The Writing Center Beyond an Academic Space? Finding Writing Center Community Partnerships as an ELL Student.
To most students, a university’s writing center might just be a place of academic seriousness (Leahy). This is especially true for English Language Learners (ELLs), as Zhang-Wu et al. point out in their 2025 on the writing center as a “contact zone,” where ELL writers’ simply want to “have the writing center as a particular tool to help them succeed in the transactional writing relationship they have with faculty and with the institution” (74). Is there a way for the writing center to truly build rapport with ELL students? Can the writing center be a community more than a place to refine academic writing? As an international student and a writing center tutor, I argue that there is. I came to this conclusion through founding Diverge , a student magazine for those who feel like their voices cannot be afforded by the traditional SAE publications on campus. In the magazine’s beginning stages, the Emory Writing Center offered ways of collaboration beyond traditional one-on-one tutorin...