Announcements for the Summer Session 2008:

The Writing Center has moved for the summer due to building rennovations. We will be temoporarily located in Bungalow 1 for the summer, and then moving back to Humanities 100 and 102 for the fall!

If you are interested in improving your writing, reading, or computing skills, while earning extra units along the way, then consider enrolling in English 67, 68, or 69.

These are credit/no credit classes with no homework! Students can attend during any of the open lab hours of The Writing Center, which are Monday and Wednesday 1:30pm -6:30pm and Tuesday and Thursday 10:00-3:00pm!

You will have the opportunity to work one-to-one with tutors and the instructor, and the classes can be used to assist you with writing or reading assignment from other classes, or they can be taken independently just to help you improve your skills.

Stop by The Writing Center in Bungalow 1 to pick up an add slip!

For more information about the classes, click on the link below:

Writing Center Classes

Volunteers:

The Writing Center is currently looking for volunteer tutors or program assistants to volunteer for a few hours a week in The Writing Center. By volunteering you will learn tutoring and teaching techniques, improve your own writing, and gain valuable experience which can be listed on resumes and college applications. Volunteers also receive priority in terms of being hired for $$ in future semesters.

For more information, stop by The Writing Center in Bungalow 1, or call (818) 947-2810, or send an email to writingtutor@lavc.edu.

 

 


What Are Our Objectives?

To encourage intellectual experimentation among both students and faculty
To empower students to read and write in disciplines across the curriculum
To familiarize students with new technologies designed to improve reading and writing
To Implement all existing course exit requirements across the curriculum
To prepare students for successful transfer
To provide in-site training resources for T. A. interns and tutors across the curriculum
To develop training and research resources and offer services to faculty and students across the curriculum


 

"The central goal of The Writing Center is to provide individualized, collaborative, and self-paced learning opportunities for students at Los Angeles Valley College. The heart of any writing center activity consists of dialogue about texts: those that a student has written or those she or he is reading. In either case, the center provides a place for students to develop a sense of audience, the externalizing of a given text that often cannot be accomplished in a classroom setting alone."

—Deborah L. Harrington, Professor of English

 

Benefits of Tutorial Interaction

"Writing Centers do not and should not repeat the classroom experience and are not there to compensate for poor teaching, over-crowded classrooms, or lack of time for overburdened instructors to confer adequately with their students. Instead, writing centers provide another, very crucial aspect of what writers need—tutorial interaction. When meeting with tutors, writers gain kinds of knowledge about their writing and about themselves that are not possible in other institutionalized settings..."

—Muriel Harris, College English, 1995

Dialogue: Key to Writing Center Process

"Nearly everyone who writes likes—and needs—to talk about his or her writing, preferably to someone who will really listen, who knows how to listen, and knows how to talk about writing too. Maybe in a perfect world, all writers would have their own ready auditor—a teacher, a classmate, a roommate, an editor—who would not only listen but draw them out, ask them questions they would not think to ask themselves. A writing center is an institutional response to this need. Clearly writing centers can never hope to satisfy this need themselves; on my campus alone, the student-to-tutor ration would be about a thousand to one. Writing Centers are simply one manifestation—polished and highly visible—of a dialogue about writing that is central to higher education."

—Stephen North, "The Idea of a Writing Center"


What The Writing Center IS . . .

A place where students can share proofreading tips
A place where students can practice techniques for detecting and correcting grammatical errors
A place where students can learn effective strategies for succeeding in their writing and reading for classes they are taking across the curriculum

What do Tutors do?

Help With Ideas:
Understanding assignments
Brainstorming for a topic
Turning a vague idea into a thesis or topic sentence
Making main ideas stand out
Filling out each main idea with persuasive details

Helping With Grammar and Style
Getting rid of run-on sentences and fragments
Composing strong, fluent sentences that stress the most important ideas
Sorting out verb tenses
Finding strong verbs
Getting subjects and verbs to agree
Using pronouns well

Help With General Academic Skills
Improving your spelling
Reading and remembering
Summarizing
Documenting research
Writing essay tests
Reading fiction and poetry

What The Writing Center IS NOT:

Not a proofreading service. Tutors don't proofread your compositions. Why not? Because we want to help you learn to do things for yourself. If we do everything for you, you'll always need a tutor.
Not a quick grammar fix-it shop
Not a classroom
Not a ghost-writing bureau