Dr. Michelle Hartley

Lecturer

Phone: 4371
Email: mhartley@uwo.ca

An award-winning professor of Canadian Literature, Children’s Literature and Writing for the last fifteen years at Western and its affiliates, Dr. Hartley is the department’s first full-time faculty member in Writing.

“Students may convince themselves that they are not ‘writers,’ but most of us will write every day in our personal and professional lives. We need to remember that writing is not natural: writing is learned. We can improve. Current trends in writing research help us to question our assumptions about the seemingly natural division between ‘good writing’ or ‘good writers’ and ‘bad writing’ and ‘bad writers.’ Therefore, the question for any writing, a question to which the Writing program and The Write Place are committed, is how can we make that writing better? When students figure out how to ask and answer that question for themselves, they become writers.”