Writing Center Staff
Developing rhetorical flexibility encourages writers and readers to recognize the practical and moral obligations embedded in composition. Within this context, false ideas prevail only when advocates of Truth fail to understand rhetoric and its role in composition.As the Writing Center Director at Bryan, I regularly encounter student composition that encourages writers and readers to appreciate their roles and responsibilities in the body of Christ. At Bryan, composition studies stimulates new opportunities to explore our institutional commitment, Christ Above All.
Ms. Pamela Davis
Instructor of English
Assistant Director, Bryan College Writing Center
There is something shockingly permanent about writing—it remains long after the writer’s initial thought, emotion, or impulse passes, after the writer himself is gone. Writing distances the composer and the reader—the words have to stand alone and speak for themselves, without a spoken apologia from the one to the other. Paradoxically, writing draws people together, connecting us with ideas and with each other. Writing is a skill that everyone can develop. It is no mystical gift that only a chosen few have. During my junior year of college, I took a class that concentrated on theories and pedagogy of teaching writing and tutoring. I was required to spend at least five hours a week working in the campus writing center. For work-study my senior year, I continued working in the center. The next year, I volunteered as an ESL and Composition teacher at a mission school. Whether I worked with peers at college, ESL students, or anyone else, I found an almost universal insecurity when someone shares a sample of his or her writing: Did I do it right? Do you see what I mean? Do you understand me? I learned that to help someone with his or her writing is to love and to serve. This, then, has become the foundation of my interest in writing theory.