At the price of $56,860 for tuition a year, the University of Richmond should provide a top-notch educational experience for the students. With the potential of solely online classes for the Fall 2020 semester due to the Coronavirus outbreak, that may be a difficult task to accomplish. As a UR student, I willingly put myself into thousands of dollars of debt for a small-classroom experience with well-accomplished faculty and the countless resources the university offers to enhance my education and wellbeing. When I struggle with understanding an assignment or writing a paper, I know I can walk to the Writing Center on campus and find a brilliant group of Consultants to help me out. The Writing Center is an asset the university simply can’t afford to neglect, especially when considering potential incoming freshmen with limited college-level writing experience. In order for the university to maintain the helpfulness of our Writing Center, they must ensure as much convenient access to free tutoring as possible for their students. We need effective communication to aid students (via Zoom meetings) and the integration of Writing Consultants into classes with written components to keep students on track and limit procrastination. These assets will help keep us students engaged in our writing process and improve the value of a remote University of Richmond education.

The Writing Center has helped me add structure to my writing process; reminding me of the importance of planning, organizing, and revising my work. Before I practiced their recommended procedures for constructing my papers, I would rely on only my intuition to understand the assignment sheet and write the paper arbitrarily in hopes of an A grade. The reality is “the assignment sheet is a text written by instructors and affects the rhetorical situations within which students must compose, and the assignment sheet is frequently misunderstood by students” (Kendall 2). Without the ability to walk into a professor's office to discuss, at leisure and without interruption, the work to be done, it is only that much more difficult to understand the requirements and goals of an assignment without understanding the assignment/prompt sheet. Considering the barriers of differing time-zones, uncertain schedules, and a heavy workload, professors may have little or no opportunity to adequately answer any and all questions their many students may have. This is where Writing Consultants prove vital to our remote education. With nearly 60 of us to allocate time specifically to aiding students in the writing process, the university can make up for the uncertain time constraints of professors. If these Writing Consultants are actively integrated into class assignments in which students must meet with them via Zoom to plan and eventually revise their papers, students would be far less likely to fall into the now wider trap of having to rush to completing assignments they didn’t plan out. With forced accountability of students for the full writing process, they are unable to completely rush assignments last-minute and are equipped to produce stronger writing. William Macauley Jr. in A Tutor’s Guide “The urgency of the writing is often a result of not getting started early enough…” (5), so integrating The Center into remote classes would limit this urgency. Faculty cannot be forced to do this, yet the Director has the ability to cajole them and provide additional resources, such as referrals for ELL writers or in-class workshops. These have, in the past, encouraged faculty to mandate drafts reviewed by Consultants.

Zoom meetings allow people to connect from any distance to discuss matters of a paper in real time. When considering the benefits of in person tutoring, including the ability to talk through and maneuver the intricacies of an assignment sheet or paper, it’s hard not to consider utilizing Zoom (or some other form of video chat) as a resource for The Writing Center. When a professor gives their students an assignment, “there is one important area they know very little about: the academic backgrounds, skills, and learning strategies that [the students] bring to college and to their particular courses” (Hjortshoj 8). With the absence of in person classes and office hours, professors will have an even harder time figuring out what their students do and don’t understand about an assignment. Furthermore, the professor’s limited schedule may not permit students to video chat with them to ask questions whenever they need to and the lack of verbal communication in emails/texts limits how effectively the student can ask questions or understand the professor’s response. Once again, The Center becomes a possible solution. With Zoom meetings, students and Writing Consultants can work together to decode the assignment sheet, develop a plan for the student’s paper, and work through the revision process later on. In this virtual conference students may also put forth any questions they may have before or after discussion for the Consultant to answer. One of the main reasons I sought help from Consultants was because doing so maximized how much progress I made, in a short amount of time. Similarly to those in-person conferences, Zoom meetings are an efficient method to facilitate informative conversations between Consultants and students especially given the other limitations of online learning with professors.

As I’ve alluded to before, I have not always worked with The Writing Center when constructing my papers and in turn I procrastinated more frequently. I know I’m not alone in dealing with the repercussions of procrastinating as a college student: the work I produce after putting the assignment off until the last minute is often of lower quality than my usual standards. Furthermore, I feel I gain much less from my academic experience when I procrastinate and lose focus of my long-term goals. When I look at my experience with online learning in the midst of this pandemic, I know I’ve fallen back into that hole partially because of the absence of motivation from not attending in-person classes or participating in programs on campus. My days often lack structure too since I need to remain quarantined and therefore have little to do with my day outside of schoolwork. While it may seem like a blessing to have more free time to complete my assignments, I find the lack of substance in my days makes it harder to accomplish my tasks in a timely manner. A break never really feels like a break, they’re more reminiscent of stagnation. However, whenever I am able to add a Zoom meeting to my calendar to discuss my academics (or anything else for that matter), my motivation is recharged. My interest in the work I’m doing is fueled by active discussion, and I’m sure many fellow students of mine feel the same way. In that way, integrating Writing Consultants into my classes (that involve writing) and requiring Zoom meetings to go through the planning and revision stages of my papers would help limit my postponement of assignments. Not only would I produce stronger work, but I would also over time improve my work ethic as I make a pattern of going through the entirety of the writing process to produce my papers. This would be especially beneficial for incoming freshmen who often lack familiarity with college-level writing and need extra assistance when it comes to adjusting to college. There are countless other reasons students may be more disengaged from their classes including “personal stress, family health, economic crisis, bad experiences, technological issues…” (Alexander). These are all the more reasons for the university to provide writing consultants for classes. While Writing Consultants will not be able to fix every aspect of a student’s life, they will help alleviate some of the weight of the student’s academics as they strengthen the quality of their writing. Students need all the help they can get when in-person resources from universities are lacking.

When considering what measures the University of Richmond should take to effectively tutor their student writers, I realized that a lot of what Consultants provide students can be found through online research and a lengthy solo revision process. This is not to undermine the knowledge and insights tutors can provide to their students, but rather recognize the lengths at which the student would need to go to supplement their writing to the degree a Consultant can. Furthermore, to have the willpower to go to such lengths independently would be quite remarkable, especially with the lack of verbal communication from online research alone. That is part of the reason students are willing to put themselves into crippling debt for college: the resources. At the University of Richmond, I felt any issue I may have ranging from mental health to academic struggles to safety were all their priority. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of times I’ve been referred to The Writing Center for my assignments. They’ve made my wellbeing and academic success a priority and that is part of the reason why I chose to attend this school over any other. We can also acknowledge their generous financial aid program as another factor, but I still willingly put myself into tens of thousands of dollars in debt for the security of attending a small and devoted university. With that, they simply can’t allow their resources to be hindered by online learning. The potential need to pay Consultants for their additional availability to meet the higher demand for class-designated tutoring will be costly, however it is vital to maintain that $56,860 a year level of education students and parents put themselves into debt for.

Works Cited

Alexander, Bryan. “COVID-19 versus Higher Ed: the Downhill Slide Becomes an Avalanche.” Bryan Alexander, 31 Mar. 2020, http://bryanalexander.org/future-of-education/covid-versus-higher-ed-the-downhill-slide-becomes-an-avalanche/

Hjortshoj, Keith. The Transition to College Writing. 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martins, 2009.

Kendall, Anna. “The Assignment Sheet Mystery.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 33:1 (Sept. 2008): 1-5.

Macauley, William J. “Setting the Agenda for the Next Thirty Minutes.” A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One, Ben Rafoth ed. 2nd ed., Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2005, pp. 1–7.