About the Writing Center

The Writing Center is a free service dedicated to helping members of the Dartmouth community develop more effective strategies for generating and organizing their ideas, finding and evaluating research sources, and presenting and revising compositions in a variety of media. 

Through informal dialogue, Writing Center tutors assist writers in developing better compositions and more effective composing strategies. Originally named RWIT, and created as a collaboration between the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, the Library, and Academic Computing, the Writing Center brings together faculty, administrators, staff, and students to focus on the art and science of composition.

Through peer-to-peer tutoring, the Writing Assistance Program, and the Education & Outreach Team, the Writing Center offers help in the following areas across all disciplines:

• Constructing and organizing arguments
• Developing research strategies
• Generating ideas and claims
• Improving sentence structure, grammar, style, and clarity
• Outlining or restructuring drafts
• Composing multimedia projects
• Planning and scaffolding complex projects

We are a peer-to-peer writing center. The acronym in our original name, "RWIT" came from a collaboration between the Dartmouth Library, its Writing Program, and the Jones Media Center. It stands for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. Dartmouth students have served as peer writing tutors since the 1960s, far before our current name was conceived. By adopting RWIT as a replacement for "The Composition Center" - our previous name, we emphasized the relationship between the multiple literacies we seek to support. Research and writing are always connected, particularly in academic settings, and our services support student growth in both domains. Information Technology evokes the growing importance of multimodal literacies - communciating via multiple or mixed media, like video, audio, or media-enriched writing. Like many other college writing centers, we support students working on multimodal compositions as well as projects that are solely text-based.

While we still provide all the same services, we are in the midst of another transition to the Writing Center, which we feel best describes our services.

Writing Center tutors help all students with the composing process, regardless of proficiency, academic concentration, or year of study. Through dialogue, tutors offer students constructive feedback on their projects and help them develop more effective composing strategies.

We believe successful tutors are skilled writers who demonstrate a sincere interest in their peers' writing and success. Successful tutors possess the interpersonal skills to assist students with diverse backgrounds and writing proficiencies; they understand common conventions in academic writing; they can discuss composition in different genres and media, including academic writing, personal essays, research reports, and multimedia compositions; they know the grammar conventions common in academic settings.

Writing Center tutors are skilled writers hailing from all academic disciplines. Tutors prepare for their roles by completing a robust training process and pursue ongoing learning throughout their tutoring careers. Tutors take pride in their professionalism, approachability, and knowledge. You can learn more about our tutors on our staff page.