This is not a rhetorical question. Where to get tutoring at Colorado State University - Pueblo

Colorado State University - Pueblo (CSU-Pueblo) has a great service available to students, according to Chad M. Pickering, Director of CSU-Pueblo Writing Room and General Education Tutoring Center. Pickering wears 2 hats as director of both resources.

Pickering has a passion about helping students, especially in writing. Pickering is from Oahu, Hawaii. His college education started when he pursued an associate's degree in liberal arts from Leeward Community College in Hawaii. He worked as a writing tutor at the college's Learning Resource Center. He then went on to earn a bachelor's degree in English with and informal specialization in composition and rhetoric from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH-Manoa). He was granted a graduate assistantship while pursuing his masters degree and was eventually asked to serve as the assistant director of the writing center. He started work her in Pueblo in September of 2014, but just prior to that he married his wife. He adopted his stepson, who is now 9, in 2015.

Calling (719) 549-2756 to set up an appointment to see a Writing

Room tutor is definitely encouraged but not required.

Tutors are not guaranteed to be available at all times,

but they can accommodate walk-in sessions whenever they are.

The Writing Room is located on the 2nd floor of the

CSU-Pueblo library.

Pickering goes on to describe the two parts of the program, beginning with the Writing Room. The majority of writing centers in colleges were started after the mid- 1970s in response to a growing concern about the preparation of new college student to handle college-level writing tasks. Pickering says that the goals of his writing center, the Writing Room, is simply to provide support of all CSU-Pueblo students who have a desire to receive feedback and support on their writing assignments, regardless of what kind they might be. He emphasizes that the Writing Room aims not to generate better writing in of itself, but to help students become better writers.

Pickering contemplating writing.

The Writing Room tutor are available Monday through Friday, fro 8 to 5, during the Fall and Spring semesters and can assist CSU-Pueblo students with anything that remotely counts as writing projects, regardless of class or major. "The truth is, as college students, you all will at some point be required to produce effective writing and can benefit from sitting down with a tutor who is just here to provide you with feedback and guidance and suggestions or even just a sounding board, and that's what we're here to provide. Everybody struggles with writing every now and then, even those who consider themselves good writers."

Pickering will individually help students every now and then when there is a need but most students are helped by the writing tutors. In the summer there are usually no more that two tutors around, but in the fall and spring semesters there are 6-8 tutors. Frequently, the tutors often find the experience interesting, because they get to read a variety of writing assignments that may be on all sorts of subjects regarding life and the human condition. Melonie Purcell, one of the summer tutors, said, "It is nice to help people." She goes on to say that she enjoys working with students to help them learn. "It is not about editing the student's work, but working together to enable the student to learn to be a better writer." Matt Enck, another tutor, agrees. "It is about collaboration."

Melonie Purcell and Matt Enck ready to assist students.

According to Pickering, the Writing Room gets a lot of first-year composition students, from English 101 or 102, requesting help. One common assignment in first year composition courses is the rhetorical analysis assignment. Students often misunderstand the requirements or guidelines of a rhetorical analysis paper, which can sometimes be a little confusing. Pickering says that what the students need to be doing is analyze, assess and critique the specific rhetorical strategies that are being employed by the author of a piece of writing - and determining whether these strategies are effective for a particular audience. Rather, Pickering finds that students often just agree or disagree with the author's argument, which is not quite what this sort of assignment calls for. Meeting with a tutor helps the student understand what the assignment is and better comprehend its requirement.

Pickering is actually very passionate about the topic of rhetoric itself. He briefly defines rhetoric as a discipline that is traditionally concerned with effective, persuasive speech and writing, but it is definitely more complex than just that. He says, "A more current understanding of rhetoric extends past traditional definitions of language and acknowledges the roles that language plays in shaping ideologies, altering worldviews and changing beliefs about a whole range of matters."

Students coming to the Writing Room are requesting help with "grammar," which is a word that sometimes means different things to different students, depending how the come to understand the word. For example, for some it could mean higher-order matters, such as organization, content, and development, while for others the word just refers to sentence-structure or mechanical issues. Some of the areas of grammar that the tutors can help students with include verb-tense issues, subject-verb agreement issues, vague-pronoun issues and lack of or misuse of articles.

He also nurtures a passion for grammar and the teaching of grammar. He does not consider himself a grammar snob; rather he is in the descriptivist camp of modern linguistics when it come to the study and teaching of grammar. He is the type of guy who actually hesitates to call something an "error." Instead he thinks that what most people think of as "errors" are really just deviations from some standardized conventions the may or may not prove to be effective in writing, depending on the who audience is and the kind of writing you are doing. Pickering said, "Don't worry about old-school grammar prescriptivist rules." He went on to advise writers to not lose sleep about things like ending a sentence isn a preposition.

The Writing Room also has an Online Writing Lab (OWL) that can be utilized by students who may not be ale to meet with a tutor face-to-face during regular business hours. Through the OWL tutors can send student written comments via email that are designed to give the same kind of feedback and support that would be given in a face-to-face session. Comments are usually retired within two business days.

The Gen Ed Tutoring Center is located in the same office. It is a little different from the Writing Room. Basically if you are a student who is enrolled in a lower-division general education class specifically in the humanities or social sciences, and you feel that you are struggling or need help in that course and feel that you could benefit from sitting down with a tutor for that specific class, you can come in and request a tutor to help you a few times per week. The director will pair the student with a tutor who is qualified to provide that service. Gen Ed tutorial sessions focus on the content of a particular course and can entail explaining complicated concepts or studying more effectively (reading textbooks, preparing for exams, etc.)

The most common request received at the Gen Ed Tutoring Center is for foreign-language courses - and Spanish is the most frequent request. Gen Ed tutoring is available only in the fall and spring semesters. The number tutors hired for Gen Ed tutoring is entirely need based only.

Non-native speakers of English (NNS students) are welcome for either program, and it seems be beneficial to sit down with an English-speaking tutor to receive help with mastering the conventions of written and spoken English.

Pickering encourages students to take advantage of these two great resources.