And the prospect has him a little jammed up. But rather than spend torturous hours trying to break through writer's block, he heads over to Levering Hall. Instead he follows the directions drawn on a droopy, colorful sign, pointing upstairs to something never before seen at Hopkins. A writing center. There, in the bright, computer-lined Little Theatre he will spend about an hour with a trained writing consultant who will help him help himself produce the essay he wants to write.
Writing centers are nothing new to American universities.
They date back to the 1950s when they were mostly places where undergraduates got help with grammar and usage, running mechanical drills until they mastered the rules. But Hopkins never followed the national trend. The spark that ignited the movement toward the eventual establishment of the center was a 1992 initiative by the schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering to require that their undergraduates take a certain number of writing-intensive courses prior to graduation in an effort to improve the quality of their writing. This year, more than 150 such courses are offered, but not without some problems. For one, as Neil Hertz, co-chair of the Committee on Undergraduate Writing, notes, the course offerings are distributed among a wide range of departments.