Mission Statement
The Writing Center's primary mission is to work with others at Shepherd College--students, tutors, faculty, staff, and even members of the greater community--to help improve students' writing skills.
Briefly stated, our motto contains our philosophy.
The phrase "Students Helping Students" emphasizes the benefits of individual instruction. Our motto also indicates that tutors learn from student writers as well. The phrase "Become Better Writers" emphasizes the need for nurturing growth over time and the need for cultivating a life-long skills rather than just creating papers for meeting short-term deadlines.
Talking about Writing Leads to Thinking Like a Writer.
Through conversation, the tutors model the way experienced writers solve writing problems. Over time, student learn to internalize these conversations to the point that the students begin to think more like experienced writers. Besides teaching student writers how to solve problems with punctuation, tutors and students work together to improve a variety of writing skills:
- Analyzing the rhetorical situation (author, audience, topic, appropriate language, etc.)
- Asking critical-thinking questions about the readings and the topic
- Establishing a pattern for organizing information based on academic genres
- Using appropriate evidence to support the thesis
- Forming effective sentences by learning sentence combining and variety
- Mastering effective style by applying rules of sentence-level correctness
- Meeting the assignment's requirement for citation style and format
Tutors Help Students Maintain Authority over Their Papers. Because tutors focus on nurturing a new set of behaviors, they see work on the students' papers as part of the process of growth rather than the ultimate end of the Writing Center tutorials. While tutors do try to help each student improve the quality of the papers he or she brings into the Writing Center, tutors cannot promise a certain grade or guarantee the paper will be free from errors. We maintain that the student has authority over his or her own writing, and the tone of our tutorials--showing respect, practicing reflective listening, and letting the student do most of the talking--seeks to honor that authority. This means that tutors do not give students thesis statements or interpretations of their assigned texts. Instead, tutors ask student writers thought-provoking questions to help them develop their own ideas. This also means that tutors do not write on student papers or edit students' work for them. Tutors might help student writers discover patterns of error and then help them master one or two new skills for eliminating those errors.
Writing Is an Art, Acquired with Time, Practice, Experimentation, and Personal Style.
Because writing involves a variety of complex, interconnected skills, we encourage students to visit the Writing Center several times during their stay at Shepherd. Writers of all backgrounds, skill and experience need an eager reader who will discuss how to make their prose more effective. Tutors understand that each student can master effective writing at his or her own pace and with his or her own style, which is why tutors focus on one skill per session and why tutors practice reflective listening.
Peer Tutors, Who Are Also Students, Benefit from These Conversations about Writing.
Much of the Writing Center director's work focuses on continued training for our tutors so that they may improve their own writing as well as improve their tutoring. Even though our tutors are still developing as writers and tutors, they have been recommended by their instructors, they have received extensive training, and they enjoy writing, learning, and helping others to succeed at Shepherd College. Tutors often comment how tutoring improves their own writing.
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