At 20, the Writing Center is an essential resource for students, a keystone of the College's academic mission, and a place to find one's voice.
Work in Progress
By Donald Challenger
Like any 20-year-old, the Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center can get a little wild and crazy. It does some of its best work late at night — the student tutors don't close up shop and go home until 11 p.m. — but it may be a bit bleary-eyed in the morning. Before breaks and at the end of the semester, things often turn intense. It's hard to tell exactly where the fun ends and the learning begins. Conversations may start in the center's conference room or at one of the computer terminals behind the glass walls of Kirner-Johnson's second floor, but before long they're spilling out into the hall, down the stairs, across campus.
That's just fine with Sharon Williams, the Writing Center's director, who has been there since the doors opened in 1987. "It's a very public place," she says. "One of the great values of the Writing Center, in addition to helping individual writers, is that we model serious intellectual conversation between students. They're in the journey together."
And they have plenty of company. More than eight in 10 Hamilton students visit the center at least once during their stay on the Hill; a majority visit four to six times. One recent student logged a staggering 84 trips to Nesbitt-Johnston in four years, perhaps on the way to a future Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award. The center's Web pages drew more than 233,000 page views last year. As the center marks its 20th year as a major facet of both campus life and curriculum, it has emerged as one of the College's quiet but remarkable success stories — an innovative peer program that enjoys virtually full faculty support, draws many of the best students to its prestigious tutoring jobs, and plays a crucial role in shaping Hamilton's identity as a place where writing and mentoring are taken seriously in every discipline.
"Our goals are fairly typical writing center goals, but what is unique about our center is that we are a much more vigorous program than any other writing center I know," Williams says. "We're not a tiny room down in the basement of the library that's open for two hours on Thursday; we are a central part of instruction at Hamilton.
"Last year we had 2,900 conferences. I say this at meetings with people from other writing centers, and they just — honestly, I sometimes wonder if they think I'm making it up."
"Hamilton’s writing-intensive curriculum and my experience in the Writing Center have been invaluable to me in my professional career. Although I arrived at Hamilton with a general understanding of how to formulate an analytical argument, I truly learned how to write at Hamilton..."
Bethany Baker Booth ’98
"I still use many of the techniques I developed as a writing tutor at Hamilton as a foundation for how I teach writing in my classroom."
Karin Gosselink ’94
"As an attorney, being able to write persuasively and to present effective oral arguments are essential tools. I can honestly say that I apply the skills I learned as a writing tutor literally on a daily basis..."
Kajal Chattopadhyay ’93
"Each Writing Center conference offers a new set of challenges and difficulties. During one hour I might be reading a 300-level biochemistry lab -- a subject I know almost nothing about -- and the next hour I might be reading a 100-level comparative literature paper by an international student who learned English as a fourth or fifth language."
