School of Arts and Sciences Review Winter 2014 | Page 8

A Closer Look

Graduate student Patrick Winney assists classics major Brianna Roberts with a paper during a session at the Plassmann Writing Center.

Writer’s Block
Master’s degree students man Plassmann Writing Center
with pride, offering guidance to undergraduates in all majors
By Julia Andretta, ’15

I

n a room in the basement of Plassmann Hall sits a
dedicated group of first-year English MA students
who are doing all that they can in order to make a
lasting change in the lives of St. Bonaventure students. The room is the home of the Plassmann Writing
Center. The MA students are the tutors who work there.
Their mission is to make each person who comes in for
assistance a better writer.
“Our catch phrase — and it’s meaningful — is ‘Make
better writers, not better papers,’” says Dr. Daniel Ellis, director of the Writing Center. “If a student brings in a
paper, then that’s the event that is used to talk about different aspects and different approaches to writing so that

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School of Arts and Sciences Review

the student can walk out of that tutoring session and
learn something, yes, about the paper itself, but also
about writing in general.”
“This isn’t a fix-it shop where a student comes in and it’s
topic sentence this, thesis statement that, and a little bit
of grammar at the end,” says Writing Center tutor David
Boocock, a first-year graduate student in the English MA
program from Cincinnati, Ohio. “It’s more about really
building something. We’re trying to build and help and
support, and we’re trying to do it in a proper, honest,
kind way.”
This is a bold endeavor, but the tutors receive ample
training so that they are more than prepared to take it on.