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I live basically for the ah-ha moments. It's that moment when you're working with the
students
and all of a sudden the principle that you've been working out sometimes
repeatedly or sometimes just in that session
and all of a sudden they recognize it as they're going through the paper, and its that
oh, there it is!
That's how it is! That right there is just... it's one of the
greatest rewards to do in this. The Writing Center is primarily
collaborative effort to produce stronger self-editors. The real importances of students coming
to the Writing Center
is that students, no matter what their background is,
if you've been out of school for a while, if you're coming from high school, there
is different audience that you have to write for.
The benefit at the Writing Center it's made of coaches, who have already written
for or are writing for the same professors,
have seen the prompts. And so they have benefit of a wealth of knowledge that
can help students
make that connection and help learn how to write for that audience.
Basically, the Writing Center offers everything from brainstorming a paper,
asking questions about the research questions, what you should look for,
how to narrow your
research down... to the final draft where you're looking at
evaluating for voice, making sure that your thesis is strong and
concise. Often times, students coming to the Writing Center think it's a
proofreading service or editing service
and that's not what we do. Basically, we have a higher order of
concerns that we go through in terms of looking at the paper. Is your
thesis is answering the assignment prompt things like that. We also work on formatting...
there's basically anything that will help you strengthen your writing
is something that we will do. Because the Writing Center has
the phone that we can work through for distance students and now with the
introduction of Wimba,
we really have shrunk the gap for distance students and we've actually introduced
Wimba sessions for writing center workshops as well. Once you're in the session,
then we'll go page by page, paragraph by paragraph to evaluate the
paper. Typically we like to have you read the paper out loud.
When students read papers out loud, they're more likely to catch their own mistakes.
And that hopes to build into the club with a becoming stronger self editor.