Megan's+2.3+Post

The idea for this post came from my interview with my WAC professor. At the end of the interview, the fact that I worked in the writing center became a topic of conversation, and she began asking me general questions about it. I came to find out that she knew absolutely nothing about our writing center other than the fact that it was in the library and it dealt with writing. She had a couple misconceptions about our writing center: she thought that it 1) was only for editing, not revising, and 2) that our writing center was only for students. As we continued to talk, I cleared up her misconceptions, and she became downright zealous about wanting to use our writing center. This interaction got me thinking of what we as consultants can do to clear up false assumptions about the writing center. It seems like if we implemented some sort of campus-wide project to increase awareness about our writing center. Maybe we really should go into ENG 110 classes, since that seems to make up a majority of our client population, and do presentations about the writing center or work with students as we did the week before spring break so everyone understands what our writing center is about. It’s clear that many students (and even faculty) who don’t work in the writing center aren’t knowledgeable about writing center theory, so I think it’d be useful (i.e. could boost our client population) for us to get our name out there as a useful university resource for everyone.

Questions:

1. What can we do to clear up misconceptions about our writing center on a large scale (i.e. not just addressing misconceptions as they come up)? 2. If we created a campus-wide initiative, would we get more clients? How could this help our writing center’s image?