Writing Center hosts Writing Bootcamp
While many attend boot camps to lose weight or join the military, Waynesburg University students had the chance to attend a boot camp for the purpose of improving their writing.
The Writing Center hosted an End of Semester Writing Bootcamp April 11 for the first time in their history. From 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., students had access to all of the Writing Center resources and extra workshops for MLA and APA citations, along with mindfulness therapy activities.
The event, said Director of the Writing Center Jill Moyer Sunday, focused on helping students overcome their busy workloads before the end of the semester.
“This is our first year [running the event],” said Sunday. “What we want to do is have a daylong event that is meant to help students prepare for their final writing assignments and also to maybe relax a little bit right before the big crunch at the end of the year.”
Although the atmosphere was different from most days in the Writing Center, Sunday said her attitude towards writing still applied. With a day focused solely on writing and finding ways to relieve end-of-semester stress, Sunday said that writing is one of the ways to relax.
“The more we talk about writing, it’s not such a solitary activity,” said Sunday. “You can share ideas with people instead of just wondering; I think the whole stress of writing can be unpacked, and that’s our whole Writing Center philosophy anyway. Everybody is involved with writing–by sharing it together I think maybe we can de-stress the prospect of writing.”
Other ways to relieve stress, besides utilizing the available tutors, Sunday said, were the mindfulness activities hosted by Graduate Assistant Michelle Steimer. Steimer brought the activities to the Writing Center event from her licensed therapist background, with the focus of reducing stress for students. Steimer said a relaxed mind helps with writing.
“It’s a matter of teaching people how to be self-aware through fun mindfulness activities and education that will help people kind of ground themselves,” said Steimer. “You write your best when you’re at your best.”
Besides the numerous resources and workshops provided for students throughout the entire day, Sunday said the event acted as an effective method to introduce students to the Writing Center who may not have been there before.
“If [students] haven’t been to the Writing Center, I think [the event] would be a good introduction to the kind of relaxed environment that we are,” said Sunday. “And they might as well come up and take a peek.”
While Waynesburg University’s Writing Center held the event for the first time, Steimer said similar events are hosted by other writing centers across the world during the spring semester.
The Writing Center had begun planning for the event last year after attending the International Writing Center Association conference in Pittsburgh.
“We started the idea last year,” said Steimer. “[Sunday] and I went to a conference, we started to do the research and reaching out to other programs to see what they did so that we could be prepared and kind of talk about what we wanted it to look like for the first year.”
After months of planning, Steimer said that she is confident this will be the start to the yearly End of Semester Writing Bootcamp event.
“We really want it to be a positive event for everybody because the end of the semester is hard and the more crunch time,” said Steimer. “Everybody can get [work] done; we’re here to help, we’re here to work together and as a university help each other.”
For more information about the Writing Center, students can contact Sunday through email at jsunday@waynesburg.edu.