A Little Off-Center: Writing Support in a Medical Library

Writing centers are a common feature on college campuses, offering students the opportunity to work with a writing consultant to simultaneously refine a particular project and refine their overall skills. Centers generally employ undergraduate and graduate students to serve as consultants, drawing especially from English majors and other writing-intensive disciplines. What do you do at a health sciences campus, when English majors are thin on the ground and the types of writing to be supported are decidedly different? 

For LSU Health Shreveport’s library, the solution was to provide writing support in-house. What started as an ad-hoc initiative from a few librarians willing to take up the slack to fill an unmet need has since evolved, involving both librarians and an external scientific editor to help medical and graduate students, residents, and faculty address a wide range of writing projects. Just shy of a year ago, I was brought on as the library’s inaugural Research & Writing Librarian to formally anchor that service with a faculty point-person.  

I come to the project from the world of the writing center, rather than that of the library. It’s a little unorthodox as arrangements go, offering writing consultation through the library directly, but writing support has always been a liminal service, tucked away wherever a niche on the campus will accommodate it. Often, writing centers even find themselves literally inside libraries, whether organizationally or just physically. 

So, what does this service actually entail for our campus?

Document reviews are the most common form of support we offer, working with writers to refine a document draft, whether they’re still deep in the rough or polishing up their prose before submission. Our external editor and I offer feedback, suggestions, and yes even some direct edits with the goal of helping writers move towards the next level both in their draft and in their craft. Writing centers have a…let’s call it fraught relationship with editing, but it makes more sense when working with a large population of residents, fellows, and faculty whose needs are different than traditional undergraduates. 

In consultations, I work with writers in greater depth to help scaffold the writing process. For med students working on personal statements for residency, that often means helping them tease out a vivid and engaging narrative about their experiences and qualities. For faculty, it can mean providing careful advice and a sympathetic ear when they get peer review feedback from that dread creature, Reviewer #2. 

For workshops, we offer our own presentations through the library itself, and also partner with faculty members to present as part of their courses. This role includes a broader element of scholarly communication, with topics including drafting a personal statement and CV, writing strategies for grant applications, and avoiding predatory publishers. 

My work in the library looks a lot like my work in the writing center did, but there’s definitely been a change in how writers relate to me. While writing centers treasure the unique peer-to-peer relationship that can help students flourish on their own terms, hosting writing support out of the library with professional consultants creates space for different peers: residents, fellows, and faculty members who might be hesitant to use a writing center framed more explicitly for student peers. Framing support through the library rather than academic or student affairs invites them into the community of writers.

I’m still a firm believer in writing center pedagogy, incorporating it in my new position in the library: I empower writers to make strong choices, help them develop a critical awareness of their process, and build their independence wherever possible. But these principles aren’t at all unfamiliar to librarians, who work with patrons to help hone their skills as researchers. We collaborate, we coach, we commiserate. Our worlds are much more alike than apart.

A service thrives best when it suits the particular ecology of their campus and community. Libraries are especially sensitive and attuned to the unique needs of their patrons—and sometimes that means taking on a less common remit. When and where it makes sense, we’re all enriched by creating space for more models of support, more ways of tailoring our work to the needs of the people we serve.