The Role of Community

            According to Bruffee, thinking, conversing, and writing are all irrevocably intertwined; one cannot learn to think better without first learning to converse better, which is done by “creating and maintaining the sort of social contexts, the sorts of community life, that foster the kinds of conversation we value,” (Bruffee 90). Bruffee claims that writing is essentially a conversation with oneself made public, an internal thought made external. Therefore, in order to better one’s writing, one must first better one’s conversation, which often involves discourse with others.

            Enter: the RWC. The writing center encourages discourse between fellow students, allowing writers to foster their thinking and conversation in a comfortable setting. This setting, a community of their peers, is essential for the writers’ ability to grow their knowledge, by which I mean, working collaboratively with other students helps develop their language capabilities. If one is capable of having an external conversation, of developing a vernacular about a subject (in this case, about writing) and putting this vernacular into external use with a peer, then one should ideally be able to put that conversation into writing.  

            The RWC is also useful as a community for writers because, as a community, the RWC is basically made up of the intended audience for the writers’ works. By this I mean, a community is created when a group of people sharing similar intellect, values, and beliefs come together to share and build knowledge. In general, this same definition of community can be applied to the audience. In most professional settings, one is writing with one’s colleagues, the people belonging to the same professional community as the writer, in mind. As a student, these colleagues are one’s peers, other fellow students. These are the people that make up the community that is the RWC. In this way, writers are able to develop a relationship between both their tutor and their audience, as these two end up being one and the same.