Writing Center FAQs

Please go to Schedule An Appointment for complete instructions.

For face-to-face meetings, be sure to arrive on time and bring your assignment notes, anything you’ve written so far, and your textbooks (if needed). The more you bring with you, the more helpful and productive the meeting will probably be. Yet, even if you haven’t started an assignment yet, you can still benefit from discussing the guidelines and brainstorming or outlining ideas with the consultant’s help. During a face-to-face meeting, the consultant will sit down and discuss the assignment with you first. Then they will look at what you’ve written so far and go over the draft with you, pointing out any problematic areas and teaching you how to correct those problems or improve your writing.

If you meet with a consultant in a videoconference (Zoom) session, the consultant will not be reading any attached papers beforehand. Instead, you can use that Zoom time to read part of a paper draft together and discuss strong and weak points of the draft; however, you can also use time in a Zoom appointment to discuss questions you have about other topics such as formatting or assignment instructions.

Online review appointments are somewhat different. You will need to upload your document(s) for the consultant before the schedule session. Then, you can just go on about your life and take care of your work, family, etc. Later that day, you can log in to the schedule again and retrieve the consultant’s written feedback to you, which you should find uploaded to the same appointment time/form where you uploaded your original document. You can see the full feedback from the consultant by downloading the consultant’s attachment and using the review tab in Word and asking Word to “show comments” on the right side of the document, if the comments do not automatically appear. After you read the consultant’s comments, you can decide what changes you may want to make to your draft.

We do not “fix” or edit papers in the strict sense. Instead, we answer questions and help students think about how to make their written ideas make more sense and flow more smoothly. Our goal is to help you become a better writer, to help you learn how to help yourself in the future. Doing the work for you and making proof corrections for you does not help us accomplish this goal, so we work with you through a process—a process from which we hope you will learn and grow. We hope you’ll learn how to better review your work on your own.

You can bring in as many drafts as you need to, as long as we have open appointments available in the schedule to see you and you have not met your weekly limit for individual consultation time. (Currently that limit is three hours per week.) For long papers such as capstones and theses, you will probably need to schedule multiple consultation appointments.

You can make an appointment with us any time before the assignment due date. However, be sure to give yourself plenty of time to incorporate any feedback you receive during the consultation before you submit your work to your professor.

Please call us at 1.402.557.5499 or log into WCONLINE to cancel if you know you will not be able to keep your appointment. Please be considerate of others who want to use the Writing Center and cancel an appointment you cannot keep before the appointment begins.

If you miss an appointment without having cancelled it and that happens twice in a row, you will have to wait two weeks before being allowed to schedule appointments with the Writing Center staff again.

Students remain solely responsible for the content, grammar, punctuation, style, and organization of their written work. Consultants may offer feedback about places where correction is needed, but a consultant will never rewrite or grade documents submitted to them. They suggest changes that they feel are most likely to improve a written work, but writers remain free to accept or reject the suggestions of consultants. The fact that a consultant has reviewed your paper does not guarantee that it is free from errors or from plagiarism or that it deserves a particular grade.