One of the great things about the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center is that you can work with our tutors at any point during the writing process. THE BEST TIME TO TALK WITH A TUTOR IS when you’ve just received a paper assignment from your teacher and don’t know how to begin–we can help you get up and running. If you’ve already started but have gotten stuck, we can help you get moving again. If the paper is due the next day and you just want to double check that your essay meets the assignment, we can help you then too.

What Happens During a Tutoring Session

First, we’ll ask what you’re working on, what the specific assignment is, and then we’ll ask you some questions about what you want to accomplish in the tutoring session. While we do not do line-by-line correcting of papers, we’ll try to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your draft and will talk with you about the best ways to revise it. We’ll look for patterns of errors in your work, and we’ll teach you how to recognize and correct those errors in your writing.

What to Do

Since your time is limited and since the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center does get busy, here are a few pointers to make the best use of your tutoring session:

• Bring your assignment. Our tutors want to help you, and you’ll find that our help will be that much better if we can see directly what your teacher is asking you to do for the assignment.
• Bring questions. You don’t have to have everything figured out before you sit down with a tutor (if you did, you wouldn’t need us!), but thinking about various aspects of the assignment or your draft before you come in will help you get more from the session.
• Bring other writing you’ve done for the class. This point is especially true if you’re revising a paper. But even if you’re not, having earlier papers handy will help the tutor determine what your teacher’s priorities are and what he or she most wants you to be working on.
• Bring an open mind. Our tutors are trained to think about your papers in a number of different ways. We will do our best to answer all your questions, but we might also point out some useful things that you hadn’t thought about before.

What Not to Do

• Don’t wait until the last minute to ask for help. We get far too many students coming in for help with papers due in an hour (sometimes less!). While we’ll certainly do what we can, there’s only so much we can do if you don’t give us much time. The best rule of thumb: Come in as soon as you get the assignment. Then, come in as often as you like to see the assignment through.
• Don’t be surprised when we don’t concentrate on “proofreading” or finding your mistakes for you. Why? Most professors care about whether you’ve fulfilled the assignment, and they care a lot about your ideas and analysis. So, there are a number of things tutors look for when reading your paper, the main thing being how well you’ve developed and presented your ideas. While grammar is important, it’s not the first thing tutors look for. A grammatically “clean” paper might still be a poor paper if it doesn’t satisfy the assignment or if your ideas are still evolving. Be open to any number of suggestions from your tutors, not simply ones concerning grammar.
• Don’t assume the tutor will do the work for you. We won’t. We’re not allowed to, since it’s your work. This is probably an obvious point, but it’s one worth making. Our primary goal is to help you build confidence in your writing ability. You simply won’t build that confidence if you don’t do your own work. 

Finally, if you want to read more about why you should visit the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center, please read this article written for any college student on any campus about how writing centers can help: Why Visit your Campus Writing Center