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You may use the Writing Lab on a regular basis by signing up for College Writing 100, a one credit class that you can take twice during your Grinnell career. By enrolling you secure a weekly appointment with an instructor of your choice. To benefit from this class, you need to write a lot during the semester; as a rule of thumb, you should have at least eight papers, but you may also use your appointments to work on a MAP or another large, long-term writing project. Enrolled students complete a Learning Contract at the beginning of the semester in which they evaluate their writing abilities and define goals for improvement. They meet with their instructor for a minimum of ten appointments and participate in a second self-evaluation at the end of the semester.
You won't find a cookie-cutter approach here. Every Writing Lab appointment is unique. Because students bring in their own writing assignments or other writing projects and because we meet with them at any stage of the writing process, describing a "typical" appointment is difficult.
If you have received an assignment and are prepared to talk about it, we will help you think about issues such as
- What the assignment is asking you to do
- The audience you are writing for
- How you can craft a thesis statement that is both supportable and interesting
- What your major arguments might be
- How you can break the assignment into "do-able" pieces so that you can turn in a well-crafted piece
If you bring in a draft, we will:
- Review the assignment with you, read the draft carefully and offer our appraisal of how well you have responded to the assignment
- Help you think about reorganizing your ideas if necessary
- Help you improve grammar, punctuation, mechanics and style
- Offer ideas for attention-grabbing openings and satisfying conclusions
If you bring in a paper that you want to rewrite, we will:
- Help you understand and apply the professor's comments
- Offer suggestions for strengthening the paper's argument, organization, mechanics and/or style
Students typically bring in papers they have been assigned in their classes, but they also bring a wide variety of other kinds of writing including:
- Newspaper stories and articles
- Opinion pieces
- Poetry
- Fiction
- Graduate school essays
- Scholarship proposals
- Business letters, resumes, writing samples
- Timed essays such as those found in the MCATs
- Proposals to study abroad or for internships, declarations of major, area of concentration
Students are free to sign up for an appointment with the instructor of their choice.
Every instructor has a strong liberal arts background as well as an advanced degree or considerable study at the graduate level. Therefore, all staff members can read and respond to papers in all disciplines.
Appointments last a maximum of fifty minutes and run approximately parallel to the class schedule of the College. There is no minimum length of time for an appointment.
Lab instructors work with the faculty to help students improve their writing. Therefore, instructors communicate directly with faculty about which students they have worked with. Faculty often recommend that students come to the Writing Lab to work on specific assignments or writing issues. Generally, faculty are glad when students use the Lab because students who do so are intent on improving their writing, a goal the faculty heartily endorses. However, in some specific instances, such as for mid-term or final examinations, faculty may request that students not come to the Lab.
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