Students can sign up for 30-minute sessions in the Lab with our Peer Writing Consultants who have gone through a multi-session training under the model of Rice's writing center, or with our expert Faculty Writing Consultant staff of Rice PhDs. 

Sessions are open to all Lamar students for any piece of writing they're working on, whether it be a school assignment or a college or job application. These meetings offer writers a unique opportunity to work one-to-one with a patient and thoughtful reader who will discuss their writing, ask productive questions, and help them strategize next steps. Coaches and consultants can assist with writing goals such as: idea generation/brainstorming for an assignment, feedback on the content of a piece of writing, help with organizing your ideas in a piece of writing, citation & formatting assistance, post-high school writing (college apps, resumes, cover letters), or visual/oral presentations. 

One important difference between a Writing Lab session and a tutoring session is that we aren’t editing the writing–we are guiding the writer through the writing process! Each writer maintains ownership of their writing in their sessions. 

Writing centers, labs, and tutoring programs are common at universities and colleges. Staffed by trained students and professionals, they serve the campus community across disciplines and fields of study by providing support for writing projects as well as oral and visual communication. These writing centers feature writing courses, individual consultations, resource libraries, presentations, and specialized workshops.

We call ourselves the Lamar Writing “Lab” because we embrace an experimental approach to reinventing such collegiate programs and services for our high-school campus community, and we emphasize the experimental nature of writing itself. Like the scientific method, the writing process involves multiple steps, many of which are repeated and revisited in progress to discovery. Like scientific experimentation, in the writing process, “wrong” answers or apparent missteps still lead to meaningful data or further our understanding.

The idea is that the Writing Lab is not a center for writing where someone is going to “fix” a piece of writing or do the writing for you; it is a place for students to discover and learn by engaging and experimenting with the writing process. It is a place where student-writers meet one-to-one with other writers, access writing resources, and experiment with techniques, exercises, and workshops to develop as practicing writers.

The purpose of coaching writers instead of correcting a paper

When we talk about writing, the term “higher order” refers to the major components of a composition such as thesis, audience and purpose, organization, and development. The term “lower order” refers to minor or local concerns such as grammar (sentence structure) and mechanics (rules of spelling, punctuation, capitalization). Writing coaches focus on higher-order concerns because we want to support the “big picture,” meaning the whole composition as well as the writing process that encompasses it.

Higher-order concerns almost always take priority over lower-order concerns when it comes to quality writing, and they involve more critical thinking and sophisticated analytical work to revise. Leading with lower-order concerns is like painting a house before it’s fully built or gift-wrapping a box before you’ve picked out the present. Presentation and polish are certainly important for academic writing; we help with the presentation of ideas and polish of communicated reasoning to empower the writer to elevate the writing, not just finish it.

We facilitate a writer’s engagement with higher-order concerns over lower-order ones because we prioritize an improved writer over a merely “corrected” piece of writing.

Lamar students can also book sessions with our experienced Faculty Writing Consultants:

The Writing Consultants for 2024-2025 are:

• Eliot Storer, Ph.D., Rice U Anthropology

• Annie Lowe, Writing Lab Director, Ph.D., Rice U English