3 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2020
  2. drive.google.com drive.google.com
    The Idea of a Writing Center
    3
    1. jennaclare 09 Apr 2020
      Let me use it, then, to make the one distinction of which it still seems capable: in a writing center the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction

      I think that this is an essential point to understand. During my consultation, I found myself wording my questions in a way that analyzed my writing style in general, instead of a specific word choice. I also tried to analyze how a mistake or an odd choice in my writing tied into my writing style as a whole to figure out how I can improve. I feel like this idea could be applied to anything in our lives. If we only notice what is in front of us and never take a step back to look at the bigger picture, nothing will actively change.

    2. jennaclare 09 Apr 2020
      The session went well enough, but afterward, as we evaluated the entire exam, one of my fellow examiners-a longtime colleague and friend-said that, while the candidate handled the tutoring nicely, he was surprised that the student who had written the paper would have bothered with the Writing Center in the first place. He would not recommend a student to the Center, he said, "unless there were something like twenty-five errors per page."

      I had a similar mindset when I first found out about the writing center. I knew they focused on the process as well, but I was shocked about the amount of content they discussed in comparison to the grammar of my essay when I first went there. I think it is important to recognize that writing can be improved in a lot more ways than just grammar and simple sentence structure. I believe it could be helpful to anyone to have their writing evaluated from an outside perspective in order to determine whether or not a reader could get a clear sense of what the writer is trying to communicate.

    3. jennaclare 09 Apr 2020
      In their minds, clearly, writers fall into three fairly distinct groups: the talented, the average, and the others; and the Writing Center's only logical raison d'etre must be to handle those others- those, as the flyer proclaims, with "special problems."

      I think it is easy to classify writers if grammar is the only factor taken into consideration. Otherwise, everyone has a different idea of what makes someone a good writer. For some, it may be the ability to make the reader feel something. For others, someone who uses big words and long sentences may be thought of as the best writer in the world. I believe our personal classifications are dependent on our own relationship to writing and what we strive to improve in our own writing.

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