I’ve sometimes had students visit the OWRC and still turn in poorly written papers. How do you explain that?
Not every writing center session is an unqualified success. We are often frustrated at not being able to help students as much as we would like to. Students at many different levels of writing ability and experience come to our writing center at many different stages of their writing process. Many of them are good, strong writers who want to be even better. One visit is enough to help them identify and address the issues that need to be resolved in a paper, and they are able to improve it significantly. But frequently we see papers with more writing problems than we can address in a forty-five minute session. As much as we might like to “take over” a student’s paper and “fix” it, that is not our mission – and while that might give you a more pleasurable reading experience when you see the paper, it would neither help the student to grow as a writer (which is our ultimate purpose), nor be consistent with UW’s Academic Integrity Policy (which is extremely important to us).
