What to Expect
Writing Center :: What to Expect
We are excited to support you in developing your writing projects and your writing goals. You can bring your writing in at any stage in the writing or research process—even before you have anything on the page! We work with academic writers, and as your writing life at East Texas A&M extends beyond the classroom, we are also happy to work with you on projects beyond assignments (like emails, social media campaigns, poetry, blog posts etc.). During a session, we’ll work on any project for which you’d like some support. In addition to the project at hand, we also support you in developing an awareness of your writing process.
Online Sessions
- Find a quiet spot, with good internet access, where you don’t mind talking out loud about your work.
- If you are planning to discuss a particular piece of writing, have that accessible.
- If there is a prompt you are responding to, have that accessible.
- Log into the tutoring schedule, find your current session, click on it, and then, in the popup window, click “Start or Join Online Session.”
- If you’d like to use audio and/or video, when prompted, you’ll “allow” access to your microphone and camera.
- Once in the session, you can copy/paste your text into the window, or you can use the double arrow icon in the upper left to import your text.
Face-to-Face Sessions
- Make sure you have access to the piece of writing you’d like to discuss. You can pull it up on a Writing Center computer, print it out, or bring your own laptop or tablet.
Note: Sessions are 45 minutes or less, and remember, sometimes (especially for big projects or heavy writing semesters) it’s just as helpful to talk about and plan the writing project as it is to work through writing-on-the-page together.
Online Sessions
- We’ll start with an audio and visual check, making sure microphones and cameras are working. (You absolutely do not have to use your camera).
Face-to-Face Sessions
- You’ll check in at the front desk and wait until your tutor is ready to begin the session.
Session Flow
- The first thing we’ll do in a session is ask about what prompted this piece of writing and how you are feeling about it
- If you want to look at a specific piece of writing, either you or the tutor will read the piece (or part of the piece) out loud.
- After reading the piece, we’ll decide what to do during the session.
- We’ll work on the writing (or brainstorming or planning) together, through discussion, exercises and/or writing or reading time.
- We’ll wrap up by making a plan together for your next steps.
- At the end, we’ll ask you to take an anonymous survey of how the session went.