How to Prepare for a Tutoring Session
The Advanced Writing Centre can be most helpful if you are prepared for your meeting with a tutor. To be prepared, we ask that you bring along the following:
- Assignment sheet from your instructor. This is very important to bring because it tells your tutor the exact question or problem you are dealing with. For example, often it will have special instructions or information on document formatting that would be helpful for a tutor to know.
- A draft of what you have written and proofread. The Advanced Writing Centre can be helpful to you at any stage in the writing process, but we can be of most assistance when a student brings a draft of what they have written for the assignment or project. The draft can show us areas of strength and weakness. We are interested in keeping the strong parts of your writing but helping you with the weak parts. As a rule, the more you bring to us, the more we can help.
- All related class notes and/or handouts. Bringing notes and handouts from class also helps the tutor better understand your assignment and its needs.
- A list of questions you have about your work. Good tutoring sessions happen when students have very specific questions about their writing or their writing tasks. Your questions help to focus the meeting so the tutor can deal with those specific problems. Perhaps your paragraphs are short and underdeveloped; we can recommend various methods of development. Perhaps you do not know the format of a formal report; we can review this with you. In other words, the more focused your questions, the more effective our advice can be. Bring your questions about your own writing needs!