Reading & Writing Center Mission

The Westfield State University Reading and Writing Center is dedicated to supporting and encouraging all students, faculty, and staff as they write to communicate their ideas and to discover new ones. Acting as an engaged audience, we seek to assist writers on any type of project—academic, professional, or creative—in any discipline or field, at any stage of the writing process. Our approach values intellectual inquiry, rhetorical flexibility, and reflective practice and recognizes power dynamics inherent in literacy.  While we do share strategies for planning, drafting, and revising so that writers may internalize the writing process and grow increasingly independent, we also acknowledge that writing is not a solitary endeavor and that all writers benefit from collaboration. Ultimately, WSU’s RWC aims to foster a safe and diverse community of writers that extends beyond the campus walls.

In order to achieve our mission:

• We offer one-on-one sessions with professional and peer writing consultants.
• We offer workshops on a variety of writing-focused topics. 
• We tailor our one-on-one sessions to meet individual needs.
• We offer a broad range of hours in order to accommodate busy schedules.
• We maintain the high quality of our services by requiring peer tutors to undergo rigorous training, by reading current scholarship in the field, and by participating in conferences.
• We assist writers on all aspects of the process, such as outlining, free writing, note taking, summarizing, understanding the assignment, using models, posing questions, organizing, developing arguments, working with sources, revising, editing, and proofreading.
• We help writers examine the expectations of particular genres and disciplines and empower them to question these expectations and make deliberate choices in their writing.
• We value difference, and we strive to enable students to enter new discourse communities while preserving their own voices.
• We encourage writers to own their writing by wrestling with meaningful problems and pursuing genuine questions.
• We empower students to advocate for themselves within the larger university community.
• We develop and participate in community outreach initiatives.