Writing Studio

There are a couple ways to visit the Writing Studio:

• If you enter through Hutchins Library, you can find us at the back of the main floor. If you go toward the “Library of Things” sign, you’ll see another sign letting you know to “write this way.” Follow that advice! Our main consulting space is through a small doorway to the right.
• If you enter through The NEST (sometimes called “Hutchins Library Annex”), you’ll go past the coffee shop and down the long hallway. A big sign and a bright green fireplace will welcome you.

Once inside our main consulting space, you’ll find lots of tables and chairs and, more than likely, students talking and working on their laptops. There are also some small offices for students to use for more focused work. We have a large workshop room nearby, which is available for club meetings, presentation practice sessions, and visits from bigger groups.

Our hours change each semester, depending on demand and the availability of our consultants. We keep an updated schedule on the Library’s schedule page. All of our available consultation appointment dates/times can be viewed by logging on to our consultation site.

“Consultation” is what we call our one-on-one writing tutoring sessions. For more information on our consultations and consultants, check out the FAQ on our Consultations page. You can schedule a consultation on our consultation site by logging in with your Berea username and password.

Berea students, faculty, and staff. We welcome anyone who is working on a writing project and needs a space to write or another brain to bounce ideas off of. We welcome folks who love to write, folks who dislike it, folks who feel overwhelmed, folks who are anxious, folks who are curious . . . All Bereans are writers, so all Bereans are invited to our space.

You can sign up to use Berea’s institutional Grammarly Premium license and learn more about our thoughts on Grammarly on our Grammarly page.

Yes, please do! If you’d like to hang around longer than a few minutes, please reach out ahead of time, so we can formally welcome your students.

We update the Berea events calendar and bulletin with many of our club meetings and events. However, sometimes we come up with an event idea that’s so exciting, we just have to run with it immediately! So, keep an eye out in our space and on campus corkboards for flyers related to the fun stuff we think up.

Contact Lauren Hall, the director of the Writing Studio, via e-mail or office visit!

You’ll want to reach out to Lauren Hall, the director of the Writing Studio. We love to collaborate with folks outside of the college.

This is a great question and one we get often. The Writing Studio does not encourage the use of Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini). However, we recognize that writers have a lot to navigate in and about their work, and we live in a complex world full of competing beliefs about what “writing” is, what it means to learn something deeply, the value of attending college and of engaging in the liberal arts, the power of critical literacy . . . to name just a few! We are mere humans, and it’s easy to feel powerless and diminished in the face of the unknown.

So, while we don’t encourage AI use, we also try our best not to judge those writers who incorporate it into their writing processes. What we will do, however, is ask the writers we work with to consider any instructional/institutional policies around AI use and to carefully think about what they might be giving up by signing off on words that they did not author.

In our consultations, we uplift the power of process over product, which means we are here to affirm and accommodate frustration, difficulty, and inefficiencies . . . and to help writers navigate challenging experiences and learn from them. We want our community to be confident, self-sufficient, and full of many different kinds of voices, so that’s what our consulting work will always support.

“Writing Resources” is the former name of Berea’s writing center. You may see it on signs and documents across campus. Eventually, we’ll get everything changed to “Writing Studio,” a name we feel better captures the creative work we do and that happens in our space. For now, we appreciate your patience.

Lauren, the director of the Writing Studio, wrote most of this page, drawing from a few older versions and some other writing centers’ sites. Isn’t it so weird to think that an actual human being is behind many of the websites we read?

Right now, I am sitting in my office, drinking iced tea, and imagining who you are and what you might want to know. Here are some questions that are guiding my writing: What are your motivations for coming to this page? How do you read FAQs? (Do you click around or are you trying to answer a very specific question?) How much time do you have to devote to reading this? What decisions could your reading inform?

Whoever you are, wherever you are, thank you for spending this time with me. ♥