The Debby Ellis Writing Center offers one-on-one consultations to all student writers at Southwestern.  The center, located in Smith Library Center (111), is open for appointments during our regular hours.  At the core of our mission and our methodology is conversation: writers sit down with consultants to discuss their works in progress, even if there is nothing yet on paper. DEWC consultants are prepared to help students at all stages of the writing process, from unpacking the assignment, to invention and idea-generating, to organization of ideas, to citation style, document style, format, and final revisions.

Our well-trained generalist consultants can do a great deal to help a writer, regardless of discipline, and we employ students from across the disciplines in our center. We also work regularly with our consultants to ensure that they are familiar with the conventions of disciplinary writing in different fields. If you’re concerned about our consultants’ abilities to provide support on a particular assignment, we’d love to have you come talk to our director about your expectations and how the consultants can help students meet them - please email the Director of the Debby Ellis Writing Center Maurice Wilson, and she will schedule you in our next staff development meeting. If you’re more generally concerned about disciplinary conventions, you might encourage your students to consult our staff page and plan to visit with a consultant who seems best suited to their assignment. 

Almost certainly! We love to talk about the work we do in our center and to invite more students to visit with us. We also offer mini-workshops for FYS classes. If you’d like more information about planning a visit to the DEWC with your class (or having a consultant come to you), please email the Director of the Debby Ellis Writing Center Maurice Wilson.

The DEWC is staffed by students from all disciplines at Southwestern. All of our staff have served as interns in the DEWC before becoming full consultants. DEWC staff are regularly offered feedback by the director and assistant directors, and they continue their professionalization through bi-monthly staff development meetings. We hire new consultants in the spring, so if you have a student who you think would be a good addition to our staff, please encourage them to apply!

DEWC consultants will ask your students if they’d like us to send you an email about their visits. If a student consents, then the consultant will send you an update to let you know that your student has visited us. However, a student may not want the DEWC to send you an email, and it is our policy to maintain confidentiality of all student visits. If you ask students not to use the DEWC for a particular assignment, they are bound by the Honor Code not to use our services, and we therefore advise that you ask students to self-report their use of the DEWC. Except as they are bound by the Honor Code as well, DEWC consultants will not be asked to report on the activity of other students.

There are many reasons why a student who has visited the Writing Center may not hand in a perfect paper. Because our goal at the DEWC is to produce better writers, not just better papers, we do not serve as a proofreading or editing service. We will help students to revise, but our consultants won’t “fix” other students’ papers. Therefore, even a punctuation-specific consultation might focus on learning proper comma use and a few preposition errors may go unaddressed (during this half-hour, at least). It’s also possible that a consultant offers suggestions for revisions or edits that a writer chooses not to accept. Our consultants are trained to focus on higher-order concerns, so it may be that your student visited and the bulk of the consultation was spent discussing organization or thesis concerns. Finally, there may have been a misunderstanding between the student and the consultant. Because we work to keep the DEWC a student-centered space, and because we work to help students retain ownership of their writing, we also must insist that the final text is the responsibility of the student writer.

We ask that you not require students to visit us, individually or as a class. We hope to be a resource for students throughout their four years at Southwestern rather than an extra assignment they have to complete. Of course, we certainly appreciate your suggesting, cajoling, encouraging, or even bribing students into visiting us; we just hope you won’t require them.

Yes. You may wish to ask students to acknowledge their work in the DEWC (or to attest that they did not visit the DEWC) in the pledge, but otherwise Southwestern recognizes the Writing Center as a part of the teaching and learning process.

Sure. The best plan is to ask your student to look over our staff page and find a few consultants who might be a good match. Then the writer can come in for a preliminary consultation to set a schedule and a plan for visits and get to work.

Students who make the DEWC a regular part of their writing practice see real gains in confidence and control over their prose. Although this process is not instantaneous, with time, work, and patience, they will see their writing improve.