Our Mission

Our mission is to guide all Warren College students in the process of writing. We seek to go beyond the individual paper, promoting long-term confidence and improvement in writing abilities.

Our Tutorial Philosophy

We believe that good writing is essential for academic success. Although students may receive explicit writing instruction in their classes, there is sometimes a gap between what goes on in the classroom and student understanding; we seek to bridge this gap. We provide a supplemental support service that may be particularly important at a large university like UCSD.

We see writing as a process that takes practice. No one is a perfect writer; there is always room for improvement at any stage of the process. Every writer is different, and we attempt to work with each writer as best we can. We aim to be responsive to unique capabilities and needs. We take into account individual students’ priorities – what they say they want to achieve in their mentoring sessions – while simultaneously communicating our own concerns about writing problems.

As writing mentors, we see ourselves as coaches, facilitators, educators, and guides. We can help students along the path to good writing, tell them what to expect, give them trail maps and assist them in navigating the terrain – but we cannot walk the path for them.

Our approach is interactive, not directive. We are here not to give answers, but to ask questions that may provoke thinking. We try to tease out what students want to say, but are having a hard time expressing. We are here to help them present their ideas clearly and thoroughly, not to promote our own ideas. When we work with students whose writing is a response to other written texts, we encourage them to analyze these texts in depth and detail, and we try to help them see themselves as having a conversation with other writers.

We recognize that students coming to see us may be anxious about their writing and their academic capacities. We strive to be approachable, to create a comfortable and nonjudgmental environment, and to help build student confidence. But we also strive to provide honest and constructive criticism, to deal with students professionally, and to give them the feedback they need. We ultimately want them to be able to feel good about what they have written.