Hi! Our writing center is located in Hisar School, Istanbul, Turkey. We have a big room in the middle of our school with a cozy vibe to it. Our center is run by high school students trained by our center directors. We aim to benefit middle schoolers and other high school students who wish to work with their peers on their various assignments. We have three different elective courses for three different levels of writing consultants. It separates the first, second, and third years, allowing each consultant to have a more fitting experience for their level.
When students come to our writing center we hope to better not just their writing or assignment, but also the writer and to leave permanent improvements they can apply to their writing of choice. When we receive a submission from a student, we prepare for their session beforehand, finding specific positives and parts that the student can work on. During the session, we keep the student motivated by using “and”s instead of “but”s, while also leaving the decision-making to the writer, creating an equal environment between consultants and clients.
When we give feedback, we also take some feedback regarding the tutor session. Here are some of the student-written feedback about our sessions. The feedbacks are important to our improvement as well, telling us specifically how we helped them and how we can better ourselves making the sessions more beneficial.
“I fortunately got very good feedback about my essay and I definitely needed a second eye to read it.”
“Everything was good. Now I know what to fix and I also got some ideas on what to write about.”
Working at the writing center benefits the tutor, as well as the writer. The environment created in the center helps the tutor work on their writing, improves their critical thinking skills and enables them to look at their writing in a more objective way. In my personal experience, I felt like it helped me with my IELTS exam as a foreign English speaker. It helped me better my skills like thinking on the spot and empathy.
Our aim as the writing center, especially by having high school students as tutors, is to create collaboration among students and inspire them to explore their writing and bring out their whole potential.
WRITING CENTER Yazma Becerileri Merkezi HİSAR OKULLARI Göktürk Merkez Mahallesi İstanbul Caddesi No: 3 34077 Göktürk – İstanbul Tel: (+90 212) 364 00 00 Ext 333 www.hisarschool.k12.tr
The Centre for Academic Writing (CAW) at Coventry University, England re-opened on campus in August 2021 after operating as a fully-online writing centre between March 2020-July 2021 during the COVID pandemic. Although CAW has offered students synchronous and asynchronous writing tutorials via the Coventry Online Writing Lab (COWL) since 2010, the pandemic pushed staff to come up with new online booking processes and delivery methods in order to offer writing tutorials, a drop-in writing café, writing development workshops, undergraduate and postgraduate writing development modules, and staff consultations online. Two years on from the start of the UK’s first national ‘lockdown’, students and staff are back in CAW, tutorials are taking place either side of clear plastic screens as well as online, CAW’s Single Question Drop-ins are happening at a table in the University Library, and writing development workshops and modules are being delivered online. It’s great to be ‘back in the centre’ as well as retaining our online presence!
Dr. Joseph Essid, Writing Center Director, University of Richmond posts student essays about how the COVID-19 pandemic changed their lives on his Spider Ghost Town blog.
Students of Joe’s class undergraduate Writing Consultants training class “describe the hopes and trauma of what has probably been the most unsettling event in our scholastic lives. There’s a lot of good advice there for writings centers, as well as a record of a semester badly interrupted and a world changed.”
