Appointments last up to 45 minutes long and begin on the hour. When you sign up for an appointment, you can indicate what you wish to work on with your tutor. When you sit down with you tutor, you can review your goals for the session before you start. This gives you a chance to agree on what can be accomplished in your time together. If you have a draft in progress, you and your tutor will read through your draft together and then decide how to proceed with the session.

Starting Your Appointment

In-Person Appointments

• If you have already made an appointment with us on WCOnline, you can walk into Gilman Hall 230 at your designated appointment time and your tutor will be ready to assist you. Come a few minutes early if you can and take a seat in our waiting area!
• Please show up on time! Students who are more than 15 mins late to their appointment cannot be accommodated and will need to reschedule.
• We also offer walk-in appointments depending on availability. Note that walk-ins cannot be guaranteed.

Online Appointments

When you schedule your appointment, you may have the option of scheduling an online appointment.

Working With Your Tutor

At the beginning of the session, your tutor will ask you about your assignment and how you have begun to approach it. If you have not yet written anything, you and your tutor may discuss your ideas and consider different ways of developing and organizing them. You may leave the session with an outline or a thesis statement, or you may discover that you need to do more research before you can begin an outline.

If you have written something, including an outline or notes, you and your tutor will read through your text and decide what aspects you would like to work on. You will determine the direction of the session. Your tutor will, of course, make suggestions and point out additional areas to work on if they think this is appropriate.

If you wish to work on sentence level issues, your tutor will provide feedback on patterns of errors and will help you to develop strong editing skills.

Be sure to ask questions if anything your tutor says is unclear. Remember this is your writing center session and you should focus on areas in your work that you feel most concerned with!

Longer Papers and Group Work

We can work with long research papers in the writing center, but we need to be realistic about how much can be covered in one session. If you have a long assignment to discuss, think about specific aspects of that assignment that you would like to work on in a particular session. If multiple students have produced a single text as part of a group project, all students must attend the tutoring consultation.

Multilingual Writers

The Writing Center provides writing assistance for writers from all language backgrounds. Specific resources for ML writers can be found in our resources section. In addition, the Center for Leadership Education and Center for Language Education offer additional options for ESL support.

After Your Appointment

After your appointment, you should let your tutor know if you would like your instructor to receive confirmation of your consultation. You will need to provide your tutor with your instructor’s email address when you make your request.

Whether you are a new or returning student, your tutor will also ask you to fill out a short survey about your consultation. This should take only a minute or two to complete and helps us to continually evaluate how we might better serve the student population at Hopkins.