For years, students have been made to bring hard copies of their essays to the Center for Academic Success hoping to get a 30 minute session with a random tutor.
But this is now a thing of the past with the new Writing Center opening up on campus.
With the new writing center, short thirty minute sessions with tutors are a thing of the past, students can now get hands-on help with any and all writing needs.
A new writing center will be opening up next week in the Center for Academic Success.
Pierce College students will soon have a dedicated area to work on assignments and improve their writing.
The new writing center is hoping to provide a more thorough, beneficial experience where, instead of just a review, students can work on the actual assignment with help from faculty members and tutors.
In the past, students who needed help on a writing assignment would bring in a hard copy to the Center for Academic Success (CAS) and have a thirty-minute session with a tutor who would review the paper.
“The new writing center is an attempt for us to change up our modality and be more accessible to all students,” said CAS Director Crystal Kiekel.
“The idea of a writing center is that students can come in and work on the process of writing. It will be in a computer lab, so that students can come in with nothing at all and they can just sit down and pull up a computer and start researching and writing with assistance from the tutors,” Kiekel said.
Currently, there will be an English tutor, an ESL tutor and an English faculty member working in the writing center. Their job will be to go around and assist students working at the computers, such as answering questions or offering suggestions on papers.
“In this writing center, students can go in and begin or continue working on a paper and get specific guidance from a tutor or teacher,” said English Professor Chris Corning. “They will be getting help as is needed.”
The new writing center was first conceived last fall as a response to Assembly Bill 705, which requires students in California community colleges to skip remedial English classes and go straight to English 101.
“We thought that this [Assembly Bill 705] would be a good opportunity to open up a new writing center,” said English and ESL Department Chair Brad Saenz. “We had to find a way to provide extra support to students who might have been in remedial courses [this year], but were instead placed in English 101.”
While the new writing center is a product of the English and ESL departments, its goal is to provide assistance to students writing papers in any subject or class.
“A person can come in and get help writing a paper on any subject, whether it be English, history or philosophy,” Corning said. “My vision for this is that the center can help students in any sort of writing.”
The writing center will be open on Tuesdays from 12-5 p.m., and on Wednesdays from 1-6 p.m.
Brad Saenz said the project is in a beta stage, and that hopefully, the center will be able to expand its hours in the future.
