Writing Center -
MSU English Dept.

Mission Statement

Mission Statement
The Mississippi State University
Writing Center 

The Mississippi State University Writing Center dedicates itself to helping all MSU students to develop as writers.

To achieve this mission, the Writing Center, housed in Lee Hall 200, provides

• Trained interns to assist students with their writing
• Computers and software that assist students in drafting and revising their papers
• Print resources—dictionaries, grammar handbooks, documentation handbooks, readers—where students can find models to guide their work
• Comfortable tables and chairs, where students can talk with trained Interns about their progress and their problems with a given project.

To ensure that Interns provide appropriate and dependable guidance to student writers, the Director of the Writing Center trains the Interns in the craft and art of one-on-one pedagogy. Specifically, Interns learn to help students to

• Start a draft by thinking about the focus of an assignment, about their audience and purpose, about what they know and need to find out;
• Craft a thesis, shape an organization, and discover appropriate evidence to support their thesis;
• Revise their papers by determining to what degree they have supported their claims, documented their evidence, and served their readers’ needs;
• Edit their own work for correctness in sentence structure, punctuation, verb forms, and pronoun usage.

Also, to ground the Center’s mission in professional ethics, Interns learn to model academic integrity. Specifically, Interns expect students to

• Keep their appointments;
• Come to a session prepared, ready to participate in the writing conference;
• Think for themselves: Interns have been trained to ask questions that will start and sustain students’ thinking;
• Retain responsibility for their own work: Interns will not edit or correct students’ work.

To foster the idea that the Writing Center has a university mission, the Director will also sponsor and conduct workshops for MSU faculty from across the curriculum to help them to refine the ways they use writing in their courses to help students to learn the material.