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Writing Centers
With The Learning Accelerator as part of your Center's writing tools, the assistance you provide each student is more effective and long-lasting. Plus it lets your writing center service more students in less time with higher quality assurances!
We have heard what you have to say and we developed The Learning Accelerator (TLA) to address many of your pressing concerns about how your writing center can do the best job possible.
Writing Centers (WC) told us that they spend too much time doing the basic and the mundane when their tutors would rather spend time on the higher, more complex points of writing. Below are a few comments that we have heard.
WC Comment: Many students come here not even knowing how to start an essay or paper.
TLA Response: On many levels, this really misuses the high skill level of writing center tutors. The Learning Accelerator gets every student started in the right direction for his or her paper. When the student requires help, the writing center can now provide the higher-order constructive help it is set up to do.
WC Comment: We spend too much time addressing basic organization skills and not enough time on the important critical thinking aspects of writing.
TLA Response: The Learning Accelerator's features and logical functionalities help students organize their thoughts and ideas BEFORE they come to the writing center. Now you can assist students on the real issue - the development of their ideas.
WC Comment: We are not here to re-read or revise entire papers, but students do not have a consistent revision method and often come to us for this help, and unfortunately, we have to turn them away.
TLA Response: The Learning Accelerator provides a consistent framework for revision and correction of one's writing. In addition, issues such as wordiness, sentence fragments, and proper word use are addressed in detail. The result is when a student brings you a draft for checking, your tutors can review at the highest level possible with little time wasted on basic issues such as run-on sentences and how the bibliography is arranged.
WC Comment: Students often have great ideas, but they lose them as they write because they do not have a structured environment in which to develop those ideas. And worse, when they research to support these ideas, there is little direction in how to evaluate sources for relevance and strength of evidence. In short, we get a lot of "wandering" papers.
TLA Response: The Learning Accelerator provides straightforward guidance in how to research, judge a source for relevance, evaluate evidence, and how to use research effectively to back up one's arguments. At the WC, work is now reviewed for strength of argument, logical construction, and clarity. When a paper is this well-prepared initially, help from the writing tutors places it on even a higher level.
WC Comment: What a student means to say is not always what they write and too much time is spent just trying to understand what the student actually means.
TLA Response: Any WC will tell you that thinking about something is vastly different than writing about it. Thinking is relatively easy; writing is hard. The Learning Accelerator reduces the difficulty of writing by providing an easy-to-use platform that allows ideas to be written, reviewed, and rewritten as needed in order for the proper sentence and paragraph to come out in the end. This requires not only review, but also a consistent process of revision, word order choice, and continuously THINKING through what one is writing. Students who use The Learning Accelerator arrive at the WC ready to be critiqued and ready to make their papers even better.
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