Writing Center

We strive to assist student writers in making strategic decisions about the preservation of their own voices within their written work, while fulfilling the expectations for writing in an academic context. We know that writing is an invention born of a need to communicate textually. This need for diverse groups of people to communicate textually means that writing, much like speaking, is born out of and rooted in the various needs of those people; as such, writing is not, and indeed, cannot be removed from the cultural and situational context in which it is produced.

We do not pretend that the writing done in U.S. academic institutions is "normal," but we do recognize that it is common and adheres to shared conventions and expectations. We also recognize that academic writing, in and of itself, varies across cultures. The way an academic in the U.S. is taught to write is not the same way an academic from other parts of the world is taught to write. With this understanding, we embrace the notion that U.S. academic writing is also culturally situated and draws on Westernized and European ways of thinking, knowing, and being, which, as is expected, creates a distinct cultural, racial, and philosophical orientation to writing.

We also understand and recognize that many students in the U.S. speak and write in ways that vary greatly from the highly formalized writing they are expected to do not only in college, but at the K-12 level. This understanding helps our highly trained staff work with students more competently, more honestly, and more humanely.

As a member of the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA), the LCC Writing Center adheres to the IWCA's position statement on the use of "they" as a singular pronoun in writing. The IWCA recognizes that using "they" as a singular pronoun may be met with resistance by faculty and other readers of student work. The IWCA recommends for students who make use of the singular "they" to put the following footnote in their documents: "In this paper, I deliberately use the generic singular "they." This usage has historical precedence for the last 400 years, and it is grammatical, as confirmed by linguists. Further, it includes people whose gender identity is not represented by the he/she binary, which erases many members of our community. This impulse toward inclusive linguistic representation is seen in style guidelines by professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association (APA). The use of singular "they" is endorsed by the International Writing Centers Association, an Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English."