Mission | Requirements | Staff

The Writing and Communication Center (WCC) is designed to complement the General Education Program and to support writing and oral communication across the curriculum. Trained tutors offer individual assistance to beginning, intermediate, and advanced writers and speakers. Assistance is available at all stages of the communication process, from generating topics to organizing ideas and from developing a thesis to polishing a final product. The primary goal of the WCC's peer tutoring program is to produce better writers and speakers, as opposed to simply improving a particular piece of writing or speech. Peer tutors act as a thoughtful and responsive audience for the student's work, helping to guide the student with questions and coaching. Tutors do not "fix" papers or tell students what is "wrong" with their work. Instead, they help students develop better communication skills by helping them identify their own problems and errors.

Students learn to think critically about their own writing and speaking and learn techniques of brainstorming, revision, editing, and proofreading so that they will be able to employ these strategies on their own in the future.

In addition to the learning that takes place for the students who utilize the WCC's services, the peer tutors themselves (most of whom are undergraduates) improve their own writing and speaking skills, along with their ability to be critical readers of written and spoken messages.