>>ROBERTSON: My name is Wayne Robertson. I'm the director of the Towson University Writing Center. It'll be my goal today to give you a brief introduction to the center. If you have any further questions or want to use the center's services as part of a course or project, please feel free contact me via e-mail or phone. I'm always happy to speak with faculty or staff. So what is the writing center? Well, we're a tutoring service that provides individual writing support to all members of the Towson community, including undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty and staff. In a typical session, we sit down together with the writer, look at the assignment sheet and evaluation rubric and read the paper together. Then, we aim to have a good conversation about the paper. Our goal is to offer the writer productive, reader-based feedback that'll help them improve not only that specific paper, but often to help them develop their skills as a writer. In sessions, we work on all kinds of writing issues including brainstorming, content analysis, source integration, organization, transition, style, voice, grammar and citation issues. 

Each session is geared differently depending on the assignment, the needs of the student and where the student is in the writing process. One common misconception about the writing center is that it's primarily used by students working on English papers. While we certainly like working with those students, in fact, the vast majority of the work we do is in fields other than English. Currently, we have tutors from 16 different majors, including political science, nursing, audiology, mass communication, psychology, business, biology and education. We understand that writing varies pretty widely according to different disciplines so we try to match students up with tutors in that field or a similar field. Students regularly bring down all kind of writing including research papers, lab reports and cover letters. Last semester, we had a student bring down a letter to his father asking for money. We also work on any level of writing, from pre-college English as a Second Language classes to PhD dissertations. 

Last year for example, we provided over 600 sessions for graduate students. At the writing center, we employ undergraduate and graduate tutors recruited from faculty basis of their writing skills, their critical thinking ability and their interpersonal skills. We don't just want smart tutors, but also tutors who really want to work with other students and are empathetic to their needs. After the faculty recommendation, we look at the applicant's academic transcript and writing samples. We then interview the applicant and ask him or her to provide feedback on a sample student paper as part of that interview. After being hired, tutors go through a 20-hour initial training process in which they learn about writing center theory and practice, they read and response to a variety of sample student essays, they learn how to work effectively with second language writers, they observe writing center session, they complete a grammar self-evaluation and they brush up on common citation styles. 

After that initial training, they attend one hour weekly staff training meetings, which are meant to help the staff continue their professional development. Working at the writing center offers significant professional development and often helps them improve their own writing and communication skills. If you have a student you believe would make an excellent writing tutor, please contact me to recommend that person. It's important to understand that we are tutors, not editors. Editors work on their own and fix things for the writer. So while the writer might make final decisions, editors do almost all the work. They point out the problems, rewrite areas of the text and correct all the grammatical and citation errors. Tutoring, on the other hand, is done in collaboration with the student and requires the student to do most of the work. 

For example, if a student and tutor are working on sentence level errors, the tutor will identify patterns of error in the essay, explained those errors and then have the student identify and fix them themselves. By participating in the session, students improve their writing for the long-term, while also improving their draft. Because we are tutors, that also means that the paper will still reflect the skill level of your student. In other words, while there should be some significant improvement on the paper, the writing will still sound like your student and there will almost always still be aspects of the paper that need additional revision. 

Sometimes, for example, a tutor may spend the entire 30 minute session helping the student locate a thesis that pulls the paper together or talking about how to strengthen the evidence for the were the paper's claims. Those revisions will a significantly improve the paper, yet there may still be some rough transitions, sentence level errors and other issues that the tutor and student didn't have a chance to address together. On this slide, you can see our hours for fall and spring terms. We're open at two locations, the main writing center in the Liberal Arts building room 5330, and in the Cook Library at the reference desk. We're also open during winter minister and during summer. Those hours can be found on our website. To make an appointment, it's best if students call us at least a day in advance. We take walk-ins when possible, but it's always better for the student to call ahead, that way we can match them up with a tutor in their discipline or somebody who can best meet their needs. At the end of the semester, we can get very busy, often serving 500-600 students per week. 

During the last two or three weeks of the semester, students may want to call two days in advance. The writing center is happy to work with your class in a number of ways. We can come to your class to provide a brief, 10 minute presentation for students about the center, that way students know what we do and how to make an appointment. We're happy to take student referrals if you notice a particular student who might need support. Often in those cases, we match the student with a tutor to meet once or twice per week during the semester. For faculty who want to make broader use of the writing center, we're also happy to work with every student in your class. If you would like each student to come to the center as part of the assignment, we can do that. Just ask students to get a blue post-session description form as proof of their attendance. On the form, the writing assistant will describe what they worked on during the session. If you decide to make writing center attendance part of the assignment, just let the writing center director know your plants, that way we can make sure to have enough sessions available. Thank you for taking the time to learn about our writing center.