Cottey College Writing Center

Director: Dr. Don Perkins Associate Professor of English

TEN PRINCIPLES FOR COTTEY COLLEGE WRITING CENTER CONSULTANTS

1. Our goal is to help students become better writers through our work with individual pieces of their writing.

2. We cannot address every issue or problem in an essay. In each consultation, we must help writers set priorities based upon where they are in the writing process. Setting these priorities will reflect what we value in writing as well as what we know about the contextual demands of the particular writer's assignment, audience, purpose, and academic discipline.

3. All writers work differently, follow different habits of mind and different ways of inventing, drafting, and revising prose. Therefore, we need to assess every writer and each piece of writing with an eye toward helping writers discover which habits and ways will work best for them. This assessment means looking beyond the writers' texts and asking them about their assignments, purposes, and current struggles with writing.

4. The consultation is most successful when the writer discovers a way to improve the essay. The consultant's role is to question, to respond, to offer choices, and to encourage-not to evaluate ("If you were my student, I'd give you an 'A'.) or to prescribe solutions ("Get rid of the second paragraph and write a stronger conclusion."). We are neither their teachers nor their editors. We are their coaches in writing.

5. Our most dangerous occupational hazard is rewriting other people's papers for them. There is always a fine line between fair collaboration and unfair influence; when you find yourself jotting down notes for the writer (notes they aren't dictating), or imposing your ideas on someone else's paper, you've gone too far. Keep the pen or the keyboard in the writer's hands--not in yours.

6. When working in the Writing Center, our particular positions as consultants prohibit negative responses about the teacher comments that appear on a paper or about the assignment. Do not evaluate or embarrass the students or second-guess their teachers.

7. Our greatest opportunity to help writers, whether they come to us with questions about dashes in a sentence or drafts of an essay, is in providing another voice of response to their writing, a voice of honest reaction first to their ideas and thoughts, then to their structure and organization, and finally to their prose style and sentences. Always read for meaning first.

8. We teach writing as a process, while keeping in mind the product. Our goal, however, is not to produce a perfect text by micromanaging and commenting; instead it is to intervene in the process with intelligence and compassion, and in so doing to help writers better understand their own processes and the skills needed to perfect their own writing products.

9. We readily admit when we do not know the answer to someone's question, but pride ourselves on the ability to find the answers in handbooks, dictionaries, and from other writers. We are glad to model this search for the writers we are helping.

10. Any writing that represents the Writing Center--handouts, correspondence, e-mail to our tutorial writers, and so on--should be models of good prose. For example, correspondence with professors must be well-written, precise, complete, and legible.

Department of English

• Dr. Mike Emery
  
• Dr. Don Perkins
  
• Dr. Kathryn Pivak
  
• Dr. Trisha Stubblefield
  

Course Descriptions

The Merry Ann DeVaney Sauls Academic Writing Contest

Cottey College Writing Center

Sigma Kappa Delta

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