Writing @ Springfield College is here to help you with your writing! You can opt to meet with a peer tutor or faculty writing specialist in person, online (Zoom), or you may submit a draft for feedback. Either way, we will help you identify areas within your project that can use a little work. We don’t make the edits for you, but we do provide you a game plan for bringing your writing project to the next level.
Writing @ Springfield College Will…
Emphasize process. We will support students using best practices in writing center pedagogy, which means that instructors prioritize process over product. In other words, emphasis is placed on providing writers with skills and strategies that can address components of a current writing situation and be transferred to future projects.
Use collaborative agenda setting. Every session begins with consultation and negotiation. The student presents their questions and concerns, and the peer tutor or faculty writing specialist helps them to set realistic expectations for what can be accomplished during the appointment. The session then moves between providing students with direct instruction and opportunities to revise their work based on the instruction they’ve received.
Offer standalone or ongoing support. Students may choose to work with a peer tutor or faculty writing specialist once to navigate a particularly challenging assignment or they may attend multiple sessions in order to work on more involved projects.
The writing tutor can be brought in at any stage of the process: from deciphering complex assignments to the late stages of a dissertation.
Additionally… Peer tutors & faculty writing specialists are trained to provide feedback about writing across the curriculum and have the capacity to learn about new-to-them style and disciplinary conventions as students’ needs dictate.
Writing @ Springfield College Won’t…
Proofread. Students can receive instruction on grammar, formatting, and citation but we will not “fix” the work for them. Rather, we help the student to identify patterns of error in their work and provide them with the knowledge and tools necessary to make the corrections on their own.
Check content. We are not substitutes for disciplinary experts. While we may provide feedback and support for analysis, synthesis, argumentation, explication, etc., we do not have the capacity to determine whether or not a student is properly interpreting a concept. We can request clarity or suggest that the student consult with their professors, but if the data is bad, the tutor will not catch or correct it.
“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
Joseph Heller, novelist