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Writing Center: Faculty

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The Writing Center helps students improve their writing by working with them on:

• Logical constructions of paragraphs and sentences,
• Appropriate presentation and organization of academic material,
• Recognizing and learning to resolve patterns of error.

 

The Writing Center helps students become better writers by helping them:

• understand criteria for assignments
• brainstorm and develop ideas
• discover and narrow topics
• understand audience and focus
• learn effective research strategies
• use appropriate resources for proper documentation
• support ideas with convincing and appropriate evidence.

 

Collaborative dialogue with our consultants can become the catalyst to sparking richer more complex ways of thinking. Our consultants ask open-ended questions and invite students to talk about their ideas and their writing assignments.This dialogue helps students clarify ideas and understand how best to present them on paper.

 

Students benefit the most if they plan multiple visits to the center – for brainstorming and planning, for developing and organizing, and then for revising, editing, and proofreading. 

 

Unfortunately, a lot of students come to us close to their due dates --at that final “editing” stage --which limits the range of our feedback and eliminates many options for revision and improvement.

 

For your convenience

Every time a student comes in for a consultation, we ask permission to send a “Writing Center Narrative” to the instructor. If the student agrees, we will send the instructor an e-mail with the student’s name, date of the visit and a brief narrative about the consultation.

 

Here’s what you can do to help

Bring your class to the center.

During the first weeks of the semester, it’s often quite helpful to take a mini “field trip” to the center. You are welcome to come to the center for a tour and brief overview, however, please schedule this in advance. We discourage such visits after the third week of the semester due to the high volume of consultations.

 

Invite us in for a visit

We can visit your class at any time during the semester to explain our services. A Writing Center consultant will present a brief overview of our services and answer questions. This generally takes about 10 minutes. To schedule a visit, please contact Patty Strong, director of the Writing Center, at prstrong@vcu.edu.

 

Talk us up!

Take time early in the semester to discuss the use of the center as a collaborative learning space best used early, not at the last minute. A student who comes in before a full draft is written benefits the most. A student does not need a written product to visit.  Dialogue for clarification, direction and focus can be enormously beneficial.

 

Make the Writing Center part of the learning process

• Require Writing Center consultation as part of the criteria for developing a writing assignment
• Include Writing Center information on your syllabus. Feel free to cut and paste from this site
• Set a Writing Center button on your Blackboard site with a link to our website

 

Do not use the Writing Center punitively

While we can certainly be helpful to struggling writers, presenting the Writing Center as a remedial space discourages those students and undermines our efforts to be of service to the whole VCU community. We are here for all writers, and all writers benefit from our services. We do help students with error correction, but we prefer to tackle these challenges over time, throughout the whole writing process, not after a writing assignment has been turned in and evaluated.

 

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