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PLEASE NOTE LOCATION IN STANLEY LIBRARY. The Writing Center has moved this year to the main floor of the library near the reference books..

Spring 2008: Writing Center open Jan. 21-Apr. 22.
Student Tutors may be available at other hours—see the tutoring page for details

Any changes to these hours on specific days will be posted in the Writing Center.

Writing Center Faculty

Ms. Karen Duddy, Instructor of English and Coordinator of the Writing Center

Dr. Marcia Horn, Professor of English

Dr. Laurie McCollum-Tisdale, Instructor of English

Ms. Megan Soukup, Instructor of English

About the Writing Center

The Ferrum College Writing Center is available to all students seeking assistance with writing projects. English faculty members staff the Writing Center twenty-two hours a week. The staff will respond to individual questions about writing strategies, organization, development, style, or mechanics.

Student tutors for writing and other subjects are available through the ARC Tutoring Center.  Check in the ARC for a list of tutors and times they are available. Occasionally student tutors assist faculty members in the Writing Center during regular afternoon hours, as well as evening hours when most student tutoring occurs.

The Writing Center is located on the main floor of Stanley Library, between stacks of reference books that are on the lake side of the library. A clipboard is available for signing in during Writing Center hours.

To Students: Assistance is available in the Writing Center on a first come, first served basis. Tutors will not proofread papers for you (proofreading to us means making the corrections, not just reading the paper), but tutors will offer help with proofreading and other writing skills. Bring your questions with a copy of your writing and plan to read over it with the Writing Center staff.  If you have instructions written by the professor for the assignment you are working on, it is helpful to bring them as well. Be prepared to make notes as we discuss suggestions for improving your paper, so that you will remember changes you want to incorporate into your next draft. 

Your instructor will be notified that you have received help with the assignment, but Writing Center tutors do not comment on grades that papers deserve or receive.  If other students are waiting for help, there may not be time to analyze all pages of a long paper in one session at the Writing Center; in that case, you are welcome to return later for more help.

When you enter the Writing Center area for help, sign in on the clipboard. Students will receive help in the order in which their names appear on the list each day.  If you do not respond when your name is called, it will be crossed off the list and you will need to sign in again if you return later. You may have to wait for your turn so be sure you have something with you to work on or reading to do in the library while you are waiting. Obviously, you may want to work on revising the paper you have brought to the Writing Center while you are waiting.

Research Papers: We are happy to answer questions about documentation in research papers, but different documentation styles are used in different fields. Be sure you are clear about which documentation method is required for your paper and which handbook you should be following. The Little, Brown Handbook covers the MLA system in most detail and as English professors we are most familiar with it, but we will ask you which method you are using before we can help you use it accurately. For online guides, see Research & Documentation below.

To Faculty: Let us know if you have any questions about the Writing Center, you would like us to know about writing assignments in your class, you would like to discuss ways to coordinate your writing assignments with our work, or you have suggestions for this web page. It is entirely up to you whether you give students incentives or requirements for bringing papers to the Writing Center. It is up to students to be aware of the guidelines given above, and the Writing Center hours are posted in various places on campus. We do not change papers for students, so they will need to allow time to wait their turn for help, if necessary, and then incorporate our suggestions into their next draft. We never comment on grades we think a paper should receive.

Ferrum College Links

Angel Log-in

Prereading Exercise - Getting to Know your Textbooks

Guidelines for Proofreading:  Marking Symbols and Terms for English Papers by Dr. Tina Hanlon

Pointers for Taking Essay Tests by Dr. Tina Hanlon

Guidelines for Reading and Analyzing Literature by Dr. Tina Hanlon

Pretest on Sentence Structure - designed for Introduction to Linguistics Course, intended for review of basic grammatical structures and sentence types. Contact Tina Hanlon if you want help with the answers.

Proofreading Review Exercises on common sentence structure problems. Contact Tina Hanlon if you want help with the answers.

Academic Resources Center - web pages have many links for improving study skills

The Iron Blade - Ferrum College newspaper - join the staff or write a letter to the editor

English 101-102 and 461

Little, Brown Handbook, 10th edition web site contains links to many writing resources, including exercises you can complete and have "graded" online.

Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum web site, for users of the English 102 textbook by Behrens and Rosen, 8th edition.

Successful Writing at Work, 7th ed., by Philip Kolin. Text for English 461, Professional Writing.

Other Web Sites with Resources for Writers and Readers

Miscellaneous

Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) contains many, many pages of printable handouts covering all aspects of the writing process, research, and types of professional writing. Includes a wide variety of exercises with answers available and links to other resources.

Links to Online Texts - lists compiled by Tina Hanlon of Internet sites that reprint many kinds of books and stories. Includes some brief guidelines on using web sites for academic projects. (See also our library's list of online Reference Materials, especially NetLibrary.)

Rhetorical Devices Handbook and a Handbook of Literary Terms is "A Glossary of Literary Terms and A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices including an Introduction and a Self Test by Robert Harris, Professor of English at Vanguard University of Southern California in Costa Mesa, California" (written in 1980 with some changes since then). Also provides guidelines for citing web pages like this one.

Top Books for Writers. The Editorial Department. This is a commercial editing service for fiction writers, but this page gives a list of books on writing.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations:  A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature.

KCI Reader-Based Writing Style Guide is a detailed guide to business writing. It includes many handbook-type entries on formats, proofreading and usage.

Resources on Appalachian Dialects in AppLit, includes a list of some dialect features (phonetic, lexical, and syntactic), questionnaire on attitudes about language, bibliography, guidelines for using minority dialect literature in teaching, analysis of dialect in several children's books, other exercises.

Study Skills on the Web. Our ARC's guide to online assistance with a variety of study skills.

Dictionary and Thesaurus Sites

Dictionary.com contains dictionaries, word games, and related tools and links.

Merriam Webster Online contains word of the day, word games, humorous and serious pages on words, and Internet links, as well as a dictionary and thesaurus with audio pronunciations.

Oxford English Dictionary. Use this link for our library's link to online version, also in book form in reference collection; gives history of each word in the language.

The Global Language Resource "provides the most comprehensive and authoritative portal for language and language-related products and services on the web with more than 1800 dictionaries with more than 250 languages." Includes dictionaries, specialized glossaries, thesaurus, word translations, etc.

iTools is a guide to many Internet tools. This link goes to the section on language, which searches through dictionaries, thesauruses, translators, and other word resources.

Glossary Agent "is a unique, annotated gateway to online monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual glossaries of interest to professionals in insurance, reinsurance, risk management, employee benefits, healthcare, and related fields such as law and financial services." This might be helpful if you are writing a paper that involves one of these subjects."

Biographical Dictionary "covers more than 28,000 notable men and women who have shaped our world from ancient times to the present day." It "can be searched by birth years, death years, positions held, professions, literary and artistic works, achievements, and other keywords."

Research and Documentation

Little, Brown Handbook, 9th ed., online guide to Documentation in the Disciplines.

A Guide for Writing Research Papers Based on Modern Language Association (MLA) Documentation. The Humanities Department and the Arthur C. Banks Jr. Library, Capital Community College (Hartford, Conn.).

Using MLA Style to Cite and Document Sources. Bedford/St. Martins web site for Online! A Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources. Also contains sections on Using APA Style, Using Chicago Style, Using CBE Style, and Using Other Styles.

Purdue University's OWL pages on Research and Documenting Sources give extensive guidelines for MLA and APA documentation, and formatting in sociology.

The Grammar and Research Hospital. Description from Merlot.org: "Online site containing movie and text tutorials to teach students how to write argument research papers and how to put these papers into Modern Language Association Style."

Noodle Tools. Research and documentation software for MLA and APA styles.

Editing and Proofreading

Punctuation Made Simple: http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~olson/pms/intro.html.

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation: http://www.grammarbook.com gives brief rules with exercises and answers to test your understanding.

WebGrammar: http://www.webgrammar.com, contains links to many writing resources, covering topics such as "spelling, grammar, homonyms, punctuation, capitalization, and style. . . or information in the areas of writing, education, typography, academic research, or Web development. . . .. The Writing section . . . includes style guides and many writing resources."

Grammar Hotline Directory: Tidewater Community College. "A grammar hotline is a list of phone numbers or e-mail addresses you can contact for answers to short questions about writing.  Tidewater Community College founded one of the first grammar hotlines in the country and publishes an annual compilation of grammar hotlines in the United States and Canada.  TCC is pleased to offer its directory to Web users everywhere."  Links to many grammar hotlines are arranged by state.

Elements of Style, 1918, is William Strunk's famous short handbook of basic principles of clear writing (later known as Strunk & White). "It aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of writing most commonly violated." This book is available within Bartelby.com, which includes literary works and reference books.

Copy Editing for Magazines by Mindy McAdams outlines a course in copy editing for New York University's Management Institute, with links to some related resources.

Editorial Eye. EEI Communications. "The Eye is a resource for writers, editors, designers, project managers, communications specialists, and everyone else who cares about contemporary publishing practices. Any aspect of effective printed, electronic, visual, or spoken communication is likely to appear as a topic in the Eye." Sample articles from a monthly newsletter are available at this web site. This site also contains Editorial Esoterica, a quiz to "test your knowledge of a range of writing, editing, and publishing topics."

Copy Editor Links. McMurray Publishing. Copy Editor's web site calls it "the leading language newsletter, companion Web site, and job search site for copy editors." The links page gives an extensive list of online resources for writers.

Pre-Writing and Writing Process

A guide to Basic Outlining, City University of New York.

Outlining Your Points. Virtual Presentation Assistant project, Communication Studies Department, University of Kansas.

See Purdue University's Online Writing Lab for resources on all phases of the writing process.

This page's last update: 01/24/2008. Links checked 10/19/06