Writing Center

Who We Are and What We Do

Our mission as writing consultants is to assist you as you analyze your paper and explore ways to improve it. Our primary concern is to help you become a better writer. To do this, we challenge you to learn more about composition and the conventions of Standard English.

Although the paper is often the medium we use to teach you about writing, we are not overly concerned with it. Our focus is to teach you how to improve it, not to do the work ourselves. For example, we don’t have time to edit or proofread the paper, but we'll be glad to teach you how to do it. We also don't want you to get bogged down on inserting commas when you have a problem with organization and logic. We hope that with our guidance you'll end up with a better paper, but we can't guarantee that.

As writing consultants, we make suggestions, explore alternatives, and show you how good writers evaluate text so that you can learn to evaluate your own work without our help. If we see patterns of error, we'll be glad to explain the errors and how to avoid them. We usually suggest that you write another draft, and we'll be glad to help you evaluate that draft as well. If you have trouble mastering a skill, we'll recommend our self-paced review materials that you can study on your own so that you can acquire the skills you need.

Because our resources are limited, we have set up the following guidelines:

• You must make an appointment to get assistance with papers. Plan ahead, as our appointments fill up quickly.
• You are limited to one half-hour appointment per day and two appointments per week so that we can assist as many students as possible.
• You should be on time for appointments. If you fail to show up within five minutes of the appointment time, that appointment is automatically canceled.
• You should keep your appointments or call to cancel. Students who make five appointments without calling to cancel will not be able to make any more appointments for the semester. This also applies to students who cancel more than ten appointments.
• If you are working on a group paper, each member of the group may make an appointment to discuss it, but each member must show up. You can pass the paper on to another person or work as a group, but you can't make three appointments for yourself just because there are three students in the group.