Preparing to meet with a Writing Place consultant

	The Writing Place
		Room 2304 University Library, North Tower, Second Floor Phone: (847) 467-2791 \|\| E-mail: writingplace@northwestern.edu The Writing Place is a service of the WCAS Writing Program, Northwestern University. Directions to the Writing Place \| Using the Writing Place \| Freshman Seminar Writing Awards \| Writing Resources
	Preparing to meet with a writing consultant The Writing Place offers free writing advice and tutoring on a drop-in basis. The tutors are work-study students who are experienced writers. They are not graders or ghostwriters, but attentive readers who are trained to engage you in a conversation about your writing. A Writing Place consultant can be helpful to you at any point in the writing process--from analyzing an assignment and developing an approach to revising and editing a draft. Four things you can do to prepare for a session at the Writing Place Understand what kind of help the Writing Place can offer Determine the kind of help you want and need Examine what you've written so far Plan to visit the Writing Place early in your writing process What a Writing Place consultant can NOT do: Tell you how to write your paper Predict what grade your paper will get Find and change all the problems in a draft What a Writing Place consultant CAN do: Help you assess where you are in the writing process, and what your options are for the next steps Tell you what an experienced reader found interesting, effective, confusing, contradictory, or difficult in your draft Help you define the point of a section or the whole paper more sharply by asking you questions and listening to your answers Point out patterns in your writing that you may wish to modify: organization of points, sentence patterns, word choice, tone, etc. Offer suggestions for revision, based on a discussion of what both of you think the paper needs Direct you to resources that can help you complete the assignment: library information, style sheets and formatting instructions, other information on writing Invite you to come back again to discuss your revisions Questions What do you want the Writing Place session to help you do? Select a topic? Decide what approach to take? Finish writing a draft? Revise and edit a draft you've already written? What do you want the Writing Place consultant to pay attention to in your draft? What do you like about the paper so far? What do you think needs more work? Is there a specific problem that you are working on solving? What is it?
	Directions to the Writing Place \| Using the Writing Place \| Freshman Seminar Writing Awards \| Writing Resources Northwestern Home \| Calendar: Plan-It Purple \| Sites A-Z \| Search ©2005 The Writing Place, Northwestern University Room 2304 University Library, North Tower, Second Floor \|\| http://www.writing.northwestern.edu Phone: (847) 467-2791 Email: writingplace@northwestern.edu A service of the WCAS Writing Program \|\| http://www.writingprogram.northwestern.edu World Wide Web Disclaimer and University Policy Statements © 2005 Northwestern University