Students Share Benefits of Seeking Help at the Writing Center
By: Claire Standaert (’18) and Gabriella Castro (’19)
Raindrops trickle down the library window pane as the girl looks down at her twelfth draft, unsatisfied. She rips it from the table and propels the crumpled version into the waste bin. But she is not suffering this frustration alone. Writing is hard.
The good news? The Gonzaga Writing Center is ready to help.
Many different writing activities take place here. We welcome students who have always had difficulty writing. We welcome students whose first language is not English. We even welcome faculty. Above all, the Writing Center is an intellectual space. You can walk in one day and hear Luke, a tutor majoring in Philosophy and Mathematics, zestily discussing with another tutor an essay about Aristotle’s virtue ethics. The next day, you may see Will, a Biology major, researching how to help a student write an Engineering paper. And because dialogue is essential, you’ll often hear tutors ask: “How can we work together to sharpen your argument?”
Needless to say, the sparks of learning keep the Writing Center burning. Intellectual growth is a two-way street here. Ali, a veteran tutor, articulates this atmosphere, saying, “It’s a process of circular learning. I get something from them, and they learn something from me.” This give-and-take, shall we say, accounts for why so many tutors at the Writing Center find their work gratifying and sustaining.
Tutors find nothing more rewarding than a successful session. We measure success by a writer’s improvement over time. Or, as Sammy, an Economics major, likes to say, “We make a business out of trying to put ourselves out of business.” The Writing Center’s goal is to give our tutees the tools to no longer necessitate our help. Because of this, we aren’t interested in “doctoring up” papers with silent copy editing. Instead we prefer to talk about big-picture aspects of writing and writing processes: “How can we push this argument further?” or “How can we invoke a specific response from your audience?”
Service and community blend nicely here at the Writing Center. On one hand, tutors help with writing. On the other, it is discussion and connection that breathe life into the shared experience about writing and writing processes. We help writers gain the confidence and skills they need to develop as effective writers across the curriculum and even into non-academic settings.
Inside the Gonzaga Writing Center, the girl who had just thrust her twelfth draft into the waste bin was welcomed by a smiling tutor. Together they worked on her thesis. It was not long before the girl’s fingers struck the keyboard like lightning and she was past the introduction, working toward the final words on the project’s last page.