Our Policies
The GW Writing Center is an open, welcoming, professional environment within which members of the GW community can receive dedicated attention to their writing and research projects.
The GW Writing Center holds the International Writing Centers Association's policy on diversity that writing centers "inclusively serve all students, including members of underrepresented groups such as people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and people with a range of abilities, economic needs, and linguistic expression."
To best serve the university community, the Writing Center maintains the following policies and procedures:
Appointment Availability and Access
You may make appointments of either 30 or 60 minutes. To allow for sessions to have the greatest effect, students are limited to reserving up to 60 minutes for appointments in a 24 hour period.
The schedule fills quickly. You may make day-of appointments by telephone for available sessions, but you are encouraged to schedule your conference online at least two days in advance and, during midterms and finals, one week in advance.
Members of the GW community can schedule up to three tutoring sessions per week.
If you are a non-native speaker, you are encouraged to work with the Language Center's Writing Support Program, which offers specialized tutors trained to work with students from non-English backgrounds on their writing.
Cancellations, Late, and Missed Appointments
We ask that you respect the high demand for appointments and cancel any reserved appointment you're not able to attend by at least 24 hours in advance. You can cancel either through the online system or by calling the Center at 202.994.3765.
If you are more than 10 minutes late to your appointment, that meeting time may be reassigned to a student waiting for a walk-in session.
Students who miss three appointments in a semester without advance notice will no longer be able to reserve sessions in advance for the duration of that term. Walk-in appointments will still be available on an as-available basis.
Professionalism and Writer/Tutor Responsibilities
The Writing Center operates as a mutually respectful, interactive working environment between writers and tutors.
To that end, writers:
- bring to the conference any relevant materials, such as assignment prompts, brainstorming ideas, drafts, research notes, or professor's comments;
- participate actively in the conference by reading their work aloud, composing new writing, revising existing work, and discussing complex ideas in conversation with their tutors;
- recognize the time allotments of a given session; longer papers or works in early drafting stages may require more than a single session for development and revision;
- offer writing that meets ethical standards, including those of the University Office of Academic Integrity. Plagiarized writing or work misrepresented as a students' own will not be discussed in conference. (We are, however, happy to work with student writers on matters of ethical citation and documentation on drafts that include research and outside sources.); and
- honor the intellectual environment for all participants in the Center's work; the Writing Center reserves the right to end sessions and ask disruptive or disrespectful students to leave.
Tutors, in turn,
- treat each writer who comes through the door with courtesy and individual attention;
- bring specialized, pedagogical training to help tutees improve as writers;
- engage in conversation to establish, and then work to satisfy, agreed-upon goals for each session;
- attend to overall writing development; tutors do not offer grading evaluations on specific assignments nor are they responsible for grades received on a given piece of writing;
- partner with a writer to identify patterns of error and help build a deeper understanding of grammar and syntax; tutors will not proofread, line-edit, or "correct" papers; and
- maintain the confidentiality of all tutees; we will not share information with professors without prior approval.
Group Projects and Collaborative Writing
The Writing Center is happy to provide assistance with group writing projects. Because tutors can only provide assistance on writing actually authored by the writer(s) attending the conference, the Center encourages all collaborators to find a common meeting time to schedule a group conference. Indicate names of group members in the Comments field of the online scheduling system.
Take-home exams can only be addressed in a conference with prior permission of a professor. Individual instructors may not allow outside assistance on exams, so it is your responsibility to talk to your professor about his or her policy. Please have your instructor send an e-mail to gwriter@gwu.edu in advance of your visit if permission is granted for conferencing through the Writing Center.
The above policies and procedures have been developed in collaboration with student writers, tutors, faculty and administrators to strengthen the GW Writing Center’s commitment to ethical writing practices and to provide clear expectations of the Center’s mission in practice. Feel free to contact the Writing Center director if you have any questions at gwriter@gwu.edu.
Gelman Library