Writer’s Center FAQs for Faculty & Staff

The student will sit down with a tutor for no more than 45 minutes to have a conversation about her/his writing. The student will be asked for a copy of the assignment sheet and what s/he would like to work on during the session. Depending on how far along the student is in the writing process, either the student or the tutor will read the paper aloud and then discuss strengths and weaknesses in the writing. Tutors are not editors and will focus on grammar and punctuation only if that is what the student needs, but the goal will be to encourage students to see their own grammatical errors and, instead, tutors will focus on larger content and structural issues that are more likely to impede successful communication of ideas.

We strongly discourage instructors from requiring students and/or entire classes to visit the center. Individuals who are required to come in often bring a negative attitude to the session and will see it as punishment. When classes are required to come, the majority of the students will wait until the last day or two to make appointments or walk in, and the WC is not staffed to handle this influx of students.

However, we suggest including information about the WC on your syllabus, recommending the WC to your students as a self-elected aid, and perhaps incentivizing a visit to the WC at some point in the semester.

Additionally, a Writer’s Center coordinator can visit your class to introduce your students to our services, philosophies, and staff. Classroom visits should take no more than 15 minutes of your class time. Contact us to schedule a visit; we ask that all classroom visits be scheduled at least 48 hours in advance.

Yes. You will receive an email from the Writer’s Center that your student has visited us, which will include a brief description of what was covered in the session. These emails will be sent in bulk on Friday afternoons at the end of our weekly operating hours. Please respond to these emails for our data tracking purposes.

• It’s very useful for the Writer’s Center to have copies of class assignments on file in case the student forgets to bring the assignment sheet to the consultation. This will ensure that the tutor understands the assignment well enough to make sure the student is following it appropriately. You can email any of your writing assignments to writerscenter@coastalcarolina.edu.
• We would love for you to encourage your students to visit the Writer’s Center, but requiring them to come often results in unproductive sessions since student engagement is forced and minimal. We encourage you to work incentives into the structure of your course.
• Please make sure you indicate on research assignments which documentation format you prefer students to use or clear guidelines for a customized format. We will consult the most current edition of any style guide unless otherwise specified on the assignment or syllabus. While consultants are more experienced with MLA and APA documentation styles, they can help with any documentation style that is assigned.

Our consultations with students are 45 minutes long since research has proven that this is the maximum amount of time you can be optimally productive without a break. Because our sessions are short, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to cover a student’s entire paper. We will begin with the larger issues dealing with content and structure and work our way down to lower-level issues such as grammar and punctuation. We offer suggestions to writers and leave it up to them to make their own writing choices, and we can’t guarantee that writers will take all of our suggestions. Additionally, students come to us at many different stages of their writing process, some very early on. While we urge students to return to us for further assistance, they will not always do so.

Yes! We invite faculty/staff to make appointments with us. We are pleased to offer our resources and provide feedback as desired for personal or professional writing. We also love to help brainstorm writing activities and/or strategize assignment designs for your courses. Come see us!