Writing partners help freshmen adjust

By: Kyle Christensen
Features Editor

One of many skills educators often attempt to cultivate in their students is the ability to express themselves through the art of writing. While the writing center is always available to help students in developing their essays and papers, a new program on campus, entitled the Writing Partners, is aiming to bring this service closer to students in the classroom environment.

The Writing Partners feature the services of six selected writing tutors - sophomores Maddy Ethington, Melissa Gorski, Paige Halpin and Anne Stone, junior Jennifer Hackworth and senior Shannon Slee - who have been working with three of the mandatory freshman Introduction to Liberal Arts (ILA) classes.

Steven Price, director of the communication across the curriculum program, oversees both the Writing Center and the newly-founded Writing Partners. “We’re starting this small, with only three sections, [but] I think we could grow larger,” Price stated.

The tutors provide a service to these first-year courses by supervising the students in many of their major writing assignments, as well as corresponding with the section instructors in order to help their pupils better shape their work for final submission.

Tutors are nominated by professors every year for the English 299-Writing Fellows training class. According to Price, the program seems to be showing great promise this semester, and if it continues to prove successful for the remainder of the Fall term, additional tutors for this purpose may be hired for later semesters, and within the next few years the in-class tutoring may expand into other departments on campus as well.

As Price noted, “It’s been really neat seeing the communication between the tutors and the faculty on a really professional level. Communication across the curriculum is supposed to be interdisciplinary, and this is a program which will hopefully improved our interdisciplinary tutoring.”