1. Where are you located, and what are your hours?
2. How do I make an appointment?
3. Why can't I just drop off my paper?
4. What should I bring with me to my appointment?
5. How do I use the online tutoring service?
6. What qualifications do the tutors have?

We are located in Knutti 114, and tutors meet with students Monday through Friday between 8:00 am and 4:30 pm, depending on what their own class schedules allow.

Read on for more detail.

We are located in Room 114 of Knutti Hall. This building is on the southeast corner of High Street and King Street. This means that Knutti Hall is on the east side of campus, near White Hall, Reynolds Hall, Snyder Hall and the Byrd Science Center. The building is wheelchair accessible. The automated door and ramp are located on the south side of the building. After you enter the ground floor, you can find the elevator on the north side of the radio station, across from the vending machines. The Writing Center is on the first floor. We are directly across from the elevator as it opens to the first floor.

We are usually open Mondays through Friday 8:00 am to 4:30 pm.  Sometimes our tutors will  have classes at the same hour, making it difficult to schedule with a tutor for some of these hours during the day.  We regret this, but our tutors are also Shepherd University students, and we have to work around their class schedules. To help accommodate your needs, we also offer online tutoring, which requires 48 hours for a reply but is open for submissions around the clock. In addition, we sometimes offer tutoring from 4 to 6 pm in Knutti 206, the Computer Learning Center. You can check the schedule book for any tutoring offered there.

We are sorry, but we do not make appointments over the phone or by email. You need to look at the schedule book located near the door inside the Academic Support Center, Knutti 114.

You can make one 30 minute appointment per day. You can make two consecutive appointments if you have a diagnosed learning disability or if English is your second language. Please talk with the Writing Center director, Karen Austin before making two 30 minute appointments in a row. You can find Prof. Austin by calling her at (304) 876-5221, by sending her an email at kaustin@shepherd.edu, by checking her office hours at http://webpages.shepherd.edu/kaustin, by stopping by Knutti 114 where her office is located.

Even if you have a long research paper, the tutors can only meet with you for one 30 minute tutoring slot. Research shows that if tutors work with student for longer periods of time, the student becomes a passive learner and the tutor starts doing too much of the work. Our intent is to teach you how to improve your own writing, not to improve your paper for you. If you have several writing concerns (and most people do), you should try to meet with the same tutor once or twice a week during the entire semester.

We are not an editing or proofreading service. We are a teaching center. Your tutor's goal is to teach you how to write more effectively. Each tutorial should focus on one or two writing skills. As you continue to meet with tutors over the semester, you can develop greater skill as a writer. Because we are a teaching center, you should try to schedule your appointments early in your writing process so we can help you with a range of writing concerns and not just with correct usage and punctuation.

Bring a copy of your writing assignment. If your teacher did not type up the assignment, then bring the notes that you took when he or she gave the assignment verbally in class. Consider bringing your textbook. If you have a draft of your paper, you should bring that. You can visit a tutor if you are still working on generating ideas, so don't worry if you don't have anything written yet. The tutor can help you brainstorm and outline as ways of getting started.

Our online writing lab is called ShepOWL. Visit the website http://www.shepherd.edu/scwcweb/tutorform.htm to learn about submitting your paper to ShepOWL. In order for the tutors to receive payment for tutoring, we need you to answer some questions when you give us your paper. These questions are located on the same webpage listed above.

You can send a paper as an attachment to scwcweb@shepherd.edu, but please include in your email your name, major, year in school, teachers name, class name, due date, and a brief description of the assignment. Sometimes we have trouble opening attachments, so if your paper does not have a lot of formatting features (such as tabs), then just cut-and-paste your paper into the dialog box as the link above directs you.

You need to submit your paper to the online tutoring service at least three days before your paper is due. We have a small staff, and we can only promise to reply within 48 hours. Then you need a day to incorporate our suggestions. We try to reply in less than 24 hours, but we usually only have one or two tutors working one hour on ShepOWL per day. Also, we often get an overwhelming amount of submissions around midterms and final exams. Again, we have a small staff, and we sometimes cannot meet all the requests during these deadlines, so try to submit your paper early.

The tutors are juniors and seniors are strong writers from a variety of disciplines. Before they can join our staff, they take a semester-long course English 377: Peer Tutoring and Composition Theory. This course helps the tutors learn the skills and the theories necessary to help other students improve their writing. If you are interested in becoming a tutor, you need to complete English 102, 103 or 104 before enrolling in English 377, which is offered each fall semester.