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by Joshua Willis '03
OCTOBER 29, 2002--The Oberlin College Writing Center, part of the College's peer tutoring program, provides a space for trained student tutors to help their peers write anything from first-year essays to senior honors proposals.
The center offers the student body "a second set of eyes, a place to exchange ideas, and a place to just vent [about classes]," says Anne Trubek, coordinator of the Peer Tutoring Program and an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition. Trubek chooses a mix of tutors who, collectively, have experience in most academic disciplines.
"The Writing Center is for everyone," says writing tutor Andrew Magrath '04, a physics major. Some of the papers he encounters at the Writing Center need a lot of revision; some need just a touch of clarity. "Everyone can benefit from a little help," Magrath says. "I've even tutored tutors."
The Writing Center’s goal is to cultivate comprehensive composition skills in students. "A lot of people think we're just grammarians," Magrath says, "but that's not the case. We're here to help writers formulate ideas, overcome writer's block, and deal with technical issues. The most common question we get, though, is 'does this paper make sense to anybody else but me?'"
Anthony Richardson '05 recently dropped in to the Writing Center for help on a sociology paper.
"The input I got was incredible," he says. "My tutor not only corrected the errors in my writing, but showed me where they were so I could figure out how to fix them. I left feeling more confident about the paper I was working on."
The center is staffed by third- and fourth-year students who are rigorously trained by faculty members from the Rhetoric and Composition Department.
"Students first have to apply to become tutors," says Trubek. "If they are accepted, they enroll in a three-hour course that covers composition theory and pedagogy. This course is equivalent to the courses an English graduate student might take to train for a teaching position."
As a part of their training, tutors discuss the merits and drawbacks of particular tutoring styles. "I've gotten a really thorough exposure to many different ideas about what a good tutoring session should be," says Joanna Richards '05, an English major. "I'm always trying different techniques with different people to see what works best for them.
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to online.news@oberlin.edu.
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