Writing Center Mission Statement

The Writing Center provides Chestnut Hill College students with constructive, targeted feedback designed to help them expand their skills as academic writers, critical thinkers, and independent learners.

Writing Center Core Values:

Tutoring at the Writing Center takes the form of engaged, collaborative problem-solving.
- The tutor serves as a guide, sounding board, and translator of American academic writing expectations, but the work of writing and revision belongs to the writer.
- Writing tutors provide suggestions, sketch out a range of options, ask key questions to prompt a writer’s thought process, and identify patterns of sentence error on which to focus. The writer chooses the session focus, actively wrangles with ideas and intended meanings, and determines the next steps for moving forward with the draft.
- Meeting with a writing tutor cannot result in a “perfect” paper, because all writing is a work-in-progress that contains flaws and errors.
Writing Center tutors remind writers that “practice makes permanent.”
- When writers consistently apply strategies, techniques, guidelines, or rules discussed in tutoring sessions to their future assignments, they become confident, independent writers both within and beyond their academic discipline.
- Writing development takes time, so writers and faculty members should not expect immediate transformation. In particular, improving sentence-level writing skills happens one pattern of error at a time and requires on-going reinforcement.
Writing Center tutors implement anti-racist and equity-focused pedagogies in all tutoring sessions, including but not limited to,
- allowing the writer to determine session priorities,
- serving as notetaker to capture a writer’s ideas before they are lost,
- focusing sentence-level tutoring on patterns of error that interfere with the writer’s intended meaning,
- recognizing the value of the academic and personal experiences that a writer brings into their assignments, and
- serving as translators of the “hidden curriculum,” especially unstated expectations for American academic writing.
The Writing Center’s support for student writers extends beyond tutoring sessions and across the curriculum.
- The Writing Center provides direct support beyond tutoring sessions through an ongoing series of Writing Workshops on key topics open to all students and through the Writing Resource Library available on the WC website and in the WC headquarters.
- The Writing Center provides indirect support beyond tutoring sessions by providing in-class writing workshops by faculty request, consulting with individual faculty members or departments to discuss adapting assignments to improve student outcomes, and offering faculty development on writing-related pedagogy when appropriate.

The Writing Center commits to making programming and writing resources accessible to all writers.
- All resources and materials posted to this site have been checked for accessibility.
- Accommodation requests and/or physical access needs related to a disability should be made prior to workshop events by contacting Dr. Jaime Longo.

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