Sessions and Policies

Who may use the Writing Center?

If you are a member of the George Mason community--a student, a staff member, faculty, or alumni--you may use the Writing Center's free services. Tutees must have a current or former Mason student ID number to use the Writing Center and must register for our scheduling software system before they can make an appointment.

When scheduling your appointment, please be sure to specify the location most convenient to you in the drop down list of schedules. The scheduler includes our email-based schedule, the Online Writing Lab (OWL).

In a typical face-to-face Writing Center session you and the tutor will:

Review the assignment. The tutor will ask you about the purpose of the piece of writing you have brought in. If you are working on an assignment for a course, please remember to bring the assignment prompt.

Read through the piece of writing. It is our preference to have either you or the tutor read the assignment out loud. Reading aloud will help you to catch lapses in organization or areas where the ideas are less clear as well as help you to discover smaller mistakes such as typos or grammatical errors. If you have signed up for a session to help you brainstorm your ideas, your tutor will have a conversation with you about the purpose of the assignment and help you develop and sort through your ideas.

Set your goals for the session. You and your tutor will set the agenda for the session together. It is helpful if you arrive with an idea of what you would like to work on, be it organization, your argument (sometimes called a thesis), or smaller sentence-level concerns. Once you've reviewed the assignment and read through the piece of writing it might become clear to the tutor that something requires attention that you had not mentioned.

Have a conversation about your work. The tutor will pose several questions to you and make observations about what seems to require attention as related to the goals you and your tutor set together as well as any observations the tutor might have in addition. From this conversation you and the tutor will determine what you'll need to do for revision moving forward with this assignment.

Work on strategies for effective writing. Your tutor might recommend strategies or provide resources for you to take with you to help you both with the assignment at hand and with future work. We aim to improve you as a writer, not just the current assignment. This way you walk away from the session with some helpful skills and strategies you can practice on your own at home.

A Note for Online Writing Lab (OWL) appointments
Please note that we aim to have the Online Writing Lab (OWL) appointments mimic the face-to-face appointments as much as possible, even though they take place over email. Please make sure to inform the tutor of your assignment and your goals for the session (what you would like the tutor to focus on). The tutor will review the writing assignment and prompt for 45 minutes and make observations, pose questions, and suggest strategies for the improvement of your writing which they will return to you at the end of the session block you reserved for your appointment.

Important Writing Center Policies

• You may book up to TWO appointments per week.
• You may book up to TEN appointments per term (this includes sessions at any of our four physical locations and our virtual location, the Online Writing Lab).
• You may not book back-to-back sessions. The reasoning for this is so that you have time in between your sessions to work on revisions deemed necessary in your first 45 minute session.
• Sessions are 45 minutes and start on the half hour.
• If you are more than ten minutes late for your appointment you lose the exclusive right to that appointment and the session may be given to someone else.
• After TWO MISSED appointments (or what we call "no-shows") you are prohibited from booking further appointments for the current term. If you have scheduled an OWL appointment and have not submitted your writing assignment to owl@gmu.edu in advance of the session you will be counted as a no-show.
• You may schedule appointments for work on your own writing (not the writing of your peers) unless you are working on a group project and all members are present.
• If you are working on a collaborative assignment the tutor can only help with the part of the assignment that you wrote.
• Tutors are not permitted to help you with take-home essay exams unless you have written permission from your intstructor, or the instructor has contacted the Writing Center directly.
• Tutors are not permitted to help you with writing that has legal or financial implications or is related to an appeal of a university decision.
• Tutors are prepared to help you with writing personal statements for fellowships, jobs, or graduate school; however, some schools and programs do not permit any outside assistance with the writing of your personal statement. It is the tutee's responsibility to determine whether or not tutoring is permitted. The George Mason University Writing Center is not liable if the tutee violates such a policy.

The Writing Center is NOT an Editing Service

Please remember that the Writing Center is not an editing or proofreading service. We will work with you to improve your own proofreading and editing skills, but we don't simply correct mistakes for you. We want to help you learn to become your own best proofreader and editor.

Confidentiality

The Writing Center believes that a collaborative relationship between instructors, tutors, and tutees is the most conducive to writing improvement. We do also respect the confidentiality of every tutorial session. Should an instructor inquire as to the content of tutorial sessions we will not provide this information unless the tutee has given permission for us to share it. All tutees are asked if they are comfortable sharing information when they sign up for sessions.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a difficult issue for any writing center. Our tutors generally assume that the writing brought to them is the tutee's own. If there are concerns with how and when research is cited, tutors do point out these concerns and explain the necessity for correct and thorough citations. Tutors are allowed to report suspected plagiarism to the tutee's professor if the tutee has agreed that the Writing Center can share session content when they sign up for sessions. Otherwise the tutor will not report suspected plagiarism to anyone outside of the Writing Center. If a tutor feels that a paper is clearly not the work of the tutee present for tutoring and the tutee resists reworking the potentially plagiarized elements of the assignment, that tutor may cancel the session at his or her sole discretion.