ACCESS Center
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Laura Young
Coordinator, Writing Assistance Center
SOU Writing Center
Where are we?
The Writing Center is located in SU 140, in the ACCESS Center. We are open from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Monday-Thursday and from 9:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. on Friday during the regular academic year. Our phone number is 552-8415.
Standing and drop-in appointments are available with individual peer tutors.
Writing Center services are free to all Southern Oregon University students.
Our Mission
Our mission is to serve Southern Oregon University by helping students become more skillful, more effective, more confident, and more resourceful writers. Toward that end, we work in cooperation with the Office of Student Affairs and the Provost’s Office through the University Seminar to complement and extend students’ classroom experience.
We provide a comfortable environment where you can get assistance in identifying and correcting writing problems and come up with new strategies for your thinking and writing.
The Writing Center provides tutors who can help you look closer at your current skills and problems areas and who offer advice and techniques specific to your needs.
We provide a supportive but critical audience for your writing.
The Writing Center and its staff
- provide one-on-one assistance through regularly scheduled and drop-in appointments
- support writers’ efforts and allow them to do their own work
- promote writing processes
- provide grammar review and help writers develop own editing/proofreading strategies rather than proofreading
- suggest strategies for improvement
- provide enough time for writers to formulate and develop ideas
- provide an instructional environment conducive to academic work
- provide current references, handouts, exercises, activities, handbooks, and internet resources for use in training Writing Center Personnel, for use in tutoring sessions, for quick reference for drop-in clients, and for use by faculty
- serve as a resource for faculty
- recognize instructors’ authority in their courses
Principles
We believe in the following principles:
We begin where the student is and establish and maintain a relationship that shows an interested and committed concern for individual writer’s needs.
We allow the writer to do the work.
We help writers discover and practice their own best way of working.
What we cannot do for you (see also below “Weekly Appointment Policy”)
The Writing Center is NOT a fix-it shop.
Tutors will not proofread papers. They will work with you to improve your writing and discuss patterns of errors so that you can learn to correct your own mistakes.
We don’t proofread or edit. We offer instruction on the writing process, not last-minute grammar checking. We’ll gladly teach you how to edit your own work, but our emphasis in conferences is on helping you respond to an assignment, develop and organize your ideas, and write clearly. (Take a look at our instructional materials for help with finding and eliminating common mechanical errors in your writing.)
Tutors cannot help you with papers on the day they are due. Tutors are here to help with revision. Revision takes time.
Tutors cannot discuss or suggest grades. A suggestion for improvement does not guarantee a certain grade.
Tutors will not discuss strengths and weaknesses of professors. That’s not their job.
Policies and Guidelines
If you are writing papers for a course, whether it is Philosophy, Sociology, Communication, Political Science, or English, an individual appointment with a writing tutor can help make your college papers more successful. As you begin to write longer papers in your major, you can come to the Writing Center for guidance in incorporating research, understanding research sources, organizing longer papers, and citing sources. If you are writing a long paper or planning a research project, you may want to schedule a “standing appointment.” Regular weekly meetings with a tutor can help you stay on track and manage lengthy assignments.
If You’ve Been Referred to the Writing Center
If you have been referred to the Writing Center, we are especially eager to assist you. After all, by referring you to the Writing Center, your instructor has indicated that you may be able to raise your grade as a result of the work you do here. With that kind of motivation, we should be able to accomplish great things together!
When you make an appointment to come to the Writing Center, please tell the person who makes your appointment that you’ve been referred to us. That way we can address your specific needs. The tutor who works with you will try to discover more about the requirements of your course or assignment, or about your course instructor’s specific concerns about your writing. If you need extra support, we may schedule longer, more frequent appointments.
We make special efforts to assist people who’ve been referred to us; if you’ve been instructed to seek help at the Writing Center, call or stop by SU 140 (ACCESS CENTER) soon. Together, we can make the most of the opportunity that a referral represents.
What to Expect at Your First Appointment
Each Writing Center conference is different, but there are some things you should expect during your conference. Unless it is scheduled for a longer time, your appointment will last from thirty to fifty minutes. Your tutor will first want to read the specific assignment you’ve received (be sure to bring it with you). Also, bring whatever notes or drafts you might have.
The tutor will ask you to explain what you most want help with. Guided by what help you’ve asked for, your Writing Center tutor will then respond, as a critical reader and as someone skilled and experienced in the writing process and in producing effective written products, to what you’ve written – pointing out sections that work well, identifying possible problems, teaching you important principles about writing, and helping you find ways to improve your paper as you revise.
Writing Center tutors are likely to concentrate on large-scale issues first. For example, they’ll try to help you make sure that you’ve responded to the assignment and that you’ve written a focused, well-organized, and effectively developed paper. Only after they have addressed large-scale issues such as purpose, thesis, reasoning, and organization will they move on to such concerns as style, grammar, word choice, and punctuation. They follow this order for a good reason: small changes in individual sentences will not improve a paper as much as changes in thesis, focus, and organization will.
It’s important for you to know that Writing Center tutors will not edit or proofread your papers for you. Nor will they do your reading or thinking or writing for you. Instead, their goal is to teach you to do these things for yourself so that you can become a better, more confident writer.
How to Prepare for Your First Appointment
Once you’ve made an appointment for individual writing tutoring session, you should do some preliminary work on your paper. Read the assignment carefully, ask your course instructor any questions you might have about the assignment, and read (or at least begin reading) any required texts. You might also do some initial research, discuss the assignment with classmates, brainstorm some ideas, or begin an outline.
When you come to your appointment, bring the assignment so that you and your tutor have all relevant information at hand. Also, bring whatever you’ve prepared or written so far. If you have a partial or a full draft, bring it along (handwritten drafts are fine). Sometimes, you’ll have an outline or some preliminary notes. If you bring a list of questions you have about the writing you’ve done, you and your tutor can focus on the aspects of the paper you feel are most important.
Even if you’re having difficulty putting pen to paper, come to the Writing Center anyway! You can use your appointment to discuss how to get started. The tutors can help you at any point in your writing process – the earlier the better. Above all, you should come prepared to think and talk about your writing. Be ready to engage in discussion about your writing, to receive advice about it, and to seek ways to improve it.
Standing Weekly Appointment PolicyNature of Conferences: To uphold the Writing Center’s mission of long-term writing improvement, tutors do not proofread client papers (that is, they do not circle and correct errors on student papers); rather, they work with clients to help them develop strategies for finding and correcting their own errors.
Eligibility for tutoring and attendance: Each term, students may come in and sign up for one standing appointment a week with tutors. They may reserve their appointment time throughout the term, BUT if clients miss two sessions in a row without having contacted their tutor, they risk having their standing appointment given to another student. They will be contacted by the Tutoring Coordinator. If they do not respond within a week, their appointment time will be opened up for others clients.
Lateness: If a client is more than ten minutes late, their appointment may be used by students dropping in for tutoring assistance. If students know they will be late, they must call the Center to let their tutor know they are still coming.
Tutor-client incompatibility: Occasionally, students may find their assigned tutor incompatible. In such cases, students should confer with the Writing Center Director and request a reassignment.
Single visit Appointment Policy (Drop-in Appointments)
As in standing weekly appointments, tutors emphasize long-term writing improvement. Students should come to “drop-in” appointments prepared to work. To avoid misunderstandings, tutors and students should review the policy and the reasoning behind it at the beginning of the drop-in appointment. A handout explaining the policy is available in the Writing Center and on the website.
Tutors schedule students for drop-in appointments on a first come, first served basis.
Student Client Responsibility
Writing Center tutors are responsible for making conferences in the Writing Center productive. However, clients share in that responsibility. If clients wish to continue working with tutors in the Writing Center, they must accept the following responsibilities:
- Attendance - Clients with regularly scheduled standing appointments must attend regularly and be on time even during weeks when they have no current writing assignments. Consistent practice and consultation will help clients improve their skills and their level of understanding.
- Materials for sessions - Students should bring all relevant materials (drafts of written projects, relevant texts, sources, assignments sheets, etc.) If they have no current draft to work on, they should bring already graded essays to work on with the tutor. Other options for tutoring sessions include
- review of patterns of grammar or punctuation errors in the student’s writing to date
- writing or essay-planning exercises done during the session
- reading comprehension and analysis, summary, paraphrase
- paragraph logic, coherence, and structure
- Discussion of writing - Students must come prepared to discuss and work hard on their own writing. Only then can the tutor help. Tutoring appointments should not be used to socialize.
- Role of tutor - Students must accept the role of the tutor as facilitator, not proofreader. Students may want tutors to proofread (circle and correct errors) in their papers, but because tutors can provide something far more useful--help in learning how to find and revise errors and overcome writing weaknesses -- tutors will not spend time proofreading for students.
- Writing Center tutors recognize that the professor’s authority in their courses is not open to challenge. Everything that happens in The Writing Center is designed to help students reach the goals set by their instructors. Do not use the tutoring session to complain about a professor. If you disagree with a professor’s assessment of your writing, ask your tutor to help you identify what weaknesses the professor may be responding to. Your tutor should focus on ways you can improve the paper.
Your tutor should help you understand what the weaknesses are, even if neither you nor tour tutor agrees with the way in which the professor has shared such observations. Instead of focusing on the comments, try to examine your paper from a different perspective.
