Promoting the Writing Center

I had to put my marketing hat on today--outside of class (gasp!)--when I went to talk to a freshmen seminar class about the St. Mike's Writing Center. The Writing Center coaches visit these classes at the beginning of every semester, so that new students will be familiar with our AMAZING service.

We are given a script to read off of to make sure we don't forget to mention anything important (but also as a buffer if we aren't a fan of public speaking). While going over the script this morning, I thought of how terribly boring it would be for me to read from the script and how much the students weren't going to care what I was saying and, therefore, not listen. The memory of our class discussion about elevator pitches popped into my head, and I decided to utilize my knew knowledge of pitching an idea to get these students interested. So I rewrote the "pitch" in my own words, made it more concise, and (sort of) memorized it.

And...

It worked! I definitely had all of their attention and I even got a few laughs. Now that I look back at the nine C's, I think I used them all to my advantage. But to spare you all from having to read about each one of them, I'll just say what I think worked best: being conversational. I kept it very casual, used my real intonation (not just reading from a script), paused, related to them, and made a couple jokes. So I think I won them over--or at least gave them a good first impression of the Writing Center. Now I just have to wait and see if they actually go!