Muriel "Mickey" Harris

Specialization

Rhetoric & Composition

Research Areas:
Writing Center center theory, practice, and administration

She joined the Purdue faculty in 1976 as an assistant professor. Collaborating with several graduate students, she started the Purdue Writing Lab and began theorizing writing center scholarship and tutorial approaches, plus developing instructional materials for student and faculty use. Those materials were later revised and made available on the Purdue website as the Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab). The Purdue OWL is currently visited annually by several million users across the globe. Harris’ research focuses on tutorial collaboration in writing, differences in individual writing processes, writing center theory and practice, and political and public perception of writing centers. She initiated and continues to serve as editor of the first journal for writing center scholarship, now entitled WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Harris’ books include Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference, The Prentice Hall Reference Guide (9th ed.), and Writer’s FAQs (6th ed.)