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The Quill Guild' crafts a creative writing community

The Quill Guild, a creative writing club at Cornell, aims to create a community for collaborative learning and writing, was established in fall 2015 by Aisha Rupasingha ’18, an English major.

Cornell engineers key to multiple federal microelectronics projects

Cornell Engineering-led projects designed to accelerate research into quantum and communications leap-ahead technologies – innovations that enable significant advances over current systems – received... Read more about Cornell engineers key to multiple federal microelectronics projects

NSF grant supports AI-driven sustainability research, training

A new program at Cornell will tackle critical environmental challenges by integrating advanced AI tools with sustainability research across the campus, thanks to a grant from the National Science... Read more about NSF grant supports AI-driven sustainability research, training

Literary Society at Cornell University

Become part of our vibrant community..

Organized by and for English majors and enthusiasts, the society plans events each semester to inspire interest in the major. Events may include panel discussions with English Department professors, student poetry readings, book club discussions with Cornell authors, pre-performance discussions for theater productions at the Schwartz Center, a mentor program between under- and upper-class English majors and luncheons with visiting writers. The Literary Society is comprised of English enthusiasts of all different areas – from English majors with concentrations spanning literary theory, creative writing, medieval literature and British literature to English minors and students of other disciplines. Anyone with a love for reading is encouraged to join the listserv and attend the society's weekly book club, where students chat in the English Lounge over refreshments.

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Literary Society at Cornell University Ithaca New York 14853 United States

Cornell Writing Centers

A picture of the 2023 graduating Cornell Writing Centers tutors and Director Kate Navickas.

The CWC provides support for individuals at any stage of the writing process. It is a free resource available to all of Cornell—undergraduate students, pre-freshman and high schoolers in summer programs, graduate students, staff, faculty, and alumni—for nearly any kind of writing project: applications, presentations, lab reports, essays, papers, and more. Tutors ( highly trained undergraduate students ) serve as responsive listeners and readers who can address questions about the writing process or about particular pieces of writing. They will ask questions that foster critical thinking about your writing, and they will also consider questions of confidence, reading, analytic thought, imagination, and research. All tutors have training in supporting multilingual writers, working with writers remotely online, and in supporting writers working on application materials.

Make an Appointment

For fall 2024, the Cornell Writing Centers will start tutoring on Monday, September 9. The CWC offers both appointment-based sessions and walk-ins at five locations (Rockefeller 178, Mann Library Consultation Area, 108 Uris Library, 403 Olin library, and B06 Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Writers will need to register for accounts and make appointments on our scheduling platform for all online appointments.

Make an appointment

Tutoring Schedule

Fall 2024 semester schedule , fall 2024 location schedule .

Sundays—Thursdays, 7:00-9:00pm

108 Uris Library
403 Olin Library
B06 Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Online Shifts, via WC Online

Mondays—Thursdays, 3:00-5:00pm

Mann Library Consultation Area
178 Rockefeller Hall

On a wooden table, there is a blank lined notebook, a pen, two crumpled up balls of paper, a black coffee, and a pair of glasses. On the left side, there is a black panel with white text that says "Hiring Writing Tutors."

Wanted: Writing Tutors!

"Come Write with Us" is in a big white font on the bottom of the image, overtop of a blue and purple galaxy picture. In the center, there is a number of yellow pencils that swirl inward, getting smaller and further away.

Why Visit the Cornell Writing Centers?

graduating tutors wishing you a good summer

Writing Centers: Celebrating Graduating Tutors

Commitment to combatting linguistic injustice.

The CWC recognizes and values the rich diversity of writers at Cornell, who come from different educational, national, racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds with varying ways of thinking and being in the world. The CWC further acknowledges the racialized ways languages (and their users) are hierarchized based on white linguistic norms. To combat linguistic injustice, our tutors receive ongoing pedagogical training on how to ask questions and provide feedback that encourages writers to value and use their own languages and voices in ways that honor linguistic differences, seek growth in writing and thinking, and advocate for their right to their language. We are committed to respecting each writer as a whole person who has agency over their writing and language choices.

Writing Center Policies

The Cornell Writing Centers are generally flexible in our work with writers, but the following guidelines may help you to better understand how we function as well as some of our limitations.

Tutoring Times

Writers can only make a 60-minute appointment using our online scheduler, WC Online. We recognize that 60-minutes may seem like too much time and/or may be overwhelming. However, this requirement is to protect both your scheduled appointment time (for example, in cases where figuring out technology or wifi issues may take up 10-minutes in the beginning of the session) and to protect our tutors from fatigue. Further, the length of the actual session will be determined by what you bring to work on with the tutor (that is, you do not need to use the entire allotted hour appointment).

Writers are encouraged to only bring 4-6 pages of writing at a time. If you bring a longer piece of writing, we would strongly encourage you to have a smaller section that you'd like to work on. We believe that tutoring is best when the writer and tutor are working together to think through smaller sections.

Appointment Limitations

Generally, writers can only make two appointments per week through our online scheduling system, WC Online. Our goal is to help you understand how your piece of writing works and how you can revise it and grow as a writer. Growing as a writer involves reading and revising your writing on your own as well as working with a tutor; thus, we hope that the maximum of two appointments per week will encourage further time reading and thinking about your writing on your own. Further, we are a limited resource and want to ensure as many people as possible can make appointments.

We encourage writers to work with multiple tutors, rather than only making appointments with the same tutor for every session. We believe that getting multiple perspectives on your writing will prove more useful.

We encourage writers to cancel WC Online appointments no less than 8 hours before the scheduled appointment. Canceling your appointment, when necessary, is a courtesy both to the tutor and to other writers who may wish to make an appointment at that time. If you miss three appointments (without canceling them), your WC Online account will be automatically disabled.

Tutoring Pedagogy

Our tutors are trained to create a collaborative tutoring experience that is interactive and conversational. They will ask you questions about your larger argument and purpose in writing, how you're using evidence and analyzing, and how you're understanding particular vocabulary or language choices. We believe that writers learn about writing through both doing the work (writing, revising) and through talking about their writing and noticing the effect of certain choices. Thus, to get the most out of a tutoring session, we hope that you will come prepared to have a rich and engaging conversation about your writing!

Tutor Agency

The CWC also honors each tutor's agency to make decisions that represent a negotiation of what is best for both the tutor and the writer. This policy acknowledges that both tutors and writers are complex humans with varying needs when it comes to reading, writing, and communicating. That means, your tutor may ask you to print out your essay because that's how they read best, or a tutor may be willing to work with you for an extra half hour or they may need to be done immediately when their tutoring shift is done. Tutors, like writers, have individual reading and tutoring preferences as well as varying comfort levels with different types of situations--we encourage them, like you, to make purposeful decisions that all parties are comfortable with. While this policy does result in a variety of different practices and approaches to different situations, we hope that you'll respect each tutor's requests and sense of what they need, as they will also respect your choices about what you need.

WC Online Scheduling System

We use WC Online ( https://cornell.mywconline.net/ ) for scheduling appointments and keeping track of the number of appointments we have each semester. If you came to the Writing Centers without an appointment, it is likely a tutor created a WC Online account for you in order to track the appointment. If you are trying to login to WC Online and can’t, simply use your Cornell email address and click on “Reset your password.” The “Reset your password” link is right below the login button.

Proof of Appointments

Generally, we do not support tutors (who are peers) providing teachers with proof of an appointment. Since we believe that peers are equals and tutors do not have power over their peers, tutors should not be asked to sign or authorize any documents that prove writers attended a session. However, writers can request that tutors email the writers their client report from, which the writer can use as they please. Client report forms are, generally, an internal document that summarizes and reflects on the tutoring session.

Online Tutoring

How online tutoring works .

Online tutoring is by appointment only, so to get started, writers need to register for an account and make an appointment.

Our online appointments offer the option for video-conferencing or text-box chatting , and in order to “show up” for an appointment, you simply need to login to the schedule , click on your appointment, and then click the yellow link that says “START OR JOIN CONVERSATION.” Our tutors will be prepared to help you navigate technology issues—they will email you to check-in and offer help should you have any trouble “showing up.”

Check-out this video demo for how to make and "show up" for an appointment:

Though we work hard to ensure smooth online appointments, due to the regularity of technical and other unforeseen issues, we ask all writers to make hour-long appointments. If technology/internet issues do arise or you're struggling to "show up," don't worry--our tutors are trained to reach out and help and they all have a back-up plan!

Become a Tutor

Interested in becoming a tutor here are some things our past tutors have valued in the work: .

"As a writing tutor, I enjoy the one-on-one conversations and brainstorming sessions I have with writers from various disciplines. This experience has challenged me to not only quickly learn and dive into a topic that I am not too familiar with, but also tailor my advice to the writers' specific needs and goals. I have become a better writer and critical thinker thanks to this job!" - Sichun Liu

"Being a writing tutor at WC makes me realize writing is not a solitary activity. It gives you access to the workings of so many brilliant minds." - Qijia Yu

"It is incredibly satisfying to have a job as intellectually stimulating as being a Writing Tutor for the Knight Institute. As an international student studying mechanical engineering, I have worked with students of feminist studies, urban planning, music theory, English, and anthropology - to name a few. These interactions - where I get to learn as much as the students who come to the writing center - have allowed me to experience fully the breadth of a liberal arts university despite having a 'technical' major, and have greatly enriched my Cornell experience." - Emad Masroor

Why Tutor?

As the above quotes indicate, tutors find this work to be rewarding for a number a reasons: working with writers from across the disciplines, the intellectual engagement of tutoring, the collaboration, professional development around pedagogy and writing, and the community! We have a vibrant and diverse tutoring community that participates in on-going professional development activities. This work is generative, creative, and an excellent opportunity for students interested in communication, writing, education, and collaborative learning.

Our undergraduate and graduate writing tutors provide support for a diverse pool of writers at various stages of the drafting process for nearly any kind of writing project. We operate out of five campus locations to offer thirty- to sixty-minute individual meetings. During tutorials, writing tutors typically:

help writers get started with essays by reading and discussing a writing assignment, evaluating research material, or brainstorming an outline;
discuss ways to shape coherent arguments, make strong use of evidence, and work with appropriate citation conventions;
consider questions about depth of analysis, organization, thesis definition, audience expectations, paragraph development, stylistics, or sentence structure;
offer specific strategies for diverse writers navigating different parts of the writing process, including brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing;
support both native and non-native speakers of English to identify patterns among errors in grammar or usage;
and, help writers understand and address specific feedback from peers and teachers.

In short, writing tutors serve as responsive listeners and readers who can address questions about the writing process or about particular pieces of writing.

Job Descriptions

Writing centers tutor.

Tutors typically work 1-3 tutoring shifts a week. We currently have two tutoring shifts: 3:00-5:00pm or 7:00-10:00pm ET. Tutors usually work between 2-9 hours a week.
New tutors must complete a 7-week, 1-credit training course (WRIT 2101, see below for details). Tutor training is only held in the spring, and begins when the 7-week courses start, midway through the spring semester.
After completing the tutor training course (once hired), tutors are required to attend 4 (paid) staff meetings a semester. Staff meetings are usually at 5:30-6:30pm ET, on varying week nights. During these meetings, as a group, we discuss tutoring pedagogy and practice, workshop a variety of sample student writing, and reflect on tutoring experiences. Staff meetings deepen and extend the introduction to basic tutoring pedagogy and practice covered in WRIT 2101 (tutor training).
Tutors get paid an hourly rate, and there is often the bonus of snacks and cookies at events.

Positions for Advanced Tutors

Social media intern.

The Cornell Writing Centers have an instagram, facebook, and twitter account, as a method for promoting and connecting with writers across campus. We typically hire 1-2 trained Writing Center Tutors to run our social media for one academic year. Social media interns must regularly meet with Dr. Kate Navickas to plan and develop content and discuss different promotion strategies. This position offers the opportunity to gain some communication and promotion skills as well as to develop creative and engaging content. Typically, interns work .5-1 hours per week.

Requirements: Applicants must be trained Cornell Writing Center tutors to apply.
To apply: email Kate Navickas, [email protected], with an explanation of your interest in the work and a resume.

Knight Writing Mentor

Writing mentors are experienced CWC tutors who meet with assigned students for one or two hours each week for the duration of a semester or year to develop effective and sustainable writing habits and strategies. Undergraduate and graduate students can work up to 6 hours per week to support writers enrolled in First-Year Writing Seminars or other writing-intensive courses, and students working on substantial writing projects, like honors theses. Writing Mentors meet regularly for reflection on pedagogy and practice with Dr. Kate Navickas. Though mentors may start tutoring right away, they still are required to attend the same 7-week paid tutor training that new undergraduate writing center tutors do (this starts the week before spring break).

Graduate students, seniors, and current Writing Center tutors are encouraged to apply. Applications from juniors with relevant experience may also be considered.

Learn more and apply here

Writing Centers Assistant Director

The Writing Centers regularly hire graduate students for the role of assistant director. The work involves 5 hours of administrative work per week. The position includes tasks like reviewing tutor applications, participating in tutor interviews, conducting peer observations, analyzing Writing Center data, leading tutor staff meetings, teaching or co-facilitating tutor training, and other necessary administrative work. Assistant directors meet regularly with the director, Kate, to select administrative experiences that align with the program’s needs and the TA’s interests as well as to reflect on the professional value of the experiences.

How to Apply

All tutor applicants must be matriculated Cornell students.

Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate tutoring applications are only reviewed in the spring
Prerequisite: Successful completion of at least one First-Year Writing Seminar
Complete this application form
DEADLINE: Second Friday of February by noon. Spring 2024 deadline: Friday, February 9th.

Application Process: Applications will be reviewed after the spring deadline. A select number of applicants will be invited to sign-up for small-group interviews. The applicants who will be offered positions tutoring, will begin the 7-week tutor training course (WRIT 2101) after group interviews, roughly midway through the semester. Thus, the application and training process approximately takes a full semester. Newly hired tutors will begin tutoring during the exams period of the semester they get hired and trained. We hope to encourage tutors to apply early in their academic career and to continue tutoring throughout their time at Cornell.

WRIT 2101: Responding to Writing: Theory & Pedagogy (1 credit)

Course Description: This course introduces students to scholarship on writing pedagogy, requiring them to think critically about collaborative learning strategies, multilingual writing challenges, ethical considerations in peer tutoring, and the ways in which race and other facets of identity inform teaching and learning. The learning objectives include: develop an understanding of different theories of writing and the history of writing centers; practice reading and responding to a variety of different writing genres and student situations in ways that connect theory to practice; learn to question assumptions in specific pieces of writing, frameworks for writing, and in pedagogical interactions; self-reflect on individual writing processes, writing, and previous educational experiences; analyze the ways in which writer and tutor identities affect pedagogical interactions and learn strategies for equitable and ethical tutoring; develop confidence in suggesting interventions for other writers at various stages of their writing processes; and, gain flexibility in utilizing a variety of strategies for fostering writer agency and growth.

Spring 2022 Tutor Training Course Details:

Starts the week of March 13
Held weekly, on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays at 4:30-6:00pm (course day will be determined by selected applicant schedules)
Knight Institute staff will enroll hired tutors
Non-tutors interested in taking the course can email requests of interest to Dr. Navickas, [email protected]

Graduate Students

Prerequisite: successful completion of Writing 7100 or previous tutoring or teaching experiences.
Submit a CV and letter of interest detailing relevant employment or coursework to Dr. Kate Navickas, [email protected]
DEADLINE: Applications accepted on a rolling basis.

CWC for Teachers

The Cornell Writing Centers (CWC) can help support you and your students through classroom visits and workshops, writing guides, and the Essay Response & Consultation Program. We are always excited to work with you to develop activities, workshops, or resources that are specific to your course and writing needs.

The CWC relies on support and promotion from faculty and instructors across campus; thus, we hope that you will continue to support our services and your students by including the CWC blurb (below) on your syllabus or Canvas site and by periodically reminding students about the work we do.

The Cornell Writing Centers Syllabus Blurb

The Cornell Writing Centers (CWC) provide support for individuals at any stage of the writing process. It is a free resource available to everyone on campus—faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students—for nearly any kind of writing project : applications, presentations, lab reports, essays, papers, and more. Tutors (trained peers) serve as responsive listeners and readers who can address questions about the writing process or about particular pieces of writing. They can also consider questions of confidence, assignment expectations, critical reading, analytic thought, and imagination. All writing tutors are also trained to work with multilingual writers writing in English and to help support application materials. Walk-ins are welcome , or you can make an appointment here: https://cornell.mywconline.net/

Request Bookmarks, Stickers, or Posters

To promote the CWC, we typically print promotional bookmarks, stickers, and posters each semester. All students in first-year writing seminars receive either a CWC bookmark or sticker each semester. If you would like us to send promotional materials to you for your course or to send posters to be hung in your building, please email Director Kate Navickas, [email protected].

Advice for Encouraging Students to Use the CWC

Making an appointment at the Cornell Writing Centers can be intimidating for students. When you talk about the value of tutoring, it helps to explain to students what they can expect. Here are some points we hope you might emphasize:

Tutoring is not only for struggling writers, it's beneficial for all writers. All writers grow from sharing their work, talking about it, and getting feedback on it.
Tutoring is interactive and collaborative because this leads to deeper learning and growth. Writers can expect tutors to ask them questions about their writing, ideas, understanding of the assignment, and hopes for a piece of writing. Tutors may also encourage writers to do some brainstorming, reading, and writing with them during the session as a way to get started on the work.
Tutors will help with language-issues, grammar, syntax, and editing; however, they will do this in a collaborative manner. That is, a tutor will not silently line-edit someone's essay. The goal of tutoring is learning, which means they may ask questions about word choice, vocabulary, intention, and sentence-structure in order to help clarify meaning and discuss possible corrections. The expectation, though, is that the writer will be involved and in-control of their own writing.
Tutors are highly trained undergraduate students who are incredibly friendly and love talking about writing!

Requiring Tutoring Appointments

The Cornell Writing Centers do not officially support requiring students to attend a tutoring session. There are several reasons why it may not be best to require students to get tutored. On a logistical level, we usually have two tutors for each shift at each location; requiring tutoring can lead to one location being overwhelmed, which isn’t great for either tutors or students. On a more pedagogical level, tutoring is primarily about fostering writer agency—that is, tutors are trained to help writers become better writers through the writer’s own work, efforts, writing and thinking. This type of learning environment works best when students make the choice for themselves to come to the Writing Centers. Sometimes, when students are required, they are resistant to feedback or less interested in discussing their work or actively engaging with their writing, which makes tutoring less effective.

While we discouraging requiring tutoring appointments, we do understand the value of giving students a slightly stronger form of motivation. We often hear stories of students who have had meaningful learning experiences through a tutoring session but would have never made an appointment if a teacher had not encouraged them to do so. Instead of requiring tutoring, though, we recommend offering a writing center appointment as extra credit. If you choose to do this, here is some advice:

Make sure you review the above recommendations on what to expect from a tutoring session with all students. In particular, students need to expect an interactive and collaborative experience.
Build in enough time so that students have a week or two to make an appointment. When students are given an extra credit assignment, but only have one weekend to get tutored, our locations get overwhelmed and students get frustrated.
After you visit the Cornell Writing Centers, write a 250-word reflection on the experience. You might consider any of the following questions to guide your writing: What were the most and least successful aspects of the session? What specific writing strategies did you and the tutor discuss? What specific revisions did you and the tutor discuss? How was the tutor's feedback similar to or different from the feedback you have received from classmates or me this semester? What do you plan to do differently after this tutoring session? Why?
Tutors are not allowed to sign off on a student’s appointment. Undergraduate student tutors (who are peers) are not prepared to police, monitor, or evaluate students. So we strongly discourage teachers for asking for proof in the form of a signed slip of paper, etc. What a Writing Center tutor can do, however, is to send the writer a copy of their client report form. All tutors write up a summary of each session for our records, which they are allowed to email to the student. The student, then, is allowed to do whatever they want with that client report form (including sending it to you).

Writing Guides

The CWC has developed a select number of writing guides (with downloadable PDF handouts) on common writing skills. While these writing guides are written for student audiences, we encourage teachers to share them directly with students or to use them to develop in-class activities related to specific assignments. Further, we are happy to meet with teachers to discuss specific writing assignments or challenges and develop course-specific writing guides. For more information on course-specific writing guides, please contact Director Kate Navickas, [email protected].

Classroom Visits & Workshops

The CWC can also help foster productive and engaging small group writing workshops in your class! Kate Navickas, Director of the Cornell Writing Centers, along with some tutors, can schedule classroom visits that promote effective peer responses around higher order concerns, like focus, organization, the development of ideas, thesis sentences, using sources, etc. Tutors will work with and alongside small groups of students as they read and respond to each others' writing.

Workshops are limited by our schedules and capacity. When requesting one, we typically ask for:

Two weeks notice
Course days, times, and location
Syllabus copy
Assignment that students will be working on
Teacher's understanding of writing skills to focus on

Contact Kate Navickas for more details.

Essay Response Consultation

The Essay Response Consultation enables instructors to sit down one on one with tutors to talk about student writing. Because tutors have a great deal of experience in reading student essays and teacher comments, they can usefully support instructors who want to deepen and extend strategies for commenting on student work. Instructors can work with tutors to:

review a set of papers on which the instructor has already commented.
discuss a set of papers when the instructor is in the process of providing response and evaluation.

Meet the Staff

The Cornell Writing Center tutors are a diverse group of primarily undergraduate students from across the disciplines. They are highly trained in tutoring pedagogy, completing both a required half-semester course and ongoing bi-monthly professional development. In addition to their training, tutors share a love of writing and a commitment to collaborative learning. If you're interested in joining our community, learn more about applying to become a tutor here.

Kate Navickas

Cornell Writing Centers Director, Senior Lecturer

Courses and Programs
Multilingual Writing Support
Simple Advice for Writing
Writing Resource: Introductions and Conclusions
Writing Resource: Strong Thesis Statements
Writing Resource: Organizing Papers
Writing Resources: Developing Cohesion
Reverse Outlining
Citation Analysis
Writing Resource: Evaluating Sources
Writing Resource: Personal Statements
Reflective Writing
Teaching Support
Faculty and Staff

Creative Writing

The Creative Writing Program offers workshop courses in fiction and poetry writing, and sponsors the Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series during the academic year. Readings and receptions are free and open to the public.

More than 500 undergraduates enroll in the program’s courses annually, many from schools outside the College of Arts & Sciences. English majors may concentrate in creative writing; other majors may pursue a minor in creative writing. Classes open to undergraduates throughout the university are Creative Writing, Narrative Writing and Poetry Writing, and Advanced Narrative Writing & Advanced Poetry Writing.

The program also offers an MFA degree . MFA graduate students organize the First-Year MFA Reading Series, and graduating MFA students hold a reading of their works in the spring.

For more information, contact: [email protected] .

Michael Koch in the EPOCH office with MFA students

The award-winning national literary journal EPOCH is published by the Department of Literatures in English and the Creative Writing Program. EPOCH publishes fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and graphic art. In continuous publication since 1947, the magazine is edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program.

Submission guidelines, advertising rates, an archive of past issues, and featured poetry and prose from the most recent issue are available at the magazine’s full site, www.epochliterary.com . The past ten years of EPOCH are also available to buy as individual issues in the EPOCH shop, along with subscriptions.