What Happens in a Writing Center Session?
The consultant will talk with you and look at your writing to identify your writing needs, then work with you to show you how to address them. The consultant’s goal is not simply to help you improve a particular paper but also to help you improve your overall writing abilities. Near the end of the session, the consultant will offer you advice for continuing to work on your own after the session. The details of the meeting are confidential between writer and consultant. However, when a student is referred to the Writing Center by an instructor, a dated acknowledgement is sent by the online system. Please note that consultants can • Help students with “writer’s block” by talking with them about particular writing assignments and/ or suggesting various kinds of brain-storming strategies; • Listen and give feedback as students discover and explore new thoughts and ideas; • Help students translate writing assignments into writing products; • Help students understand teacher comments in a no
Mostly, it’s conversation. This might seem surprising, but it is conversations about writing that help us become better writers over time. You will work one-on-one with a writing center consultant who will ask you a lot of questions about your assignment, what you want to accomplish in the paper, the work you have done on it so far, the due date, and your concerns about the work so far. We ask these questions because they often help you clarify your own goals and intentions for the paper, and that helps us know what to look for as we read the paper with you. When you come into the center for a face to face session, you or the consultant will read your paper aloud. Reading aloud, we often hear things that we wouldn’t see when reading silently. Reading aloud also helps catch overly long sentences, strange rhythms, and repeated words. You may be surprised at how much it helps to hear what you’ve written. As the paper’s read, we listen for ways of improving the writing–ways to make it say
