“Why,” my colleagues often ask me, “haven’t my students learned about paragraphing (or argument or documentation or punctuation or any number of writing matters) before they get to my class?”

“Don’t they get that in freshman English (or high school or middle school)?” they ask with obvious frustration. “And since they didn’t learn it there, can’t they get it once and for all in the writing center?”

While I certainly sympathize with these questions, behind them is an assumption I don’t share: that writing is a skill we learn from the bottom up, one skill at a time. It’s because of this philosophy that in the ’60s, when I attended school, we didn’t start writing full essays until 11th grade.

We were too busy learning the rules of grammar to write. When we finally did write, we still made errors, because learning rules in theory isn’t the same as applying them in practice. Even more troubling, we knew little about the real process of writing, the tangled struggle of drafting and revising that’s so necessary to producing meaningful text.

When colleagues tell me about the inadequacies of their students’ writing, I tell them to suggest their students visit the University Writing Center (UWC). But I also warn them not to expect a quick fix. Learning to write is a much messier process than was believed when I went to school.

Students learn some rules from the bottom up, others from the top down, and they don’t get anywhere without frequent practice and exposure to writing through reading. Furthermore, what constitutes “good writing” changes with the type of document, the intended audience, and the purpose for writing. The format, diction, and style that work for an English paper may fail in a letter to an employer or a lab report.

So what do the consultants in the UWC do when your students visit? We sit down beside them, ask what they need, read their drafts aloud with them, answer their questions, and give them our opinions.

We model the writing process; we make them aware of the choices all writers have to make and show them that even experienced writers look up how to document sources, consult usage or grammar guides, and get feedback from potential readers. We provide a glimpse of the true complexity of writing and offer tools and strategies that we know from experience help many writers.

For the help we provide in the UWC to be truly useful, though, it has to be help sought by students. They will never learn conventions about comma usage simply because we say they ought to. They will learn those conventions only when they recognize that if they misplace their commas, they may confuse their readers and lose credibility. In our ideal consultation, we work at the student’s point of need and from the student’s motivation.

At the UWC we want to help students become better writers. But our larger goal is to help students use writing to become better thinkers, to develop a sense of judgment, a critical eye, a knowledge of and willingness to use available resources.

It’s a lifelong learning process, and we at the UWC look forward to assisting you and your students along the way.

—Dr. Valerie M. Balester,
Executive Director
University Writing Center
v-balester@tamu.edu