Seriously? Sarah thought. She gave me an F on this essay? I got straight A’s in high school. There must be some mistake. When students make the transition from high school to college, not only is it a completely different environment, but each student also has to drastically alter their mindset about what writing is. What was great there is not acceptable here, so this can be a scary transition for students. Fortunately, the university’s writing center can help with this process.
The main focus in high school English classes is the mechanics of writing. So, when a student gets his or her paper returned, the teacher has marked all of the errors in grammar and how the paper is organized. High school teachers are still teaching students the basics of writing. They do not teach them the importance of focus and content. It is not the teacher’s fault; this is what is required of them. How can a student worry about the deeper issues of the paper if his or her surface still has issues? Like Peter Kittle says, it is not the teacher’s fault.
The writing culture changes when a student goes to the university. Professors expect you to know the mechanics (you spent more than thirteen years working on them, so it is a pretty good point). The college level professor grades the student on focus, organization and content. But, the focus and content come first. Your organization really does not matter if you do not know what you are talking about. In The Novice As Expert: Writing The Freshman Year, Nancy Summers and Laura Saltz discuss why some students grow in their college writing and others give up on working to make it better. They argue that it is all about the changes within the student, not the actual paper. This can be seen in a writer’s choice to go to the writing center.
The Writing Center can be scary in the mind of a freshman. Not only does the student have to get up the nerve to go there, but he or she probably has the misconception that doing so is going to be like one-on-one conferences with high school teachers where the teacher butchers the student’s paper and the student has to go home and make out what the teacher wrote in blazing red ink. This is not how the writing center works. The students who work there help the student who has walked in to develop the paper he or she wrote. It is no one else’s work but the students. The student works on developing his or her writing with guidance, nothing more or less
In Kristin Walker’s “Difficult Clients and Tutor Dependency: Helping Overly Dependent Clients Become More Independent Writers”, she talks about how dependent a writer should be. Academic writing should never be done completely alone. There is something wonderful about collaborating with a classmate to improve one another’s writing. The Writing Center is a great tool to incorporate this theory.
When students make the transition from high school to the university, the writing culture is often difficult to adjust to. Fortunately, the student has a partner during this transition. The Writing Center is a tool that incoming freshman can use to make this adjustment easier and to improve their writing throughout their academic time at the university.
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