The Writing Center

The Writing Center is a free academic support service sponsored through the Humanities Division that allows students to work one-on-one with trained assistants on any aspect of their writing project. Most of our clients are students who are working on class assignments. We generally help students:

• grasp the assignment and what it requires of them
• understand how their own writing is and isn‘t working
• learn strategies for writing tasks (how to brainstorm, organize, etc.
• practice the art of revision in both re-seeing and rewriting

Our approach to assisting, then, is first and last to ask questions and help student writers to discover their own purpose for writing and means by which this purpose can be best achieved. In the best case, this process becomes a habit of mind which students subsequently practice on their own. We aim at rendering ourselves unnecessary to the student in the future when he or she acquires the habits of being able to think through a topic, organize ideas, anticipate and counter objections or questions, illustrate by data or example, check and repair sentences and so on. To that end, we strongly urge students to make multiple appointments for each writing assignment they bring to us. A single visit is of much less value in the long term than multiple visits.

If there exists a misconception about The Writing Center, it is that it functions primarily a proofreading service, that we provide a sort of one-hour martinizing to "clean up" student papers. That is not what we do. Everything we do is aimed at empowering the student writer to write effectively without our intervention, and proofreading students‘ papers for them would be counter to this aim. In view of our limited time and resources, we try to concentrate efforts where they will do the most long-term good. For example, we would ask, “How can you make this paragraph more coherent or persuasive?” as opposed to “Which pronoun case is used before a gerund?” This does not mean that we do not address grammar and punctuation problems, because we do. We work with students to help them recognize and correct their errors and patterns of error as well as introducing them to useful proofreading techniques.