"We're here to help"

The Dalhousie Writing Centre is now bigger and better than ever. In the fall of 2004, the Writing Centre moved its offices to the Killam Library's Learning Commons, and began offering a number of new services under the leadership of its new coordinator, Margie Clow Bohan. Formerly a lecturer in the School of Business, Bohan felt that the students she was encountering could benefit significantly from additional writing support.

"Students generally find writing difficult even when they think that they have good ideas. It takes time to learn to organize your thoughts and present them in a manner that readers will understand. Students also must express these ideas in documents (essays, opinion pieces, reviews, reports, etc.) that have their own rhetorical conventions. No matter what students do in life, they will write, so they might as well make sense of the writing process here at Dal," says Bohan. "We're here to help."

The Centre tries to alleviate some of these challengs by offering several services. For those students looking for quick answers to specific questions, the Centre's Q&A office in the Learning Commons is staffed by tutors ready to help. Distance education students can also access this service by email. For those requiring help with a specific assignment, one-on-one tutoring sessions are arranged. The Writing Centre also offers periodic teaching sessions in which small groups address a particular topic.

Although the Writing Centre is primarily for academic assignments, students can use these services to help them with any number of projects. About to graduate from Dal with an engineering degree, one student was having trouble writing the Letters of Intent required to apply to graduate engineering schools in the US. While he was having difficulty putting his thoughts into words, he had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say and how he wanted to come across. What impressed him most about the Writing Centre, he says, "is how much time they put into understanding what the letter was for, what kind of program I was applying for, and thinking about what kind of person I am and how I wanted to present myself." The student has since succeeded in his efforts and is presently in a combined MSc/PhD program at Dartmouth.

One area of significant concern is teaching students how to cite sources properly. Bohan notes that the advent of Internet and the subsequent increase in availability of material has left students confused about what they need to cite and how they can do so appropriately. One of the goals of the centre is to impress upon students the importance of intellectual honesty and avoiding unintentional plagiarism.

In the end, Bohan thinks that the Writing Centre can help turn students into confident writers— and clear thinkers. Students can access the Centre by dropping by room G40M in the Learning Commons of the Killam, by emailing writingcentre@dal.ca or by phoning 494-1963.