Seven Things the Writing Center Can Do for You

1. Get Started
To most beginning writers, this is probably the hardest part of writing. Putting those first words down on paper. Our writing coaches can assist you there. They will listen, ask questions, help you generate ideas, narrow down the focus, and decide on an appropriate angle for your paper.

2. Organize
Some call this outlining and this is done usually before you start writing. But your outline may change as you go along the writing process. It can be just a mental outline or something on paper. Whatever the form, our writing coaches can work with you there also.

3. Develop Ideas
Once you have started, and going down the road with your outline, you may need more ideas for your paper. Our writing coaches can help you look for more ideas—from racking your brains, talking to other people, reading books and magazines, or just looking at the world around you with feeling.

4. Improve Fluency
Once you have put down your ideas on paper in more detail following your outline, you start looking at the flow of ideas from beginning to end. This is your rough draft stage. How does the story read—disconnected, fluent, boring, interesting? Our coaches can give you tips on how to improve your style and the flow of ideas.

5. Revise and Edit
After the first draft you need to revise your paper. Our writing coaches can give you suggestions on how to improve the language—sentence construction, grammar, punctuation, the little things that will make your paper more readable. If extensive change is needed, you revise or rewrite major parts of your paper. If little change is needed, you just edit.

6. Cite and Document
If you are writing a big paper for your class, you need to cite your sources of information in the text itself, and prepare a list of references, or bibliography. Our writing coaches can assist you with citation and documentation. We have references on the APA and MLA styles, which are the most commonly used by teachers and researchers today. Our writing coaches will aid you in selecting one style to follow consistently throughout the paper.

By the way, if you not have noticed yet, in all of these things our Writing Center has offered to you the key word is help. We will not write the paper for you. We will only assist you in doing it.

7. Etcetera
We can also help you with the etceteras. The dictionary defines etcetera as and others, and so forth and so on. That is exactly what we mean. Even if you are not ready to write that magnum opus yet, you can come and chat with us about writers, writing or about life and things in general. Perhaps we can give you tips on how to write that great American novel over a cup of coffee (sorry, not Starbucks) at our Writing Center. Try us.