How can I encourage students to use the Writing Center?
Add a statement to your syllabus about Writing Center services. You may copy and paste this one:
The Marion campus Writing Center offers free help with writing at any stage of the writing process for any member of the OSU-Marion community. Walk-in hours are posted on web site (u.osu.edu/marionwc) and at the Library/Learning Center front desk. Students are encouraged to come early in the process, even before beginning to write, to get help breaking down the assignment into manageable chunks and planning to write.
Invite Writing Center staff to visit your class to give a 5-10 min introduction to Writing Center services. Email the coordinator to set this up.
Describe your own writing process and share with students when and why you seek feedback from others. Demonstrating to students that all writers benefit from early and frequent feedback can help to remove any stigma they might associated with visiting the Writing Center.
How can I best prepare students for a Writing Center visit?
Students often come to the writing center with a vague sense of what they might accomplish in a consulting session—e.g. they want to “fix their grammar” or something similarly broad. This makes it difficult for a consultant to quickly set an agenda with the writer that can productively use the time they have together.
Faculty can help by suggesting a few concrete, manageable goals that a writer might address over a session or series of sessions (and this CAN be sentence/grammatical level issues—but they should be specific and oriented toward long term development, not just general proofreading).
Additionally, faculty can follow up with students referred to the Writing Center by, for instance, asking students to reflect on how they used feedback they got as they revised their work.
My students’ writing is error-riddled. Will you proofread their papers before they turn them in?
No. Consultants do not provide editing or proofreading services, and students may not drop off a paper and pick it up later with corrections. Consultants will, however, teach students to edit and proofread their own work more effectively. Don’t expect them to turn in flawless prose after visiting us, though. Our goal is to help them increase their skills and knowledge, and move toward independence in the writing process. Thus, there’s a limit to the number of different concerns we can address in a single session or a series of sessions.
Do students need an appointment?
While students may make an appointment, they don’t need one. The Writing Center has weekly walk-in hours that can accommodate most students. If you are finding students consistently reporting problems with accessing the Writing Center, please email the coordinator.
Do you do in-class workshops?
The Writing Center operates on a “professional development” model for in-class writing workshops, informed by Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) standards and best practices, with the goal of supporting faculty development of sound pedagogical practices for the teaching of writing in any class. Therefore, faculty should follow this procedure:
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- Well in advance of the desired session, request a workshop by emailing the coordinator with a brief description of your needs and/or goals (topics can be anything from APA style, to reading strategies for difficult texts, to paragraph structures, and so forth)
- The coordinator will set up a meeting to talk about goals & outcomes and begin planning
- It is Writing Center policy that faculty must be present in their classes during any workshop given in conjunction with the Writing Center
- Ideally, over several semesters, faculty will move from an observational to participatory (with support) to independent role in facilitating the workshop.
Should I offer extra credit for visiting the Writing Center?
Faculty are typically discouraged from offering extra credit to students simply for coming to the Writing Center. While such visits might acquaint them with our services and sometimes develop into worthwhile sessions, more typically, students only come to get the points without intent to improve as writers. Furthermore, because the Center operates on a first-come-first-served walk-in basis, their visits can prevent consultants from being able to help students who who have actively and independently chosen to get help. That being said, offering extra credit for a Writing Center visit that includes a reflective statement about the visit can help to create more worthwhile sessions. See the next section for an example.
Can I require students to visit the Writing Center?
Yes, with sufficient scaffolding (and notifying the coordinator).
Faculty members are encouraged to work with the WC to design a reflective writing assignment that accompanies any assignment for which students will be required to visit the WC. Such an assignment would include:
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- Preparing students for their visit by helping them compose a question or two about their drafts to focus on during the session.
- Reflective writing about the session in which students write about what they learned from or accomplished in the session that they will use in revising and/or future writing assignments.
This kind of scaffolding helps our sessions be as productive as possible, teaches students how to seek feedback on their writing and how to determine what to do with that feedback. In other words, it empowers them to take control of the writing process but also teaches them how to do this.
It is typically discouraged for a faculty member to require a class of students to visit the Writing Center as a part of an assignment without such scaffolding. There are both practical and pedagogical reasons for this policy:
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- Required visits overwhelm resources and prevent consultants from being able to accommodate all visitors.
- Students who aren’t invested don’t learn well. When students visit the Writing Center to fulfill a requirement, they often expect to stay for just a few moments to have their paper proofread and have their consultant “rubber stamp” their attendance.
- Writing consultations are more effective when students are personally invested in their own development as writers.
- Requiring visits from an individual student who needs a great deal of help is also discouraged because it often backfires. If students are not ready to seek help on their own, they often will not approach the session with the appropriate mindset to receive help. Encouraging students to visit and providing them with specific goals is a more effective strategy.
Writing Center services are designed to complement and supplement writing instruction in the classroom. If there is a situation in which you believe your whole class needs help with a writing topic or skill, please contact the Writing Center to plan an in-class workshop (see above).