Preparing for Your Appointment

Whether you're just starting a writing assignment or fine-tuning your senior thesis, we are here to help you. The Writing Center can support your writing in any discipline.

As talented as our tutors are, we cannot resolve every issue with your writing in a single session. Through focusing tutoring sessions on a specific objective, we can use each session to advance your semester-long goal of becoming a better writer. Here are some suggestions for constructive session goals:

• organize your thoughts
• formulate a thesis
• understand assignment instructions
• brainstorm topic ideas
• cite sources
• identify recurring grammatical issues

To maximize your time with your tutor, we stress that you bring your assignment materials, including the assignment itself and relevant books, to each session.

Policies

You may make a maximum of one appointment per day and two appointments per week. All appointments are one-hour long.

Arrive on time to your session. If you are 5 minutes late, we consider your appointment missed, and we will offer your session to another student.

You may cancel your appointment online before your session. If you need to cancel, please do so 24 hours in advance. If you miss two appointments, without canceling in advance, in one semester, you will not be able to make Writing Center appointments for the remainder of the semester.

Students should be aware that they will be offered an anonymous post-session evaluation form to complete at the end of each appointment.

We have these policies because our tutoring sessions are limited, and we want to help as many people as possible.

Plagiarism

Stern College for Women regards plagiarism as a serious act of academic dishonesty. "Plagiarism" means presenting someone else's work as your own. Plagiarism can be an act of deliberate fraud, such as turning in as your own work a paper wholly or partially cut-and-pasted from the Internet, or it may be an inadvertent error, such as forgetting to cite a source whose ideas you paraphrased or meant to quote.

Instances of plagiarism are reported to the Dean and may become a part of your permanent file. Penalties for plagiarism range from receiving a failing grade on the essay to receiving a failing grade for the course, loss of honors, suspension or expulsion from school.

Whatever the penalty, being caught in an act of plagiarism can poison your relationship with your teacher, the department or the whole college, and may hurt your efforts to continue your education.

If you are confused about citing sources, speak to your teacher and visit the Writing Center.