About the Writing Center

What We Do

Clark University’s Writing Center offers all Clark students free one-to-one assistance with your writing. Our writing consultants will work with you on any piece of writing, from short papers, research papers and honors theses to graduate school applications and resumes. Conferences can focus on different aspects of writing: from grammar, word choice, and style to thesis development, coherence and overall organization.

Writing Center conferences are interactive, and we expect you to actively participate in conferences by asking questions and generating ideas for improving your writing. We do not edit or proofread your essays for you while you do other work; rather, we work on a piece of writing with you. Our goal is to help you improve your writing skills, and this is possible only if you participate in the consultation.

Getting the Most Out of the Writing Center

Come early in the writing process, especially if you feel that you would benefit from help with developing a thesis and help with the overall structure of a paper. We’re happy to work with you before you’ve written anything, when you have an early draft or when you’re polishing a final draft of a writing project.

Our writing consultants have only 50 minutes per appointment to work with you, so if you are working on a paper longer than 7 pages, please decide what pages or what aspects of the paper you would like to work on within those 50 minutes.

Before you come

Please plan to arrive on time! (When we are busy, we give away your appointment if you are ten minutes late. If you must be late, call us to tell us and we’ll hold your appointment for you.)

Have a clear idea of the assignment

Bring the assignment handout, as well as any other course materials, from class that you might reference in the writing assignment.

Come with a goal

Think about which aspect of the writing project you need the most help with (e.g., brainstorming something to writer about, overall structure of a paper, paragraph structure, specific grammatical problems).

What to Expect During Your Consultation

The beginning of conferences

The consultant will read your paper, or parts of your paper if it is very long, and listen to what you would like to work on.

Together you will agree on the main goals for the conference

Expect that a consultant may identify important goals that you did not think of. Deciding what to work on in conference is a collaborative process.

What productive conferences are like

Again, a conference is productive when a student writer actively participates by asking questions and generating his or her own ideas for improving a piece of writing.

Work is done in conferences. If you come to the Writing Center to work on sentence structure expect to write some sentences. If you come to work on identifying a thesis for a paper expect to generate some, discuss their pros and cons, and end up with a number of good candidates.