About the Writing Center

Writing Center Mission

We help students to become stronger and more independent.

We help students recognize their strengths and areas to improve. We want students to begin to ask and answer their own questions about an essay’s focus, organization and evidence. We want students to have a positive experience and return to the Center, but we don’t want students to feel they can’t get through a paper without a consultant’s help, so we work to help them learn independent strategies. Because we are committed to building students’ abilities, not giving answers, we might only focus on one or two issues in a half-hour session. Real improvement is an ongoing process.

We help students at all levels and across languages.

We work with students who want their writing to be the best it can be, whether they are building basic skills, acquiring writing skills in a new language, or strengthening a wide range of strategies to complete any writing task, at any level, successfully. Our staff consists of accomplished student writers who are both native and non-native English speakers.

We help students with any kind of writing and at any stage.

Students may come to the Writing Center with any writing that they are working on: assignments for any class, resumes, personal statements, creative writing, etc. We want students to use the Center at all stages of the writing process – drafting, revising, editing.

We respect students’ choices and priorities and collaborate as equals.

We respect students’ ideas and abilities, and we know their writing process is their responsibility. We help students learn writing strategies that include assignment analysis, focus, development, organization, as well as editing for errors. But we believe students control their own writing process, and if a student is certain that s/he wants to work on an aspect of the writing that differs from the consultant’s advice, we respect the student’s choice and will work with his/her priorities.

Like other students, we are committed to multicultural awareness, co-learning, and professional development.

The Highline Writing Center provides opportunities for students who have done well in college writing to work as writing consultants. In accepting this role, we commit to ongoing training, leadership activities, and collaborative learning in a diverse context. We work as a team to create a welcoming environment for constructive peer conversations about writing. Our current projects include initiatives involving multilingualism and queer identity which helps us to explore how the writing center can best serve the student writers.