Writing center

Writing centers provide students with assistance on their papers, projects, reports, multi-modal documents, web pages, and other writerly needs across disciplines.

[3] Typical services include help with the purpose, structure, function of writing, and are geared toward writers of various levels and fields of study.

[6][7] Elizabeth Boquet and Stephen North point to the origins of the writing laboratory as first a method, not a place, where "the key characteristic of which appears to have been that all work was to be done during class time".

[8] It was also at this time when writing centers began to employ student tutors, who were more affordable to hire than Faculty members.

[17] If the writing center offers workshop or group tutoring sessions, staff, experienced undergraduates, or graduates may serve in an unofficial or official teaching assistant capacity.

[23] Writing centers may serve English-language learners from across academic disciplines who are undergraduate or graduate students at the institution.

[24] Writing centers may develop resources and handouts for English-language learners on academic vocabulary and grammatical conventions.

[25] Some English Language Learners may access a writing center specifically for grammatical help and error revision from tutors.

This may conflict with the philosophy of a writing center to help students become better writers through discussing the overall flow and organization of the paper, rather than focusing on sentence-level revisions.

Collaboration allows tutors to involve students in a dialogue which helps to get in touch with their knowledge and find their unique voices.

Collaborative environment rejects any kinds of hierarchies in the writing centers, thus allowing to negotiate and set common goals.

[35] Some writing centers provide services for the non-academic community, such as peer-tutoring for out-of-school writers and workshops on a wide variety of topics.