North Vs. Trimbur

Trimbur's article on writing centers was much shorter than either of North's, was more 'to the point', and slightly less opinionated. Yet, both authors dealt with what services a writing center should offer and what the name represents. Both authors made me question what services I think our writing center should offer.

North and Trimbur spoke of expanding the writing center so that it is no long just considered a place to go for a quick grammar fix or a quick paper re-write, they spoke of the idea of a multiliteracies facility. I believe that our writing center is capable of much more than just written assignments, especially because of our in class discussion on Wednesday. There were so many forms of communication we talked about and how they applied to the writing center. A lot of them were also mentioned in Trimbur's paper. Then there is the literal name of the writing center, we threw around a couple of idea's in class and had a hard time coming up with something plausible. Trimbur and North both continually mentioned that the name labels and limits what people assume the writing center is therefore and what it can help you with. Which brings me back to the idea of multiliteracies. Although I believe that our writing center should try to include rather than exclude services such as technological writings, multi language writing, etc., I think it is important to not overextend ourselves. This idea of spread one's writing center too thin was a topic of discussion in North's article on Revisiting "The Idea of a Writing Center". North admitted that even though he had great hopes and dreams for his own writing center, it was not plausible with such a small staff to accomplish them. It is this conundrum of the numerous services that it is possible for the writing center to offer and how many people there are to provide these services that prevent writing centers from expanding exponentially. I think that it is more important for a writing center to offer as many services as possible with the utmost proficiency than to offer numerous services with little perfection. North agrees that it is important to keep a balance between services and workers and I strongly believe that this is the most important aspect of writing center.