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There's a valuable resource tucked away in the basement
of the Quad Cities campus of Western Illinois University of Moline.
Whether you need assistance developing your ideas for a research paper
or help polishing a resume or fine tuning an article for publication.
When you come downstairs to the Western Illinois University writing center at the Quad Cities campus,
you'll find professional tutors ready to offer their assistance.
For a regional center it's very unique
and as Western Illinois University Quad Cities grows to a full-fledged campus,
it will be a predominant feature of our campus.
Writing centers are great. They promote academic excellence.
They give educational opportunity. They help people personally grow.
Anything we can do to encourage using the writing center from the beginning
using it as a developmental tool rather than a life preserver.
Because I see it as a developmental tool.
Some students see it as a life preserver.
They only want to come the last week before the paper's due and say, "Fix my paper."
That's what I'd encourage.
I'd encourage the smartest way to use the writing center is to start from the beginning.
Start with developing your thesis statement.
Developing your structure. Then get into how do you paraphrase,
How do you use your sources.
And that's the best way to get the benefit out of it.
We tend to think when we're writing, and I'm saying I do this too.
There is a writing as discovery to use
the way you were putting it.
Which is exactly the way I would too. Stage.
And that just kind of spills out.
Not everybody does it. I mean some people do sit down and just think and then write,
and we hate them, but that's, you know people are able to do that.
But, most of us have to spill it all out,
and then good. Now you've got your ideas. Probably at the end.
Maybe you had some good ones along the way that you didn't develop,
you just spilled them out and then developed them.
The writing center, just like the faculty,
needs to-will help students go back,
find those pieces and reassemble this along the lines that that artificial assignment requires.
I'm always emphasizing the same two things with all of our writers
regardless of their expertise with writing.
The importance of audience.
That makes any piece of writing for any writer very very genuine and very real.
To have in mind a very specific audience.
You know, and to adjust their writing,
their diction, their style, word choice, everything.
In order to reach that audience.
And the other thing I find myself emphasizing is true, authentic revision.
That's revision where we rewrite, rethink, re-envision
what we're writing from top to toe.
Most writers will skip that stage. They'll draft.
They'll go through the process of drafting.
And then they'll skip the...what I think of as authentic revision,
and they'll skip over that to editing and proof reading.
So those two aspects of writing are why I keep coming back to, as for me,
the most crucial things for writers to be aware of to become better writers,
to become successful writers.
The main idea that the humanities shares with the writing center is the idea of the writing process.
That when you are assigned a research paper, that is not something you start the night before,
but that you start weeks in advance,
even a whole semester in advance.
and the writing center at the Western Illinois University Quad Cities has that same philosophy.
They're not here to proofread their papers,
but they're here to make them better writers.
And I would say nine times out of ten that people have come back.
Not just with a better paper, but will be better writers of papers down the road.
And quite frankly there's been a couple students if they didn't spend just as much time down here
with the tutors and mentors in the writing center as they did with me,
they probably would have never successfully completed their action research project.
The way I can tell-the most obvious way is the papers are stronger. Generally speaking.
The other way that I can tell is that when I talk with the students, I can hear them talking about revision.
And that's the key idea that has become something that they
feel comfortable about when they think about writing a paper.
Is that, this is not-when I write that first paragraph it's not as if I'm
chiseling the Ten Commandments and it can never be erased.
This is just the start. It will be revised,
and so they've had a conversation or multiple conversations with somebody in the writing center.
So when they see me, they are thinking about revision, talking about revision,
not treating each-everything they've written as sacred and not to be changed.
I definitely do get feedback from people who come in regularly.
Which in itself, I think, is feedback.
That people find it worth coming back, time and again.
You know, that yeah, their papers-they feel better about them.
Their professors feel better about them. Yeah, that happens.
If you think you need to come down here, you need to come down here.
Don't wait until you get a less than positive
set of remarks and feedback from a professor here.
It tends to kind of dull your enthusiasm and discourage your efforts.
You know, run it by the writing center.
Like I write at-when I make this recommendation at the bottom of the paper.
I really think you need to use the writing center.
I use it. They're great. I don't what else I can really tell the student,
but to, you know, get down here and use these resources.
This is a dynamic, dynamic staff here,
and they are well able to help all of our clients.
Whether they be undergraduates, graduates, faculty, or alumni.
We have a number of people working in the writing center who are also writers, who are also professors.
So, this is not a matter of imposing a philosophy they are not living themselves. They're already doing that.
Most of our clients are graduate students. Followed by
the undergraduates, upper division graduate students...or undergraduate students.
Followed by alumni who return to work on career writing resumes, cover letters.
And a significant number of faculty come in and use our professional tutors
as what we call "ideal readers" for their publications or reports or presentations.
That's another valuable thing about the writing center here is that
I know that they work with people, including people who aren't even students here,
who are coming in with writing assignments that are for the professional world
or for non-academic kind of writing.
And so the tutors are used to adjusting to meet those demands of whatever the writing context is.
I do a lot of technical writing for the university, and
I have somebody on staff that I work with who, when that person is not available,
Sherie Brigham, the director, would be my first choice.
You'd be foolish not to take advantage of what resources are available down here.
I used it myself.
We just had a pretty major double volume edition of the Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health.
And Sherie was very helpful in helping me craft my arguments and making a contribution to the literature.
I encourage my students to go from the very first day. Some of them do.
I hope more of them will in the future,
and they've been very successful. The students who've made use of the resource.
Because being able to communicate well and elegantly and clearly is something that
there is not enough of in the world today.
And simply pragmatically speaking,
it can certainly help you in any kind of an employment context.
If they're looking at the cover letter
if an employer is looking at the cover letter or the memo or whatever,
of someone who can write well and communicate clearly and someone who can't
then there's not a whole lot of question there about which that employer is going to prefer,
but just sort of beyond that, there's an art to it.
Entirely beyond the bottom line. It can be even, you know, a simple email.
It can be a little work of art if you think about it that way and you want it to be.