Tutoring Students from All Disciplines in a WAC Writing Center

Abstract

On a typical day at the University of Nevada, Reno Writing Center, students come to get help on papers for classes such as Management 321, English 401, Biology 102, History 387, Women’s Studies 450, and Business Administration 772. Students seek help on resumes and personal statements for graduate school applications. And, of course, students from our first-year composition classes–English 098, 101, and 102–are always well represented. We tutor students from all over campus, from every discipline, and from every level of instruction, from basic–or “developmental”–writing students in English 098 to people working on doctoral dissertations. It truly is a writing center focused on helping writing across the curriculum, not just students in first-year composition courses or a handful of writing-intensive courses. In fact, in an average year, our writing center tutors between 5,000 and 6,000 students, from about 300 different classes, representing every major on campus. About 46 percent of the students who utilize the UNR Writing Center are there for first-year composition courses, and about 12 percent are graduate students, with the remaining clients coming from a variety of 200-, 300-, and 400-level courses. It’s also worth noting here that these students generally leave the UNR Writing Center satisfied. Post-tutoring session surveys that we conduct always reveal that more than 90 percent of students who visit the UNR Writing Center say that the tutors they worked with either met or exceeded their expectations.