Welcome

Welcome to the homepage of the NYA Writing Center! As of September 21st, we’re live and would love to have you stop by for all of your writing needs. Our goal is to promote stronger writing skills in students regardless of discipline and to provide students with a place in which to receive ethical supplemental writing help. This site will feature writing tips, a catalogue of teacher style pages (i.e. “How to format a lab for Mr. Smith”), creative writing opportunities, and school writing updates.

Where, When, Who, What, How

The Where and When:

The Office off of the Lounge  Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday 10-12 and by appointment.

The Who:

My name is Alexander Champoux, and I’ll be running the Center this year. I’m an NYA graduate with my BA from Trinity College where I majored in English (Creative Writing) and minored in “Writing, Rhetoric, and the Media Arts” and “Mythology.” While at Trinity I was a Writing Associate and Head Tutor of the Allan K. Smith Writing Center, an English TA, and an introductory college writing instructor. Now, back at NYA, I’m working in a lot of areas…but writing is still my passion, and I’m excited to be involved in this new opportunity.

The What:

“Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum” is an integral philosophy to every Writing Center, and it meshes perfectly with the education that students receive at NYA in the Middle and Upper School. As philosophies go, it’s pretty simple, but still vitally important; essentially, we believe that students need strong writing abilities regardless of the discipline that they’re interested in. Whether writing a short story, a history research paper, or a biology lab, students should be able to express themselves with clear writing and minimal stress. The NYA Writing Center is here (in addition to all of the great teacher-based instruction) to provide supplementary writing help that is both ethical and stress-free. We help with:

• Citations
• Clarity of Analysis
• Organization
• Theses and Topic Sentences
• Understanding of Assignments
• Formatting
• Research Methods
• …and much more

The How:

The best way to explain “How” a Writing Center works is to simply walk through the procedure of a typical session…so that’s what you’ll find below. In addition to tutoring, we will also be offering hand outs and other forms of writing support.

Procedure:

• First and foremost, make sure that your teacher will allow you to receive help on the assignment in question. Some teachers may not be comfortable with you receiving extra help on certain assignments.
• Before coming for help, make sure that you have all of the supplemental materials that you might need. It is always good practice to bring the actual assignment handout, the syllabus, pertinent readings, and earlier drafts in addition to the actual piece that you want help on. If your teacher has a handout detailing how they like to have written work formatted, please bring that too!
• When you get to the Center, fill out a tutoring form with your name, date, the assignment, and the kind of help that you’re looking for.
• If I’m working with someone, make sure that I know that you’re waiting—otherwise, I have a tendency to delve as deep as time allows, and that could mean a longer wait for you.
• Once we start, I’ll try to keep our session as short as possible…no longer than 30 minutes. Because this tutoring is one-on-one, ethics are pretty important—I can’t go through your piece for you and individually fix every comma splice or fragment. I will point out macro issues (read: bigger or recurring problems) and sometimes give parallel examples to demonstrate how you might fix things…but I will not actually rewrite your paper for you.
• I usually start by reading the assignment handout and the assignment, and will make some marks on your paper. If you would prefer that I not write on your paper, please let me know in advance and I will keep my comments on a separate piece of paper.
• After reading over your writing, we’ll go over it together and I’ll point out the places where the piece needs a little more work. If you would like to bounce some new ideas off of me, that’s perfectly fine.
• When we’re finished, I’ll have you fill out the last part of the tutoring form. This is a part where you can reflect on what changes have been made, what kind of help I have given you, what you have learned, and even how helpful (or un-helpful) you found the session to be.