"Perspectives on the Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum: A Dialogue Between the Sciences and Humanities"

Introduction

When I set out to examine how the Wilkes University Writing Center can further help promote strong student writing as part of my senior undergraduate capstone project, I did not really know what exactly I was examining, or even what I was going to find.  Much like designing a scientific experiment, I simply started with an observation and a hunch.  As an employee of the Wilkes University Writing Center and a student with almost equal investment in both the English and Biology departments at Wilkes, I began to notice some disconnects between the different groups of students I was working with in the Writing Center, especially between the disciplines of the sciences and humanities.  As my semesters working in the Writing Center accumulated, I began to notice that the types of questions science majors asked during a consultation in the Writing Center were quite different than those who came to the Writing Center with papers written for courses in the humanities.  Although several students from various disciplines would come to the Writing Center asking for the consultant to look for grammatical errors in the paper, many students with humanities papers also asked for other aspects of the paper to be looked at as well, such as paragraph arrangement and argument construction.  Yet, their science peers did not; instead, they often stopped at the point of asking for the consultant to examine grammar and mechanics, and little more.  Due to my own experience as an employee of the Writing Center, as an English major, and from taking courses and working in the Biology department, I knew that writing in the sciences is essential, as science, at its very heart, is most interested in conveying information, often through writing.  Therefore, I could not grasp why science students who bring their papers to the Writing Center would not ask for the same kind of consultation as those from the humanities, and I began to suspect that students in disciplines outside of the humanities were possibly confused or unsure how the Writing Center could help them, and that perhaps, as an extension, confusion was circulating among Writing Center Consultants and science professors as well.