Writing Centers and Libraries: Strange Bedfellows, or Match Made in Heaven?

by Alyssa Mandel, March 2021

"I was hoping to have a conversation with you about next year…" the principal said, and my mouth went dry and the breath left my chest.

In the dozen years I've been a school librarian, I have also been a study hall proctor, an academic advisor, a chaperone, a quiz team coach, a middle school history and English teacher, a high school teacher of the senior seminar, an art history teacher, and in one particularly surprising circumstance I nearly ended up filling in a term for an introductory Latin class, despite having studied Greek instead. Librarians are often parceled out as needed, and nowhere is this more true than in an independent school, so when someone "needs to have a conversation" with me, my mind begins doing a furious kind of calculus in which I begin setting up my mental calendar, figuring out what days my class schedules might overlap and how to get the fourth grader to ballet on time. Every subtraction of time from my librarian role feels like another percentage of the profession itself being scoured away, however small, so I am always wary of anything that diminishes the importance of librarianship at large and consider how it serves the students and faculty.

When the buzzing in my ears stopped, I forced myself to focus and realized the problem the principal was trying to solve. Our high school writing center coordinator was departing, as planned and announced months earlier; with her departure I was being asked to step into the role, and not temporarily, either. The pounding in my chest stopped, I gazed back at his face and my own up on the screen in the video chat, and said, "Of course. I do seem like a perfectly logical choice."

And I am. Once I had a moment to process what was being asked of me, and having reconciled myself to permanently dividing my time, the request made more sense than anything else that's been assigned to me. I have been a professional writer in some capacity for almost thirty years, and although like all writers I am occasionally plagued by minor bouts of writer's block, I write easily and fluidly under most circumstances. Though it's not my favorite kind of writing, the quarterly student-performance comments I compose about my homeroom kids go quickly and garner praise from higher-ups. Nuanced word usage is my particular superpower, and I spent years as a copy editor for my college newspaper, so improving someone else's writing is second nature for me as well. Once I was able to get past "Why me?" I moved to "Why not me?" pretty smoothly.

That was in late May. I had an opportunity to work with the departing coordinator and observe her meetings and interactions with students before the school year ended. I availed myself of her advice on guidebooks and pedagogy, and I was granted access to assets she had created such as style guides and intake forms. I did not expect that we would still be working virtually or behind masks well into the fall and through the winter. As curveballs go, that's pretty steep. Further complicating my early foray into the role was a nearly complete lack of any staff in the writing center, which was a weird circumstantial glitch that was no one's fault but meant I was running the both the library and the writing center singlehandedly. And, my predecessor had done such an excellent job promoting its services that demand started out high and stayed that way.

History of Our Writing Center

Our writing center was founded several years ago by a member of the English faculty, who envisioned creating a cadre of peer tutors trained to help other students strengthen their writing and improve achievement. This coincided neatly with plans for building a brand-new building designed to house an array of services: a large student gathering space for social study, private rooms for individual work or study groups, offices, and a second floor to house STEM classrooms and laboratory space. Thus, our writing center was always conceived of as a place as much as a notion, and from its very inception functioned as a way to support student achievement by improving writing across all curricular areas. The writing center does not "teach writing" per se, but it teaches students how to write better, whatever the discipline. The pedagogical method espoused in the Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors (Ryan and Zimmerelli 2016) is designed to lead students to the right answer, rather than just proofreading and correcting errors for them. Most students conceive of the writing process as solely the purview of the English department, but faculty encourage students to visit the center for help with any kind of project in which writing plays a part, including biology lab reports, historical biographies, and college application essays. Some teachers mandate a visit to the writing center as part of the assignment grade, while others make it optional or even remedial if an assignment clearly presented a struggle.

In terms of staffing the center with tutors, since students can visit before, after, and during school, a cadre of student writing assistants (SWAs) is trained each fall in the advanced composition class, with veterans returning in order to provide support until the new crop of tutors is ready to work with students seeking help. Scheduling software designed for managing writing centers is a critical part of operating the writing center smoothly. Although there are many calendar scheduling programs out there, several of them free, writing center scheduling software provides intake questionnaires and follow-up forms that are a vital part of improving writing outcomes.

Walk-in visits are also permitted, and soft comfortable seating, some quirky touches to the decor, and café-style high-top tables for side-by-side consultation create a welcoming, yet purposeful atmosphere. On-duty SWAs can study and work on their own assignments while awaiting student clients with appointments or walk-in visits. Initially the writing center's founder supervised the center and the SWAs in addition to taking student appointments and teaching a full load of courses. The decision was made to relieve some of that burden by assigning the daily operation of the center to a new hire in the fall of 2018, an alumna who returned to us after significant experience working in her college writing center.

But the pandemic hit, and the alumna moved on as she had planned, and so last spring I found myself contemplating how to be a good librarian and a good writing center coordinator, as well as a good colleague trying desperately not to undo the excellent work my colleague had begun. A complicating factor was an almost total lack of SWAs, at least temporarily, as course scheduling and personnel changes made it impossible for a trained group to be ready to work in time for fall semester. Students are laboring under unusual and demanding conditions during this peculiar time too; thus the writing center opened this year with only me and one fully remote SWA.

How Can the Library Add Value to the Writing Center?

Writing this article is, in a way, a reflection exercise on how it went and how it is going, as much as it is meant to be advice for anyone else contemplating how to comfortably merge library services and a school writing center. Timothy Horan published a series of articles in 2014 in School Library Monthly, in which he described carrying out the process of founding a writing center inside the school library. A subsequent book published by Libraries Unlimited and aimed at librarians for grades 7-12, expands on that content and emphasizes how librarians can add value to the library at no cost by founding and hosting the school writing center (a similar volume for K-6 exists as well). For me, the question is nearly opposite: How can the library, and by extension its librarian, add value to the school writing center?

The prevailing wisdom among librarians is that no one really knows what librarians do except other librarians. In my own mind, there is no need to divorce library function from writing center function—they can ideally complement one another in equal measure—but the laity are less inclined to understand this unless it is clearly spelled out with examples. To that end, here are some real-life illustrations of ways in which what is traditionally regarded as the librarian's job are woven into a writing center visit.

• At least a dozen students made appointments in conjunction with an essay based on Lord of the Flies. Knowing the assignment would no doubt require using quotes or paraphrases from the novel, I spent several minutes of each appointment demonstrating how to build a source citation for the book and how to insert in-text citations in correct MLA format before we moved forward with improving the writing itself.


• The ninth grade biology teacher offered extra credit to any student who visited the writing center to improve his or her lab report. I have not written a lab report since 1988, but there are style guides for every kind of writing, lab reports included. I made it a component of each visit that students had to look up how to style elements like numbers less than ten, temperatures, and measurements in lab reports, either on style manual websites or in copies of printed manuals the writing center keeps for just such an occasion. Lab reports are written in third person and often in passive voice, and this is an opportune time to review the rules of how to avoid passive voice in other assignments.


• A tenth grade honors English project involved exploring the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. One student, with a limited background in Judeo-Christian religious traditions, wanted to pursue writing an essay dependent on the Biblical passages that Douglass frequently quoted in his writing. Together we searched in electronic reference books for scholarly discussions of those passages, which helped her interpret Douglass's work more thoroughly and led to a stronger essay.

One of the most satisfying aspects of librarianship is the sense that each day I've helped someone—a reader hoping for just the right book, a researcher in need of a journal article, a faculty member trying to create a great class project—and in working closely with students to strengthen their writing, bolstering the process with all the library offers, that sense of satisfaction is even more profound.