During the first few weeks of my experience at Princeton, I was bombarded with advice from the serious (don’t take too many classes, make sure that you get enough sleep) to the very serious (Murray Dodge gives out free cookies!). Amid the deluge of varied advice from Community Action leaders, advisers and even my preceptors, I kept hearing one piece repeated — if I was ever having trouble with a paper, I should go to the Writing Center. I was told that the Writing Center was just as good as advertised: The writing fellows could help me at literally any stage of my writing process and were open and helpful. As a first-semester freshman not in a writing seminar, I’m up for all the help that I can get. When my first paper was due, I set up a meeting at the Writing Center and have gone back for other assignments since.
I consider the Writing Center an extremely valuable academic help program at Princeton, and I am definitely grateful that I have access to it. But, while I have had several positive experiences there, I think that the process could be improved. Several of my friends and I who have been to the Writing Center so far this year have experienced a significant problem with the system — the possibility that the writing fellow has little or no experience with the subject material of your paper.
Currently, this is a conscious decision on the part of the Writing Center. Their website states: “In general, the Writing Center does not match you with a fellow according to your paper topic; no matter what the subject matter, our fellows serve as sounding boards, careful readers and helpful critics.” The website explains that the fellow is there to serve as a “non-specialist” to view your paper from a fresh perspective. I agree that going through the process of explaining your ideas and your paper’s logical progression to someone one step removed from the class can be a strong test of the viability of your arguments. And, even if that exercise were not beneficial, it’s also unrealistic to expect Writing Center fellows to be experts. A student seeking to have a detailed and contextualized conversation about essay content should approach a preceptor or a professor for advice.
But for Writing Center fellows to truly be “sounding boards, careful readers and helpful critics,” a basic knowledge of the paper’s subject matter is sometimes essential. Without some subject understanding, the most a Writing Center fellow can assist you in is structure and syntax. While these parts of a paper often need to be addressed and edited, the Writing Center should be able to do more. Several of my friends have brought papers to the Writing Center only to spend most of their appointments explaining relevant texts and themes.
Students can indicate what they would like to focus on when they schedule an appointment, so it wouldn’t be necessary for students who genuinely do only want to work on structure and syntax to be matched with a fellow who has experience in the subject of their paper. For students wanting to work on a thesis or strengthen their arguments, matching up Writing Center fellows and students by the subject matter of their papers is easier said than done, but it isn’t impossible. It isn’t realistic or practical for Writing Center fellows to only advise students in classes related to their concentrations, especially as some Writing Center fellows have not yet declared. It is possible, though, for fellows to indicate areas of academic strength and experience. For example, if a fellow has taken several politics classes, he or she would be qualified to advise a student on a paper for a politics class, even if the fellow were not a politics major. Using this system, each fellow could advise on multiple topics. Once fellows identify subjects that they are comfortable working with, it would be easier for students who want subject-specific help to be matched up with people who are more knowledgeable.
Under a new structure such as this, the Writing Center might have to make changes to the scheduling system, but the benefits would be worth surmounting logistical challenges. The Writing Center could live up to the formidable reputation that so many mentors, advisers and professors created at the beginning of the year and truly help students at every stage of the writing process.
Sarah Schwartz is a freshman from Silver Spring, Md. She can be reached at seschwar@princeton.
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