"Problems in the Writing Center"

Although author Kathryn Evans addresses professors more than writing center personnel in this article, unclear writing assignments have plagued us all as tutors and students. Teachers (including me) are so familiar with certain concepts that we can easily forget that that these concepts are brand new to our students.

For example, in the Writing Center we see students who don't understand what a thesis statement or topic sentence is, or who don't bother with paragraph breaks. Many of our students don't understand that academic writing is almost a separate language, and that generally, slang, curse words, and sentence fragments are frowned upon. We may assume that because students were accepted into Madonna, they have some of these basics, but that's not always the case.

Jeri and I kind of laughed at the prospect of asking Madonna professors to modify their writing assignments to include more detailed criteria as well as many levels of scaffolding. Like so many educators across the country, much of our faculty feels overworked and frazzled--just as we often feel in the Writing Center.

Larger writing centers sometimes have a student liaison to work with a specific department. If we were a larger writing center, for example, John might work with Katie O'Dowd in Humanities and Holly might work with Dan McDougall in Sign Language Studies. This individual may help decode writing assignments or maybe even work with the instructor to create these assignments. Who knows? It may happen yet. (This means, of course, that John and Holly can never graduate.)

-- Frances