The Ball State University Writing Center turns 40 years-old today, and to celebrate the center is having a cheers to 40 years party from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The celebration will include free food, drinks and a writing contest, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, director of the Writing Center, said. A slideshow about the center's history also will be shown, she said. Besides having changed locations four times since its founding, the center has changed how it helps the student body during the past four decades, she said.
"It began in a small building on Riverside Avenue and only first year students in composition classes were tutored," she said. "Now, the past couple of years, we have had over 1,000 a year in every program from freshmen to Ph.Ds."
The history of the Writing Center will be archived and digitized in order to document the changes undergone by the center, McKinney said.
Jason Glassburn, a senior English and telecommunication major, said he has been a tutor for three years, and the center's anniversary shows it is a service that fulfilled a need of the students.
"The fact that it has continued for 40 years and has attracted students says something," he said. "When we see the same people coming in we know that at least we're helping them."
Tutoring sessions start on the hour and must be scheduled in advance. Sessions last no more than 50 minutes.
Kristin Prindle, a sophomore hospitality and food management major, said she has been to the Writing Center five times to get papers edited in hopes of earning a better grade. She said the tutors have helped her learn how to write a better paper and spend less time at the center.
"They have helped me with formations of the papers and working on my grammar," she said. "One of the things they have helped me with the most is making better transitions between paragraphs."
While the center still works with hard copies of papers in-person with students, next semester McKinney said the Writing Center also would offer online tutoring. Students will log-in and post their papers online so both the tutor and student could look at it, she said. The tutor and student will discuss the paper in a chat room.
Besides its 40th anniversary, the Writing Center and writing program is also celebrating winning the Conference on College Composition and Communication award.
The award has been around since 1949, and according to the award's Web site, the conference is the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition, from writing to new media. The conference gives the award to the 20 best programs in the country.
Any program can apply for the award, which is the only national program for centers of excellence, McKinney said. The award will be given in March, but she said she felt honored that Ball State's Writing Center was selected because of the changes made to the writing center's curriculum.
"The new rhetoric and visual rhetoric is innovative in the sense that typically composition classes focus on standard double-spaced essays in MLA format on white paper," she said. "We want to find ways that a student can make their best argument and give the best message and this could be through PowerPoint or hypertext."
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