Writing Center

Hello Everyone. This is Camille Chen. I hope mid-term has been treating you well.

With finals coming, I believe that there are students struggling with their papers. Me as International

 student, and with English as my second language, writing has been the biggest challenge for me.

 Grammar rules vary in different countries. In China, we don’t have articles such as “a” or “the”, 

which I always get confused. Another one I notice is that we express plurality differently as nouns

 themselves do not indicate any singularity or plurality. What’s worse, rules for plurality sometimes

 even doesn’t make sense to me. How can many fish still be fish, instead of “fishes”? 

Grammatical errors are the major area that my points get taken off so I decided to get help from the

 Writing Center. I would say that going to the Writing Center is one of the best decisions I have 

made for this semester. I can frankly say, papers are my worst nightmare. I can deal with exams 

or other things but papers just give me lots of headache, and it takes up way too much time. 

In Writing Center, they DO NOT write your paper for you but if you get stuck with your thoughts,

 sometimes they will help you to organize your thoughts. Like I said earlier, the biggest help for me

 from the Writing Center is to correct my grammatical error. Another big help is that they will go 

over my paper and point out anything that doesn’t make sense to them. Choice of wording or 

appropriateness of wording is also my big challenge as sometimes I still think in Chinese, and 

there are certain words that I believe they would fit in the scenario in the essay while it might not 

work in English. According to my writing tutor, the grammar is correct but the wording is just a 

little bit awkward and we don’t say it like that.

 

 

So yes, I am frustrated and the struggles are real. If you have the same issues, definitely go check out

 the Writing Center in the library. Tutors are all friendly are extremely helpful.  If you are struggling with 

your paper or want to make sure that you don’t get taken points off from grammar, check out 

their website and make an appointment with them :)