Victoria King, staff writer
The Writing Center is one of the most important services provided by Daytona State College. Dozens of students use it for different purposes every day.
Laura Henning, a Writing Specialist at the DSC Writing Center, shared information about her main responsibilities. Her job is a lot more than just tutoring students. She also develops handouts and materials for online distribution such as the MLA and APA Info Guides and Learning Glass videos. Students enjoy watching her videos and find them helpful when they are having problems with citation styles. Henning said that she also trains and mentors new tutors, facilitates workshops, and works with faculty members through embedded classes and other forms of department outreach.
She also excitedly noted, “As a Writing Specialist, I’ve also had the opportunity to participate in awesome professional development opportunities like WAC/WID (Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines), and attend/present at conferences like SWCA (Southeastern Writing Center Association).”
Students can book an appointment with a tutor through the DSC website www.daytonastate.edu/cwc or email cwc@daytonastate.edu and communicate with them personally in chat, e-mail, teams-meeting or in person on campus.
Teresa Rizzo, a current student at DSC, mentioned that she has been using the Writing Center for many different classes. The Writing Specialists helped her work on her spelling and grammar mistakes. They also taught her to work with DSC’s online library and find good sources for her assignments, which ultimately helped her to get excellent grades on many of her assignments. Rizzo emphasized how friendly and polite the tutors were toward her during her multiple sessions with them. She highly recommends using this valuable resource.
Students can use the Writing Center tutors to help them correct grammar errors on discussion boards or understand assignment instructions. Sometimes the students use different tutors to help with one assignment depending on who is available at the time. Structuring or reorganizing writing assignments is one more very common issue that students face.
If students have any difficulties with assignments, they can simply make an appointment with a Writing Specialist who will be ready and happy to help. “Students come to the Writing Center for all sorts of reasons because they come for all sorts of classes and all kinds of backgrounds,” Henning said. “No one session is ever the same, even with students I’ve been working with semester after semester.”
Henning explains that at the start of a session, she always asks students what they prefer to work on. “Sometimes it turns out that there are other more pressing concerns that need to be addressed first,” she explained. “Tutoring is really all about finding the balance between what a student wants and what they need, as well as navigating that invaluable third space between student, teacher, and tutor.”
Writing Specialists are here to help students succeed. All they need to do to start this journey toward success is to contact the Writing Center at cwc@daytonastate.edu.