Writing center
From Handout-o-rama
Many educational institutions maintain a writing center that provides students with free assistance on their papers, projects, and reports from trained professionals, consultants, or peer tutors. A key goal of any writing center is helping writers to learn. Typical services include help with purpose, structure, and organization of writing and are geared toward writers of all levels and fields of study. In general, writing centers also offer assistance with grammar and syntax and citation of sources for research papers using one of various recognized formats, such as MLA, APA, or Turabian. Nevertheless, writing centers coach students rather than doing their work for them even in dealing with apparently mechanical aspects of writing.
A writing center usually offers individualized conferencing whereby the writing tutor offers his or her feedback on the piece of writing at hand; a writing tutor's main function is to discuss how the piece of writing might be revised. However, the tutor usually does not proofread nor edit the student's work. Instead, the tutor facilitates the student's attempts to revise his or her own work by conversing with the student about the topic at hand, discussing principles and processes of writing, modeling rhetorical and syntactical moves for the student to apply, and assisting the student in identifying patterns of grammatical error in their writing.
Some institutions also offer an Online Writing Lab, often abbreviated as OWL, which generally attempt to follow the model of writing center tutoring in an online environment. A list of online writing centers is available from the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA).
A recent movement in writing centers has been to provide services for the non-academic community. Such services include one-to-one response for out-of-school writers and workshops on a wide variety of topics. Such writing centers are often identified as community writing centers.
[edit] Writing center professional organizations
- International Writing Centers Association
- European Writing Centers Association
- Mid-West Writing Centers Association
- Northern California Writing Centers Association
- Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association
- South-Central Writing Centers Association
- Southeastern Writing Centers Association
- Southern California Writing Centers Association
- Canadian Writing Centres Association
