The WCC @ MIT (the Writing and Communication Center), located in Building E18, Room 233, offers free professional advice to MIT undergraduate students, graduate students, post-docs, faculty, lecturers, staff members, spouses, alums, visiting scientists and scholars. The WCC is staffed completely by communication experts. All are MIT lecturers. All are published writers, all are experienced college classroom teachers, and all have worked extensively at MIT for many years. In other words, WCC lecturers know the expectations and genres of all the fields taught here.
The WCC lecturers will strategize with you to
- DISCOVER new content and new implications of your data, research, and ideas–regardless of your field or academic discipline
- ANALYZE the conventions of your technical, professional, and academic disciplines and genres
- TAILOR your messages and organization to meet the needs and expectations of different audiences, including your professors, readers of grant proposals, and journal editors
- CRAFT your style to maximize the rhetorical effect of your documents, slide designs, and oral presentations
- PRACTICE oral presentations, interviews, and conversation
In short, you can get free individual consultations about any writing or oral presentation issue. We can help you discover and fulfill your particular field’s communication expectations. We can teach you rhetorical strategies for making your documents more convincing. We can help you take your writing to the next level, making your style even more subtle, flexible, and sophisticated. We can also teach you techniques for deepening your critical thinking and analytical skills, for overcoming writer’s block, for organizing papers, for revising your work, for exploring the implications of your ideas more fully, for understanding the intricacies of English grammar, and for presenting scientific and technical information. In addition, we offer instruction to both individuals and groups in all aspects of oral presentation (e.g., how to write a speech, how to use visual aids, how to conduct yourself when presenting scientific or nonscientific information).
You may visit the Center during any stage of the thinking or writing process: finding a topic or idea, prewriting, writing a first draft, revising, or editing.
The WCC is not a proofreading service; it is a teaching institution. Our motto is “be a better writer.” We treat writing as a process, and our goal is to clarify and promote techniques of good writing.
The WCC provides specialized help to those for whom English is a second language. We also offer practice in pronunciation and conversation.
Please go to mit.mywconline.com to register for the WCC’s online scheduler, and click here for important information about appointments.
