The Sam Houston State University Writing Center serves as both a resource and a place of employment for English graduate students. Its goal is to help students, faculty, and members of the larger community become better writers and thereby develop more confidence in their writing abilities. Because writing is the primary method that graduate students use to express their critical understanding of texts and to make arguments about those texts or about their own creative enterprises, and because writing is thus the primary instrument by which a graduate student’s success or failure is measured, developing better writing skills and greater confidence is obviously crucial to anyone in the English MA Program. To this end, the Writing Center tutors provide one-on-one and small-group writing instruction to those who seek it. Throughout the school year the Center also offers one-session workshops on various topics relating to writing.

Sometimes even seasoned graduate student writers may need an outside eye to help see their way through an argument or to suggest some rhetorical strategies for making a critical argument better. The Writing Center encourages you to bring in your class writing. The tutors at the Center—some of them your peers who hold graduate assistantships—are always happy to sit down and talk to you about your writing tasks and goals.

As the old proverb has it, “If you give a man a fish, he will have dinner for the evening, but if you teach a man to fish, he will have dinner for the rest of his life.” Although Writing Center staff can help students with every kind of writing task— research papers, critical analyses, creative writing and technical manuals, science lab reports, résumés, scholarship and job applications, even MA theses and PhD dissertations—the Center is not merely a copyediting, proofreading, or correction service. Instead, the tutors, all of them certified by the College Reading and Learning Association for Tutor Training, help students learn prewriting strategies, organizational rationales, revising principles, and editing skills by working with them on specific writing tasks that they bring in. Their goal is not to give students papers so that they can satisfy their instructors’ particular assignments but to help the students develop skills that they can take with them for the rest of their lives.

If you are interested in working as a writing tutor, you may wish to apply for a Graduate Assistantship, with the good chance that you’ll be given an assignment at the Writing Center.

The Writing Center is located in Room 111 of the Farrington Building. You may contact the Center, either by phone (936-294-3680) or e-mail (wctr@shsu.edu).