Known as the place that any Jefferson student can take their writing assignments to be critiqued and sharpened, Jefferson’s Writing Center plans to welcome a new round of tutors in February.

“Our new tutors will be joining us in a few weeks, possibly by the beginning of second semester after they go through some training,” junior Nur Simsek said. “Having more tutors will help us organize more Writing Center sessions and provide higher quality tutoring since we won’t have to cram our schedules and resort to group tutoring.”

While the Writing Center has introduced new JLC tutoring sessions, this is only the beginning of the attempts to increase the times in which students can seek tutoring. With high hopes of starting tutoring sessions during lunch or even a cyber writing center, the Writing Center is looking for more efficient ways to pair tutors and tutees and to make tutors available outside of school hours. .

“We attended a large writing center conference and applied new knowledge of how to engage and interest students to preexisting plans,” senior Alex Li said. “In this year alone, we expanded the eighth period presence of the WritingCenter without spreading ourselves thin.”

With all the different genres of writing that are addressed at the Writing Center, the tutors believe that increasing the Writing Center’s hours is the first step in making a larger writing community at Jefferson. Many of the tutors also express their desire for more people to attend Writing Center tutoring sessions and future events.

“We’re tutoring students in a variety of areas, from scientific writing to literary analysis to creative writing,” senior Wendy Sun said. “For this reason, the Writing Center is a great place for all writers to meet and I hope to see a growth in Jefferson’s writing community so that the Center can expand in the future.”

While adding more tutors is only the first step in the Writing Center’s expansion, a lot remains to be seen in how the club will continue to grow within the Jefferson community. Because many ideas have been brought up by the different tutors, it is only a matter of time before more progressions will be made.

“In the future, we would like the Writing Center to be a natural progression in the writing process for Jefferson students,” Li said. “Holding more specialized writing sessions, such as those for SAT writing, ACT writing and college writing, is certainly a short term, achievable goal. Overall, students must understand what the Writing Center does before we can work effectively, and we must naturally tackle the issue at hand.”