The Write Site
The Write Site is the UFS undergraduate writing centre. We aim to help students on an individual level with their academic writing needs. Our writing consultants are trained to identify students’ individual writing needs and work with them to become better academic writers, as well as produce improved assignments. The services at the Write Site are free of charge, and students are encouraged to visit us as often as possible for assistance with their writing tasks throughout their studies at the UFS.

Additionally, the Write Site works collaboratively with content lecturers across faculties to meet students’ subject-specific writing needs. Discussions with content specialists inform the development of tailor-made online and face-to-face workshop materials that prepare students to complete specific assignments. The online workshops enable the writing centre to reach large cohorts of students and work around capacity and venue limitations. Furthermore, students can work through the online materials at their own pace. All workshop materials include authentic, discipline-specific texts that address academic writing aspects such as the structure of specific text types, thesis statement formulation, development of academic arguments, paragraph formulation, synthesis, paraphrasing and summarising, and referencing.


We, therefore, support students in the following ways:

• One-to-one writing consultations
• Group consultations
• Online workshops
• Face-to-face workshops

Contact details

The Critical Academic Literacies (CAL) Courses
The CAL courses are designed to support students studying across the disciplines. These courses focus on writing guided academic assignments for the purpose of developing students’ writing ability in various discourses. They also emphasise intensive and extensive reading, and listening and note-taking practices as vital to developing academic skills. Students are introduced to a variety of topics relevant to the respective disciplines through a faculty-specific and resource-based approach. 

Although our focus is on reading and writing, the overall outcomes of the courses are to help students develop:

• Critical reading skills (the ability to extract the main ideas and key details of an academic text);
• Academic writing skills (the ability to express information and opinions clearly and with appropriate organisation in the written mode);
• Oral skills (the ability to express opinions about a variety of issues fluently, critically, as well as creatively in the mode of oral discussion); 
• Critical thinking skills (the ability to apply, analyse, and/or evaluate information); and
• Listening and note-taking skills (the ability to collect and organise important ideas).