New director Courtney brings love for writing to University

Dr. Jennifer Courtney looks on in awe at the three-ton pickup parked beside her small car in the faculty parking lot. Since moving to Texas in August, Courtney said she has seen more large trucks than in any other state. Gathering her belongings she begins walking toward Room 202 of the Business Building for another day of working at the Writing Center.

Courtney

As the center’s director, Courtney is responsible for providing University students assistance with their writing assignments. The center is open 46 hours a week and employs student tutors. Courtney moved here from North Carolina where she served as the writing center director at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for five years.

As a Virigina Tech student, she said she helped develop the campus writing center and also served as a tutor for seven years. “I love working in writing centers,” Courtney said. “It’s just an amazing place of learning.”

Reading and writing is a lifetime passion for Courtney. As a child, Courtney said  her parents inspired her by reading to her after dinners and on the weekends, she said.

Courtney said she believes the written word contains a lot of power and she wants the center to help students find that power. “I like to work in depth with students,” she said. “It’s not just their papers, but them, as writers.”

She is the first permanent director after a long line of temporary directors since founder Lucus Niller opened the center in the early 2000s. Courtney has several goals for the future of the writing center including informing more faculty of it.

“I’d like to have an open house where faculty can come sit down and talk about their writing assignments,” Courtney said. When writing tutors know more about the writing assignments that professors have, the better equipped they will be for tutoring.

With more faculty using the center, more students would become aware of its availability, she said.

The center is open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.  on Friday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Tutorial assistance covers the paper-writing process from brainstorming to the content of the final copy while looking for ways to enhance the writer’s ability.

Courtney stresses the center is not a place where students drop off their papers and then get them corrected, but a place where learning occurs to ensure a better writer.

“I like to work in depth with students,” Courtney said. “The goal of the writing center is to make better writers, not better papers.”