The Writing Center Open House

Last Tuesday, The Writing Center inside the Heterick Memorial Library here at Ohio Northern University held its first open house for the semester. Upon arrival, students—and faculty, if present—were given a brief, ten-minute description of the services that The Writing Center offers to ONU students. Afterwards, they were asked to sign in so that they may be entered to win a $10 gift card to a location of their choice just for attending the open house. Finally, the students were welcome to travel through The Writing Center office to see what the rooms looked like, as well as pick up a delicious snack and drink on their way out. In case you missed this event, I happen to be a writing tutor employed by The Writing Center, and I am happy to give you a brief overview of the services we provide.

The first service we specialize in is perhaps the most common one, and that is one-on-one tutoring. This means, by scheduling an appointment, you will have a writing tutor’s sole attention for a full 25 minutes. During this time, you can ask questions, talk about your paper, and receive help on any aspects of your paper that you are questioning or confused about. What most people don’t realize about this is you are not required to have a full draft in order to use this service. In fact, you can schedule an appointment with nothing but a rubric to show, and ask the tutor to help you figure out how to start your paper or go about writing it. You can have as little done of your paper as a prompt from your professor, to as finished as a polished draft that you feel ready to turn in. Tutors will be able and willing to help you no matter what. This also doesn’t just qualify for going over papers—we can assist you with learning how to write citations, going over grammar rules, and virtually any other question that you might have in regards to writing. Feel free to bring in any type or form of writing, too. From 30 page essays to love notes—we’ve seen it all.  

The next service we provide at The Writing Center is much less well-known—the Writing Room. Monday through Friday, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.—as well as 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays—you are welcome to come into the Writing Center and sit in our Writing Room and just write. The beauty of this service is that a tutor is always in the room with you during this time. That means whenever a question might rise up as you write, you will have a tutor there to answer it for you right away. If you are the only person in the room, you can look at it as an extended one-on-one tutor session, because you will have the tutor’s full attention. If there are more people in the room, the tutor can help you for five minutes at a time, in order to make sure everyone is getting their questions answered equally. This is a great place to write out papers, so keep it in mind!

Finally, the last service we offer is email help. If you have a question about writing, but do not feel like going to The Writing Center to ask for help, you can email your question to writing-help@onu.edu. During tutoring hours, tutors will be able to respond to your email almost immediately and answer your question to the best of their ability, as well as potentially add links that could help you better understand the answer they provide. This service is not intended for submitting full drafts and asking someone to edit it, because unfortunately we do not have the staffing to read all email drafts. You also would not make an appointment through the email, as it is intended strictly for answering questions about writing or The Writing Center. Feel free to email us your questions anytime!

The open house for The Writing Center was such a success, that we ran out of food halfway through the day! Our director promises that there will be plenty more food for our next open house in the Spring Semester of 2017. Be sure to make it! Until then, The Writing Center is open from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays. Call (419) 722-2186 or stop by The Writing Center to make your appointment today!