Stories

Helping Walden students do their best writing is a passion for Dr. Laurel Walsh, a faculty member in The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership. Through an investigation of capstone quality, she and her Walden colleagues discovered that students made very few changes to their academic writing based on boilerplate, cut-and-paste APA-rule edits. What did inspire them to make changes were comments and suggestions that were more like a conversation between reader and writer. Walsh and her colleagues used that approach to create a set of best practices for faculty reviewers and editors. “When I’m mentoring faculty and working in the classroom, I still use the insights we discovered creating those best practices,” she says.