An orientation is a great way to introduce your class to the Writing Center and what we have to offer. Our staff will visit your class—or you can visit the center—and provide information about how we can help your students. We can also tailor the presentation to your specific class needs.
Please schedule your orientation at least one week in advance.
Is there a writing-related topic you’d like to have presented to your class or group? Our staff can come to your class or event to lead a discussion on a variety of topics, from basic outlining skills to writing scholarship essays. We can tailor the presentation to your specific needs and time allotted, but please plan to be present while we are there.
Take advantage of the following presentations:
| APA, MLA, and/or Chicago citation style | Thesis statements |
| Formatting an academic paper | Writing scholarship essays |
| Outlining basics | Writing a college paper |
| Plagiarism | Writing a Personal Statement |
| Pre-writing | Writing timed essays |
| Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing |
If there is a topic you do not see on this list but would be interested in having presented to your class or group, please contact us and we can develop a presentation for you.
We respectfully request scheduling workshops in advance to ensure that we are able to provide you with the best service.
In general, a writing center is a beyond-the-classroom space where students can explore confusing or challenging educational issues through dialogic relationships, providing individualized, engaged responses to compositions (written and oral) for writers across the university in all disciplines and at all levels and stages of the composition process. This can be brainstorming ideas, discussing assignment requirements, or reviewing style and correctness, or similar. Just as the consulting relationship serves the student choosing to take part in it, consultants, too, learn to communicate better and improve their understanding of writing.
We work with all Purdue University Fort Wayne and Indiana University Fort Wayne students on the Fort Wayne campus, in all majors, freshmen to seniors, undergraduates and graduates, native and non-native English speakers. We consult on many types of assignments, including lab reports, speeches, presentations, and senior projects.
The Writing Center is not a proofreading or editing service, although we are happy to help writers with these skills. Our consultants work collaboratively with students and, after reading through the assignment and paper together, discuss the student’s concerns—which may include sentence-level errors like grammar errors, punctuation errors, and typos. Our goal is to support each student’s long-term development as a writer, acquiring new skills to use in future writing projects.
The Writing Center offers orientations to introduce our services to students. Typically, orientations are done in the library—though we can also come to your classroom—and last approximately 15–30 minutes. We give an overview of our services, walk your students through how to meet with us and what happens during a visit, and answer questions about what we do and how we do it.
For online classes, we also have an orientation video you can embed in your Brightspace course.
To request additional Writing Center services, contact us at writingcenter@pfw.edu with the particulars of your request (topics to be covered, size of the group, location, date, etc.). We will respond as soon as possible to discuss the event and confirm our participation.
There are many instructors who require consultations on assignments. If you choose to require your students to use the Writing Center, we request that you contact us at writingcenter@pfw.edu to let us know about the expected influx of students and to provide a copy of your assignment so that we can be prepared to assist your students. Also, please remember that many students use the center, especially as midterms and finals approach, so appointments can become scarce. Please ask your students to make their appointments early or put an early deadline on the Writing Center requirement, as students may not be able to meet with a consultant before the due date if they wait too long.
The Writing Center allows students to schedule one appointment per day per class, and up to three appointments per week per class.
*Please note: This is changing with the switch from TutorTrac to EAB Navigate for Fall 2024. When the Writing Center moves to EAB Navigate in Fall 2024, students will no longer receive an email with a summary of their visit. They--and you, the instructor--can view their appointments and appointment notes within Navigate.
The Writing Center does not provide lists of student users to instructors. What we offer as documentation of a consultation is the appointment summary that is emailed to the student’s PFW email account at the end of their appointment, or is included with the returned draft for our eConsult service. The consultation summary lists the class name, the appointment date, the appointment duration, and a summation of what was discussed in the appointment (online consultations are summarized in a PDF attachment). The student is responsible for giving the document to their instructor.
Should there be issue with the network or TutorTrac, students are also able to print out a visit history that documents their attendance for all tutoring-related activities. The student must log in to TutorTrac, click the Visit History button in the top left corner of their screen, and print the window that opens. They can also contact the Writing Center and ask to have their consultation summary resent.
We are working on a new option for this! More info will be available. Stay tuned!
