions.

Yes, CWC offers workshops and courses to external departments and institutions. CWC faculty, with their diverse expertise, teach academic, research and professional writing across humanities, social sciences, and science backgrounds. CWC has previously conducted sessions with CEPT University Ahmedabad, University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi, IISER Pune, University of Kashmir, Christ University Bangalore, Gauhati University, Haryana Chief Minister’s Good Governance Associates (CMGGA), Indian Sociological Society (ISS) among others. 

To work with us in your classrooms or with your students, please visit us or write to us: 

Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University 

Third Floor, Administration Building 

Email: cwc@ashoka.edu.in 

Website: https://www.ashoka.edu.in/page/centre-for-writing-and-communication/