In your time at the University of Georgia, you will undoubtedly acquire many valuable skills. Often, those skills will apply directly to your major and, in turn, help you throughout your career. However, one ability we hope you acquire will serve you no matter what your major or planned career: the ability to communicate effectively. The importance of being able to express yourself clearly crosses departmental lines and is crucial to your success in nearly any endeavor you undertake. As you already know, much of this communication takes place in written form.

• Why We Are Here
• What We Cannot Do
• Groups We Can Help

Why We Are Here

The Writing Center is here to help you learn to be a better writer by offering you the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with a writing tutor without the pressures of a grade. We also offer you the opportunity to have someone else read your writing, identify your individual writing strengths and needs, and help you build on those strengths and improve those areas that need work.

What We Cannot Do

The Writing Center offers extensive tutoring services, but there are some things we cannot do for you? The Writing Center is not a proofreading service. You cannot just drop off your paper and pick up the corrected version later that day. Nor do the tutors simply go through your paper and tell you where you need commas. Our goal is to help you become a better writer yourself, not simply to fix your essay. However, that still leaves a large number of services that the Writing Center can provide you. The kind of attention we do give your writing is ultimately more learning-centered and, therefore, more productive for you.

Groups We Can Help

Whoever you are and whatever your experience with writing, we can help you if you are a part of the UGA community. Just some of the people who will find us helpful include

• Students preparing for Regents' Exam

• Multilingual speakers of English

• First-year English composition students (must have referral from instructor)

• Undergraduates in any course or major

• Graduate students working on course papers, theses, and dissertations

• Teachers looking for ways to incorporate writing elements into their courses

"I find students who are under the mistaken impression that writing isn’t important for scientific disciplines, but nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, science is all about knowledge creation, and that knowledge is useless unless it can be communicated to the rest of the scientific community and to the public, and the primary information mechanism for that information transfer is through the written scientific literature."

—Dr. Robert A. Scott
Chemistry Dept. Head

"Experienced writers know that writing is a process of rewriting, not just drafting, which is what typically students are doing on the first go-through. If students would attend more to the process, then they would not only, of course, produce better prose, but then they would also be able to learn what these conventions are that are appropriate to any discipline. The Writing Center could help with this because it could help the student work through his or her own writing process."

—Dr. Michelle Ballif, Director
UGA Writing Intensive Program