At the end of my first year, I went to the Writing Centre’s Late Night at the Library with a quick citation question. Everyone was super welcoming and it felt very community-oriented – I really enjoyed it. There was a “we're hiring” poster on the wall, and I’ve been working as a tutor there for almost two years now.

When I started at MacEwan, I didn't quite understand all the different varieties of assignments students get. In high school, it was just essays with the five-paragraph structure. In introductory English classes here, you do a rhetorical analysis, a research paper, an annotated bibliography – all these things that require different approaches. And then, looking online, none of the templates are the same. There were times where I just didn’t know what to do with an assignment.

Now, though, I’m able to explain those things to my peers in ways that would have been helpful to me. I like breaking things down into formulas – which is weird, because I'm not a math person. If you have a formula for a thesis statement, you can plug in your information and then change it around if you want to. Things like that can be helpful for understanding the entire assignment, especially if you're an English language learner, are coming back to school after a long time away or are fresh out of high school.

We get a lot of citation questions; style guides are so similar yet so different. The way you write depends on the citation style. People also sometimes need help getting started. I always make sure that the student can explain what the assignment guidelines are – we can use those as goal posts. Without them, we can’t be sure we’re actually meeting the mark.

My favourite part of tutoring is getting to watch an assignment change shape, since a lot of the students that I work with book with me a few times. I love watching how everything develops from the beginning and seeing their ideas grow through to the end. 

I also like when I can explain something or rephrase it in a way that makes sense to the individual student. That's what I needed when I was in that position, and I didn't have that, because I didn't use the Writing Centre until the end of the semester. 

I've had students come back in to say they’d gotten 100 per cent on an assignment. It feels like we got that grade together, because we talked it through. 

My goal at MacEwan is to do my honours thesis – focusing on how digital fandom impacts our perception of book series – and then pursue my master's and a PhD so that I can teach university students. My work with the Writing Centre has just made me so much more sure that this is what I want to do.

– Beth Murray, English Honours student

Learn more about the Writing Centre’s services or book an appointment on their website.

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