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About the Writing Center

 

Greetings from the Director.

 

Thank you for your interest in our work.  It is often hard to communicate what a writing center actually does, so I appreciate the time you’ve taken to learn more about our services.  From the outside, it is easy to assume our work is of a remedial nature and that only people who have “writing problems” would use our services. Without question, the biggest misperception about writing centers is that they are places where weak writers go for help. But the truth is that writing centers exist for writers at all levels of skill. All writers need readers for their work and, fundamentally, that is what our writing center provides – trained, invested, and experienced readers who can provide honest feedback, ask and answer questions, and prod thinking along.

 

Meeting the needs of the reader should be the primary consideration of any writer, and yet under the pressure of school assignments, deadlines, and evaluation, this is easy to forget.  In fact, readers are so important to your developing work that, as a general rule, your professor should never be your first and only reader. Writers benefit from preliminary readers who can help them understand how a piece of writing is received and how it might be revised for the best result.  But you should also choose your readers wisely.  Sometimes your roommate, or mother, or best friend is not the most effective source for feedback.  While well intentioned, these readers frequently lack the critical engagement and training necessary to give you the kind of feedback you really need. Our Writing Center consultants are trained to provide you with the right kind of feedback – whether it is about content development, organization, or writing style and correctness. Our one-on-one, thirty minute consultations help writers conceptualize and develop ideas, manage the demands of academic writing, revise papers for depth and clarity and learn how to recognize and resolve writing errors. We also work with writing across disciplines, so we can be helpful to writers in any class and at any level.  

 

We believe that writing is about so much more than just writing. The actual writing that you do is simply the visible end of a largely invisible process that you conduct -  sometimes alone and sometimes with others. The mental energy that you spend thinking about what to write, for example, is part of the writing process.  Talking to others about your assignments and what you are learning is also part of the writing process. And it’s this last thing – talking – that we believe has the greatest potential to improve the overall quality of the written product.  Conversation is a powerful form of prewriting, but it is something that writers often neglect. Just having a conversation about your ideas can go a long way toward improving your writing. In fact, writing teacher and scholar Kenneth Bruffee calls conversation “the origin of thought” and notes that conversation stimulates reflective and critical thinking. We experience and learn in “direct social exchange with other people,” writes Brufee (208).  We rarely do our very best thinking alone.  It often takes other peoples’ perspectives and opinions to spark in us new and deeper ways of seeing something. Think, for example, when you listen to other people in class or in general conversation, how many times you have said to yourself, “Gee.  I never thought of it that way before.”  Thus, we learn and think through social exchange. The ideas we develop and eventually write down in our academic papers are in large measure the result of these experiences and interactions with others.  

 

This notion of conversation, the critical role of social dialogue in both learning and writing, guides the way our writing center operates. We like to talk to students about their ideas and their writing and so we train consultants to be good facilitators, to use questioning to help writers clarify their thinking and to use conversation to guide them through the writing process.

 

In our experience, when students come to the center close to assignment due dates - at that final “editing” stage – our range for feedback is limited, reducing many options for revision and improvement.  Students benefit the most from our consultations when they make it a habit to come to the center more than once. These students come at the beginning for brainstorming and planning, in the middle for developing and organizing, and then at the end for revising, editing, and proofreading. 

 

I hope you will consider making the Writing Center an important part of your writing process. 

 

Patty Strong, Director

prstrong@vcu.edu

(804) 827-8109

 

Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Peer Tutoring and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" Writing Center Theory and Practice. Ed. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner. Neidham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. 206 - 219.