The Writing Center
Schedule an appointment.
If you encounter any issues logging into your appointment, please email us at [email protected] or call us at 757-683-4013 during our open hours. Please note we will not have phone access during online only hours. We recommend emailing during online only hours.
Welcome to the Writing Center!
The Writing Center (WC) provides free individual tutorials to undergraduate and graduate students, working on writing projects for any course; WC tutors are not editors or proofreaders, but they coach and encourage students to achieve independence in the composition and revision of their own work.
Our tutoring is available for both on-campus and distance students.
The Writing Center provides supplemental instruction to help students improve their writing strategies. Instead of providing a proofreading service, we offer tutoring sessions that assist students in learning to proofread their own work, in getting projects started, and in developing the writing process for a paper.
The Writing Center offers 45-minute appointments with graduate student tutors who work with individual students or with groups. Most tutoring sessions are by appointment; walk-in appointments are provided when tutors are not in a scheduled session. For distance students, we use WCOnline for online appointments. Students have the option of making standing appointments with tutors once per week for up to four weeks at a time. In addition to tutoring services for undergraduate and graduate students, we will visit classrooms to provide writing lessons and group tutorials.
Thank you for visiting the Writing Center at ODU.
Megan Boeshart, Writing Center Director
Appointment Policies
Appointment types, graduate student write-ins.
- Number of appointments allowed per week: Students can have three appointments per week.
- Appointment Length: Appointments are 45 minutes.
- Proof or verification of appointments: The WC will send professors an email after an appointment. Students need to email us at [email protected] or talk to their tutor once the appointment has concluded to get the verification sent. Our tutors will not sign any documents.
- Requesting a specific tutor for your appointments: Provided that a particular tutor is available during the hours that you request, he or she can see you on a regular basis.
- Missed appointments and cancellations: When the Writing Center is booked, the only way students can get appointments is if we have a cancellation. When the WC is full, you may be able to get an appointment at ten minutes past any hour if someone doesn't show up for an appointment. Please use the Wait List feature in our scheduling system if this happens.
- If you cannot make it to an appointment, please email us at [email protected] OR cancel the appointment yourself within our appointment system. If it is already past the start of your appointment, you can still email us within 10 minutes of the start of the appointment to cancel without penalty.
- Late policy for appointments: All appointments begin on the hour. We hold the appointment for 10 minutes. If a student doesn't show up, the appointment is considered a no-show. There is no penalty for cancellations, but there is a penalty for no-shows. Please remember that our appointments are in demand. Being a no-show means taking away an appointment from someone else. Students are allowed two missed appointments per semester (without any attempt to contact us and cancel or reschedule ahead of time). After two appointments are missed, a student's WCOnline account will be disabled.
- Required appointments: The Writing Center is a voluntary service. The WC has a limited number of tutors and appointments and is unable to offer teaching assistance for individual instructors, courses, or departments.
- Distance appointments: All students can make online appointments with us via our scheduling system.
- Time: Please note that our appointments are 45 minutes. This means we may not be able to get through an entire piece of writing, especially if it is more than a few pages. We encourage students to plan ahead so they can have multiple appointments if necessary.
- Accessibility: If you need live captioning for a real time appointment or captioning for video feedback due to a disability, please make a note in the "questions or comments" section of the appointment form that you'd like the captions and we'd be happy to provide them.
Real Time Online
- Use microphone and webcam to talk and work together in real time.
- Writing is shared in an editing space that can be seen and worked on by the tutor and student at the same time.
- Ideal for sessions where clarification, questions, or discussion needs to take place.
- Can be useful at any point in the writing process.
Video Feedback
- Student submits the writing assignment guidelines and writing, identifying what they need feedback on.
- The tutor creates a video where they verbally walk the student through feedback on the writing.
- Ideal for assignments where significant writing has been done.
- Not useful for the early or brainstorming stages of a paper.
- Student does not need to be available at the time of appointment.
- Please do not schedule multiple appointments with the same draft with different tutors without making changes based on the feedback you receive first.
What is a "Write-In"?
Write-Ins are weekly writing retreats hosted by the ODU Writing Center on Saturdays for graduate students. You're welcome to come once, or come every week!
If you're trying to make progress on an article, dissertation, or course project, but would benefit from some quiet camaraderie, and a structured time to focus on your writing, we welcome you to join us for this weekly writing retreat. Our goal is to provide a time and space for graduate students to set writing goals and work without interruption in a supportive environment. WC tutors will facilitate the session and be available for 30-minute appointments to answer specific questions or review select segments of text.
We start and end with discussing our writing goals as a group. The group offers encouragement and accountability to help keep you focused on your goals.
Where and When is the Write-In?
Fall 2024 Graduate Student Write-Ins will begin Saturday Sept. 7th
Write-Ins are Saturdays from 10:00am - 2:00pm on Zoom. All graduate students are welcome! Students must sign-in using their ODU MIDAS ID and password to get into the meeting.
Zoom Link: https://odu.zoom.us/j/96088865252
If you encounter any issues joining the Zoom, please email us at [email protected]
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