As you read through the posts of this website, you will gradually understand why we decided to write about academic writing and writing centers in the MENA region. The concepts related to teaching academic writing, proper citations and writing centers are almost foreign to the region. These concepts were brought to the region mostly as part of the Western model of higher education roughly three decades ago. Since that time, they have been perceived in different ways and have faced several challenges. 

                  The challenges are largely due to cultural, linguistic, and academic reasons. In Arabic, writing is perceived differently than it is in English. Arabs value redundancy and consider it a sign of good style. It is all about rich vocabulary and multiple synonyms. Expressions like I saw it with my eyes are not seen as redundant, but rather the addition of the phrase my eyes is valued as a way of clarification and emphasis. Classical poetry in Arabic abides with examples where an object or concept is referred to using multiple names in the same instance. It is also common to state the meaning once in the affirmative and then follow this with the negation of its opposite. Zakariyya’ al-Qazwini discussed the different kinds and uses of redundancy in his book Clarification in Rhetorical Studies.  

Linguistically speaking, Arabs are fond of long sentences where the conjunction ‘and’ generously appears leading to sentences that can reach four or five lines. Finally, the absence of a standardized citation style that is developed according to the morphology of Arabic makes most researchers adopt the available citation manuals like MLA or APA with some variations in their research.

Perceptions of the WTC vary widely across the different institutions in the MENA region. WTC’s are seen as a prestigious component in some institutions, a support center in others, and in some cases as a burden imposed by the Western model. In some places it is perceived as a place for weak writers to seek help; students who do not know how to write well or who produce bad papers are required to go to the WTC; some faculty may even warn their students that they should not go there because it is a place for weak writers where they go and get extensive help on how to draft their assignments. In some institutions, it is perceived as part of academic support services, a place for special needs students; in others, it is considered part of the English Department, while a third group of institutions thinks of this as an unnecessary luxury. Such wide and sometimes even contradictory perspectives have encouraged us to try to explore this rich region and shed light on the conditions and attitudes surrounding centers.