Written Feedback Appointment Form

Before requesting a Written Feedback appointment please READ THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS carefully:

Create a Writing Center Account

In order for us to assign you a Written Feedback appointment you must have a Writing Center account.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER 

Making a Written Feedback Appointment

To make a Written Feedback appointment, please read all of the following sections, and then fill out the “Written Feedback Appointment Form” below and submit it. Upload your draft as a .doc or .docx file. Please also upload a copy of your assignment or writing prompt if you have one.

Please note that submitting a request form is not a guarantee of an appointment. For example, we do not offer sessions during university breaks.  Once submitted, your tutor will read your work on the day of your appointment, paying particular attention to the goals and concerns you’ve articulated. They will respond to your writing and you’ll receive their feedback in a specified window of time.

This service is asynchronous (meaning writers do not have to be present for the session). When submitting the form below, please carefully consider when you will need to receive the feedback, including time for yourself to revise.

Filling out the Appointment Form

Since Written Feedback sessions are asynchronous and don’t allow for a real-time discussion between tutor and writer, it is crucial that you provide details about your assignment, your writing, and your goals/hopes for the session up-front when you make the appointment. As such, we request that you fill out the entire “Written Feedback Appointment Form” in detail:

  • Describe your assignment, project, or other writing task. Be clear and detail-oriented. The more information you give your tutor, the more targeted and helpful their feedback will be. You are strongly encouraged to upload or link to assignments, writing prompts, scoring rubrics, or other relevant information.
  • To make Written Feedback sessions more collaborative, we encourage you to include a few questions, comments, or highlighted sections in your draft. Microsoft Word has a “comment” feature that allows you to leave remarks directly on the document;  tutors can then respond directly to your targeted comments, creating a dialogue that can be quite productive. That said, please keep the 45-minute constraint in mind, and limit your questions and goals to 2-3 areas of concern.
  • Remember that our tutors only have 45 minutes to read and respond to your draft. Tutors can realistically only give feedback on submissions of 6 pages or less. If your submission is longer, please choose a section of the text for your tutor to focus on. 
  • Please let us know about any learning or tech accommodations or needs! (For example: sans serif fonts, file formatting, etc.) We are beyond happy to make sure we keep them in mind as we respond.

Receiving your Feedback

When the tutor has finished the Written Feedback session, the feedback will be returned via WCOnline in both in a Session Report (a concise overview of what was accomplished), and also in a new copy of your draft. This new copy will include the tutor’s comments (both marginal and holistic). It is recommended that you read the Session Report and the in-draft feedback together.

As you read through your tutor’s feedback, we encourage you to take your own notes and jot down responses to the comments they left. This will help continue the collaborative back-and-forth dialogue between writer and tutor, even in an asynchronous session. You may love some of their feedback, and you may disagree with or have a different approach to resolving other portions. Both can be productive for you: make note of these convergences and divergences and fold them into your revision process. 

Please keep in mind that a tutor’s feedback is based on the information, goals, and concerns from your Appointment Form and that they have only one 45 minute session to review and give feedback on your writing, typically focusing on 2-3 primary concerns articulated by the writer.

Written Feedback Policies

Our Written Feedback modality is new, it's being researched, and we’re still working hard to find the best ways to serve you as writers. Our central goal in offering this service is to increase access to writers who may not otherwise be able to use the Writing Center. We recognize that many of our students have busy lives, work multiple jobs, have unreliable internet connections, or even live in different time zones around the world. Others have disabilities, impairments, or preferences that make synchronous tutoring less accessible. We want to provide a variety of options for writers to collaborate with tutors, and this is one of many ways we’re trying to broaden access.

Because this is a new service, there are limited numbers of Written Feedback appointments available. As a result, we are limiting writers to only ONE Written Feedback appointment per week. You can book your Written Feedback session up to 2 weeks in advance. If you need to cancel, please do so at least one day prior to the scheduled appointment.

The file(s) you upload to WCOnline must be .doc or .docx files. We will not work with other types of files. In order to upload, files must be 5MB or smaller. If you are working with another file format or extension, like Google Docs or .PDF, please convert to .doc or .docx format. In most programs, this conversion function will be under the “File” menu. In Google Docs, you can download your Google doc as a Word doc by clicking the “File” menu, selecting “Download” and choosing “Microsoft Word (docx.).” In Adobe Acrobat you can convert a .PDF to a .doc by clicking the “File” menu, selecting “Export To” and choosing “Microsoft Word.”

NOTE: The Written Feedback service does not tutor assignments for FYE courses (you'll need to make a face-to-face or online appointment to get credit).