Tutors come to the rescue

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

College essays can be daunting, especially with many different professors with completely opposite expectations. There is, however, an entity in place at Monmouth College to help sort out the confusion.

Located on the third floor of the Mellinger Teaching and Learning Center, the Writing Center is meant to help students improve their writing skills. The center, coordinated by communication across the curriculum director Steven Price, employs student tutors who receive extensive, semester-long training in preparation for their job.

Junior Vanessa Schumacher, who is in her second year as a writing tutor, said she felt extremely prepared to tutor, thanks to the training she received. “We had discussed so many different readings and ways to practice this new information that it all became second nature.  Sure, I was nervous to begin tutoring, but I felt prepared,” Schumacher said.

For her, the most valuable experience came approximately two months after she officially began to tutor, when a student she had worked with previously approached her and asked when she would be back in the Writing Center. That student had gotten her first A on a college paper, one which Schumacher had helped her with, and wanted her help again.

Price said while most students assume that they can only go to the Writing Center with an English essay or that all the tutors are English majors who will be very picky about grammar, most tutors are not English majors. “We have tutors from all disciplines across campus,” including art, music, Spanish, psychology, philosophy and religious studies and education. The tutors, as part of their training, talk with professors from several disciplines on campus, and are told the different expectations of each discipline’s writing assignments.

A new feature of the Writing Center is the Writing Partners. These tutors are working primarily with a specific Introduction to Liberal Arts (ILA) class, tailoring their writing advice to the particular professor. The tutors are in place to conduct focused tutoring sessions and act as an “intermediary between students and faculty.”

There are several professors across campus who make a concerted effort to direct their students to the Writing Center. Among these faculty members are education professor Monie Hayes and sociology and anthropology professor Judi Kessler.

Kessler, who often refers her students to the Writing Center for large class projects, views the Writing Center as valuable “because students today often come to college without having had the opportunity and the support to develop written communication skills needed for college-level work. The writing center offers students the opportunity, over their four year tenure at Monmouth, to refine their writing skills, develop an effective writing style, and become powerful communicators.”

Hayes agreed, saying the Writing Center helps students to “understand that writing doesn’t spring fully-formed like Athena,” but instead takes work and time to become something of quality.

When a student enters the Writing Center, he or she will be asked to engage in a discussion with the peer tutor, Price said. “We are interested in helping people become better writers, and not just better on one paper,” he commented. The tutors will help the student fix chronic grammatical problems, but they will not simply proofread an essay for grammatical mistakes. They will instead model the things which make good writers, often asking students to use writing heuristics, or techniques, such as freewriting and list making to generate ideas for their essays.

Price has had a great deal of positive feedback from both students and faculty, citing the tutors’ approachability and friendliness as two common things he hears. Faculty members appreciate the feedback given by tutors in their session reports, and they feel as if the tutors have a good eye for what they are asking of their students in an assignment. Many have, he says, seen many positive improvements in students’ writing.

If there is one thing Price could advise all students at Monmouth College about in regards to the Writing Center, it would be to start coming early, and come often. “If we encourage them to come as freshmen, they will keep coming,” he said.

The Writing Center is open from 3-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday afternoons, and 7-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday nights. Services are free to all Monmouth College students, and appointments are not necessary.