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Writing Center Will Serve as New Student Resource

Your lab report is due in three days.  You’ve finished typing it, but it doesn’t seem complete.  You’ve debated between rewriting the conclusion and changing your responses to the end-of-lab questions.  But, you can’t decide what to fix.  Stuck, you stumble upon the new writing center in the library.  Hoping for some help, you arrive with many questions, but leave happy with a complete, detailed lab report and all of your questions answered.  

Woodland will soon have its own student run writing center, a resource where any student can bring any writing at any stage of the writing process to get help with it.  Located in the library media center, the writing center will be staffed by volunteer peer tutors who have been trained how to edit other students’ work.  Students can bring any kind of writing from any class to be edited; whether it be english work, a lab report, or a history essay.  They will have the option of visiting the writing center during their study hall or before or after school.  

Anna Muharem, an english teacher at Woodland, started the writing center after learning about it at UCONN when she became certified to teach ECE (Early College Experience) classes.  Muharem noticed that many other schools offering ECE courses had writing centers, so she attended a writing center conference and thought,  “We could do that, we have those kind of kids that can be responsible and independent and run a writing lab for their peers.” Ready to start a writing center at Woodland, Muharem spread the word to students that they could volunteer to become peer tutors.

Volunteers quickly signed up and went to a meeting to learn more about the writing center.  They then took a field trip to the University of Connecticut (UCONN) Storrs Campus, where they were trained to be peer tutors through a high school outreach program.  

Jasmine Coppola, a sophomore at Woodland, volunteered to become a peer tutor after learning about the writing center.  She cites the journal entries she writes in English class as well as her love for helping other people to why she wanted to become a part of the writing center.  Coppola hopes to gain better writing skills and friendships through helping other students with their writing and is looking forward to learning about things that other people are passionate about through their writing.  

The writing center will be a great resource for students to use in order to improve their writing and receive constructive peer feedback. Next time you find yourself stuck on a piece of writing, consider the writing center as the go-to place for help.