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Need a Writing Tutor? |
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Need a Writing Tutor? |
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How to make an appointment You can schedule an appointment with a Writing Center instructor by going to https://tracktion.oneonta.edu/. When students come to the CADE to work on a specific paper for a course (not to prepare for the College Writing exam), they need to have the written permission of the professor for that course. Please print out a permission form, fill it out, have your professor sign it, and bring it with you to your first appointment. If You’ve Been Referred to CADE's Writing Center If you have been referred to CADE by an instructor, we are especially eager to assist you. After all, by referring you to CADE, your instructor has indicated that you may be able to raise your grade as a result of the work you do here. With that kind of motivation, we should be able to accomplish great things together! When you make an appointment to come to CADE, please inform the person who makes your appointment that you’ve been referred to us. That way we can address your specific needs. The CADE staff member who works with you will try to discover more about the requirements of your course or assignment, or about your course instructor’s specific concerns about your writing. If you need extra support, we may schedule longer, more frequent appointments. You can find out from our web site how to prepare for your first appointment, and what to expect from CADE. We make special efforts to assist people who have been referred to us; if you’ve been instructed to seek help at CADE, call or stop by soon — together we can make the most of the opportunity that a referral represents.
What to expect at your first appointment Each writing consultation is different, but there are some things you should expect during your first appointment. Your appointment will last half an hour. Your CADE tutor will first want to read the specific assignment you’ve received (be sure to bring it with you). The instructor will then ask you to explain what you most want help with. Guided by what you’ve asked for help with, your Writing Center staff member will then respond, as a critical reader and as a writing instructor, to what you’ve written — pointing out sections that work well, identifying possible problems, teaching you important principles about writing, and helping you find ways to improve your paper as you revise. CADE tutors are likely to concentrate on large-scale issues first. For example, they’ll try to help you make sure that you’re responding to the assignment and that you’re writing a focused, well-organized, and effectively developed paper before they help you with such concerns as style, grammar, word choice, and punctuation. They follow this order for a good reason: small changes in individual sentences will not improve a paper as much as changes in thesis, focus, and organization will. It’s important for you to know that tutors will not edit or proofread your papers for you. Nor will they do your reading or thinking or writing for you. Instead, their goal is to teach you to do these things for yourself so that you can become a better, more confident writer. How to prepare for your first appointment Once you’ve made an appointment for individual writing instruction in Comp 090 or for a writing consultation, you should do some preliminary work on your paper. Read the assignment carefully, ask your course instructor any questions you might have about the assignment, and read (or at least begin reading) any required texts. You might also do some initial research, discuss the assignment with classmates, brainstorm some ideas, or begin an outline. When you come to your appointment, bring the assignment sheet so that you and your CADE tutor have all relevant information at hand. Also, bring along whatever you have prepared or written so far. If you have a partial or a full draft, bring it along (a handwritten draft is fine). Sometimes you’ll have an outline or some preliminary notes. If you bring along a list of questions that you have about the writing you’ve done, you and your instructor will be able to focus on precisely the aspects of the paper that you feel are most important. Even if you are having difficulty putting pen to paper, come to the Writing Center anyway! You can use your appointment to discuss how to get started. The staff can assist you at any point in your writing process — the earlier the better. Above all, you should come prepared to think and talk about your writing. Be ready to engage in discussion about your writing, to receive advice about it, and to seek ways to improve it. Undergraduates have always been the core clientele for the Writing Center, and we are proud to serve a consistently increasing number of undergraduate writers each semester. We also serve an increasing number of students through the Cooperstown Graduate Program. If you are writing papers for an introductory course, whether it is Women’s Studies or Political Science or English, an individual appointment with a writing instructor can help you make your first college papers more successful. As you begin to write longer papers within your major, you can come to the Writing Center for guidance in incorporating research, organizing longer papers, and citing sources. If you are writing a thesis-length paper or research project, or if your courses require papers regularly throughout the semester, you may wish to enroll in a mini-session for five weeks of bi-weekly meetings with an instructor to help you plan, write, and revise. When nearing the culmination of your undergraduate career, prepare for the College Writing Exam by seeing a writing instructor. Along with the guidance of advisors in your discipline, we can help you write a strong application for advanced study. Writing Center offers you the same kinds of instruction it provides other student writers: individual instruction and classes on writing issues. In individual conferences, students can receive suggestions about revising a paper for any course and discuss topics like the following with a professional writing instructor:
Services for Faculty, Staff, and TAs As “writing across the curriculum” becomes a goal of teachers in all disciplines, the Writing Center stands ready to assist faculty members and teaching assistants in making writing a productive part of their instruction. If you are teaching a course that requires papers from your students, please let your students know that CADE’s services are available. If there are specific students who you think would benefit from our instruction, please recommend that they come to CADE to arrange for at least several appointments with the same professional tutor. If you would like to discuss your students’ work at CADE's Writing Center, please contact us at 436-3010. Please send them with a signed permission form. If you wish, you may grant permission to all or several of your students by using the blanket permission form. We don’t do simple proofreading or editing. We offer instruction on writing processes, not last-minute grammar checking. We’ll gladly teach you how to edit your own work, but our emphasis in conferences is usually on helping you respond to an assignment, develop and organize your ideas, and write clearly. Take a look at General Information on Writing for help with finding and eliminating common mechanical errors in your writing. CADE'S Writing Center can help you with work for almost any class, as well as with short, expository pieces of writing oriented toward your career (such as your resume, a cover letter, or a graduate school application essay). A permission form signed by your professor is required if you are working on a paper for a course. Please be sure to bring it with you. Writing consultations are limited to three per semester. After that, students are enrolled in a section of Comp 090, which is a non-credit bearing tutorial. This tutorial is free for full-time students. We gratefully acknowledge The Writing Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison whose wording we appropriated in great measure for this site (with their permission, of course). J |