Enhance Essays and Polish Prose

Enhance Essays and Polish Prose
By Samantha Stainburn

September 2, 2005

By the middle of the fall semester of freshman year, Stanford University student Felicia Cote was fed up with the middling grades she was getting on papers in her humanities course. She had been one of the better writers at her high school in Teaneck, N.J., and found it baffling that the professor thought her arguments lacked clarity.

She decided to take a rough draft of her next paper to Stanford's writing center. "What they told me right off the bat was I had a problem with putting in superfluous evidence to prove my point," Cote recalls. "Also, I had a big problem with being verbose--I needed help streamlining my prose."

Cote attempted to fix these problems in her second draft and went back to the writing center for feedback on her next assignment. In fact, she talked to writing tutors about all of her papers that quarter, and her writing--and grades--improved. As a rising junior majoring in public policy, Cote still makes tutoring appointments for every paper, about two weeks before each is due. "If I don't see how people are [responding to] my papers, then I'm not going to improve," she says.

That's something writing teachers wish more college students realized. "Good students develop a kind of individualism, and they don't quite realize that writing itself is not a fully on-your-own type of thing," says Hilton Obenzinger, who consults with students tackling honors theses as the associate director of honors writing at Stanford. "You can enhance your writing by getting other people to read it."

While college writing centers certainly offer remedial coaching to those math majors who struggle with words, they are also set up to help more-proficient writers, from freshmen learning the ropes of scholarly writing to graduate students aiming to impress academics with their masterly use of insider jargon. "Our job is to stand between the student and the assignment and help the student negotiate the teacher's expectations," says Clyde Moneyhun, director of the Stanford Writing Center. "We didn't write the assignment; we're not grading the assignment; so we can be a reader that the teacher is not."

Walk in. Most writing centers are set up like the one at Stanford, where students can either drop in or make an appointment for a private session with a writing tutor. Tutors, many of whom are graduate students, will work with undergrads at any stage in the writing process, from brainstorming to refining outlines to smoothing rough drafts. (Here's a tip, though: Don't bring a paper to a writing tutor an hour before it's due, says Lester Faigley, director of the writing center at the University of Texas-Austin. "You may receive some splendid advice," he notes, "but you won't have the time to act on it.") Tutors will also read law school essays, summer internship applications, grant proposals, and the like.

However, students hoping to boost their grades by getting a tutor to perform a quick polish of their prose before they hand in an assignment will most likely be disappointed. "You can't drop your paper off and pick it up," says Linda Bergmann, director of the writing center at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. "Students have to be there. We're teaching these students how to write, and the paper is an opportunity for that education to take place." Stephen North, a SUNY- Albany English professor who has studied writing centers, has observed that "in a writing center, the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction."In other words, a writing center tutor is going to make you do the work. The typical 30-to-45-minute session is a Socratic affair, with the tutor asking questions like "What did you mean by this?" and prompting writers to come up with their own solutions. Then it's back to the laptop to put it into pixels. "Writing is revising," says Faigley.

Still, students who invest the time say it's worth it. Last semester, it seemed to Natalie Lyons, a geography major at UT- Austin, that the writing center tutors never ran out of suggestions for improving her writing, such as clarifying her arguments, getting her tenses to agree, expunging the passive voice, and adding helpful transitions. But when Lyons tackled the final paper for her Literature of the American Renaissance course, something clicked. "There was less editing with that one because I started with a sure footing and wrote clearly the whole time," she says. "And it just felt easier to write."