“More professional, less punitive,” Student Manager Eric Rusnak ’00 quips when beginning to explain the many reasons The Writer’s Workshop is now The Writing Center.

“Our mission statement always used the phrase ‘center for writing,’” Director Maureen Fry explained. “We think of ‘workshop’ in the collaborative sense that you see in creative writing. It has always been perceived as this from the inside, but our location worked against that ideal.

For certain reasons some students must come to see us, which continued the perception of it being punitive or remedial. Our old location in the basement of the Shouvlin Center reinforced this; it was like going to the dungeon,” she said.

The new name “says what we’ve always felt is important,” Fry said. “We’re not just a place for students. We also have plenty of resources for professors. It’s not that we’ve changed what we do or how we do it, but we can focus more on some of our less-known programs.

“Interestingly, one student who came to visit actually said, ‘It’s easy and nice to come here.’ This space in Hollenbeck Hall physically asserts that centrality of who and what we are. The timing for the name change was perfect,” Fry shared. “Before, we were always on the other side of campus. Now, we are situated between the humanities and the sciences. I think of us as a little bridge.”

Two seniors currently help Fry make the campus more cognizant of The Writing Center’s capabilities. Kristen Mathias, a communications major and writing adviser, approached Fry in the spring of 1999 about developing an advertising plan for The Writer’s Workshop as her senior thesis.

In the fall Rusnak, a management major and the first student to act as assistant to the director, was also thinking of a thesis project and focused his attention on creating a marketing plan. “We joined forces,” Rusnak noted, “and pinpointed things that we felt didn’t coincide with our intended mission. No one had ever looked at this in an analytical way before.”

“We looked at the center from many different perspectives,” Mathias added. “Although we think of it as a new business, the workshop ran for 20 years in a different capacity. We needed to find a way to keep those things in line while assuaging people’s perceptual screens.”

“Moving up to Hollenbeck was the opportunity to launch the marketing and advertising plan, but the move itself was not the solution,” Rusnak said. “It was the vehicle for finding ways to reach the campus community to let it know that The Writing Center is the main source for all types of writing and all types of writers here at Wittenberg.”

— Jessica A. Gillota ’00