Writing Center Position Statements

The Writing Center maintains the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language in which they find their own identity and voice. (To understand why written content and stylistic choice should be consistent with culture and identity, not imposed, please review “Part I” of the following video, Writing Across Borders.)

The Writing Center affirms that all Englishes are accented and that academic English is enriched and enlarged by the diversity of its speakers and writers.

The Writing Center recognizes languages as integrated and encourages multilingual writers to draw on their full linguistic repertoire for communication and meaning making.

The Writing Center celebrates multilingual media, pointing out their rhetorical insights, accessibility, and ability to build community. (For example, the Writing Center sponsored a community conversation event, using the film Mulan. The tutor-initiated event is designed to bring multilingual and monolingual students together to learn from and about one another.)

The Writing Center supports writers authoring narratives (counterstories) about how an institutional construct such as a writing center operates and to bring about awareness of the burden institutional bias places on students and staff of color.

The Writing Center welcomes transdisciplinary perspectives concerning multilingual writers in developing theories, designing studies, analyzing data, and discussing implications of studies of multilingual writing.

The Writing Center encourages investigations of issues that involve multilingual writing and writers in the context of writing programs, including first year writing programs, undergraduate and graduate, technical, creative, and theoretical writing courses, the Writing Center, and Writing Intensive Curriculum program. The Writing Center ensures that the research and perspectives about multilingual writers are not based on traditional standpoints but take into consideration nontraditional perspectives and methodologies.

The Writing Center supports the “Position Statement on Racism, Anti-Immigration, and Linguistic Intolerance: Statement of the International Writing Centers Association 2010”.

The Writing Center supports the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Statement of the Conference on College Composition and Communication 1974”.

The staff and tutors in the Mary G. Walsh Writing Center believe that the ability to create, imagine, and learn are essential to humans. We believe that language and the process of learning how to use language allow us to be part of an ongoing human conversation. We believe that humans have been invited to participate in this conversation and to make it richer. We further believe in using language to understand our experiences, and we maintain that we acquire wisdom as we read and write. We believe that the satisfying process of thinking through reading and writing tasks strengthens us and makes our experience of the world around us more meaningful. We believe in providing students with the multimodal tools necessary to think, create, and learn for their lifetimes. We affirm language to be perhaps the most important of these tools.

As the literal center for writing at Salem State University, the Mary G. Walsh Writing Center has always explored, investigated, and critiqued the ways in which technological tools interact with writing. We worry that not enough has been said about the ethics of generative AI; we worry that the uncritical use of generative AI in the writing process can be problematic; we worry that deferring to AI curtails critical thinking and diminishes originality, integrity, and collaboration with others. In the Writing Center, we strive to encourage discourse that brings tutor and writer together to cross thresholds constructed by ever more sophisticated writing projects demanding agency, voice, original thinking, and creativity. To that end, we will always endeavor to engage writers in a conversation about their writing.

So, we welcome the opportunity to tutor all writers and learn, together, what AI tools can—and can’t—do. At the same time, we will dissuade writers from allowing AI bots and Large Language Models (LLMs) to take the place of the thoughtful examination of topics through multiple perspectives and intersectional identities. The tutorial conversations in the Mary G. Walsh Writing Center will encourage writers to engage in the acquisition of writing strategies that help them to embrace ideas and evidence as embodied persons. In this way, we will continue to offer our resources for meaningful writing that contributes to that ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.