Students sit down with a tutor and read their paper aloud.
Hearing the paper aloud allows the student to take a step back from it. Students often make their own corrections as they read, muttering, “That doesn’t sound right.” The tutor does not mark the student’s paper. If there are grammatical and punctuation problems, the tutor should explain the general pattern of the problem, and allow the student to go through and fix the mistakes. In ideal circumstances, the conversation moves beyond mechanical errors to bigger issues of flow, clarity, organization, and the strength of the argument. 

The student directs the tutoring process.
The tutor asks the student what he or she would like to work on. Often the student has a clear idea what this is. The student, for example, wants help integrating an earlier assignment, which was an article summary, into an analytical paper. If the student doesn’t know what to work on, the tutor will make a suggestion. The tutors are trained to pick a focus, maybe two or three things, instead of overwhelming the student with areas that need improvement. If the instructor gives the student clear guidelines—“Go to the Writing Center for help using quotes from the novel to prove your argument”—this helps everyone. 

Tutoring does not produce perfect papers.
Or even better papers, necessarily. If the student is engaged and motivated, then tutoring will probably be a big help. If students don’t know what to work on, or show up in the Writing Center because they have been required to, the results are often negligible. Often students come in with a paper ten minutes before it is due. It’s too late. But the student still protests to the instructor, “But I went to the Writing Center!”  

Tutoring takes time.
A typical drop-in tutoring session takes at least a half hour. A full hour is often not enough time to get all the way through a major writing project. Encourage your students to come in to the Writing Center early in the writing process—with a draft, not a finished product—and to make several visits. 

Tutoring helps good writers.
Students often feel reluctant to come in with an assignment they are struggling with, as they feel the Writing Center is only for poor writers. This is reinforced when only deficient writers are referred to the Writing Center. Good writers can be pressed to move to a higher level of competence by getting lots of feedback on their work. And even the best writers get stuck on a particular assignment, or have trouble in an area outside their expertise. Tutoring provides thoughtful feedback. Good writers can make good use of this.