What To Know Before Your Conference
Be prepared by bringing a copy of your assignment and any instructions you have for the assignment you are working on, so our PWCs can help you address specific components of the assignment. If you have a draft, that’s great; if not, that’s okay too. We can help you get started!
Before a conference session, students should be prepared to talk about and work on their writing or speech. Here’s a little about our process:
- During a session, we focus our attention on three points: Conversation, Collaboration, and In-session Writing.
- We begin by talking with our clients to figure how we might best help them.
- Next, we offer some directed feedback that will help our clients work on their paper, speech, etc. during their session.
- After 10-15 minutes of In-session Writing, we reconvene with our clients to discuss their work to offer more feedback and suggestions for future individual and conference work.
- After our conference has ended, we will compose and send a conference summary to the student’s e-mail that will help remind them of our conference work.
- If our clients ask us to do so, we will also communicate our work with the student’s professor by sending our conference summary to the professor.
The WCC can help students:
- Narrow down topic choices
- Develop a working thesis statement
- Organize an outline
- Organize a rough draft
- Support a thesis
- Integrate source material
- Integrate other information
- Integrate documentation
Our Professional Writing Consultants can also help students develop strategies to:
- Revise a rough draft
- Edit spelling mistakes
- Find grammatical errors
- Recognize areas that need rewording
- Format a works cited/resources page
- Develop their presentations and speeches
Keep in mind, our Writing Consultants will not start a paper for students. Similarly, the Writing Consultant will not simply “fix” the paper for the student seeking assistance. Rather, the Writing Consultant’s role is to help students improve their writing skills by answering questions regarding writing mechanics, organization, content, documentation, and so on.
In this way, the Writing Consultant works with students to help them develop strategies for identifying and developing their communication needs.
The WCC does not guarantee any grade on edited papers, nor do they comment on instructor directions for the student. Our objective is to help students develop a critical analysis of their work as they develop effective rhetorical and revision strategies and develop their communication processes.
