Cure those literary woes at the Writing Center


by Eric Perkins - Class of 1998

You've gotten your first paper back for the term and it's got so much red on it you wonder how your professor has enough free time for anything else besides correcting your paper. You got a bad grade. Now you're going to fail the class. This will set off a chain reaction and you will fail more classes. Eventually, after bouts with academic probation, you will fail out of school altogether, and that's the end of your college career! As you sit back and ponder the loss of all your dreams, you think, "Wow, I could have avoided all this if I had just gone to the Writing Center."

This case is obviously a bit exaggerated, but the help the Writing Center can give is not. It can't guarantee that you'll get an A or a B on every lab, essay, or project that you bring it, but it can and will help. The tutors are everyday students - probably some of your own classmates - who have been trained to help others in all aspects of writing. Whether you have questions on grammar, style, organization, format, or even trying to understand a professor's assignment, the tutors have most likely encountered the problem before and will be more than happy to work with you to solve it.

That's a very important aspect of the Writing Center: the tutors work with you. Though the tutors will try to field any questions you have for them, expect to field some yourself as well. You may find yourself leaving a tutor session with the feeling that you helped yourself more than the tutor did, and that's exactly the point. There isn't necessarily a great author hidden inside every student, but most students do have a clear idea of what they want to say, they just need a little help expressing it.

So, if you came to WPI with the vague hope that you would never have to write anything substantial again, only to find that you do have lots of projects and labs to trudge through, the Writing Center could be the place for you. Come to Salisbury Labs Rm. 134 and sign up for an appointment, or just walk in if you see the tutor is free. The Writing Center is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday from 9:00 - 3:30 and on Wednesdays from 12:30 - 3:30. The Writing Center may not be able to save your college career, but if it helps you with a paper here and there, your college career will never need saving in the first place.


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