Before you use Writing and Speaking Tutorial Services it can be difficult to conceptualize the kind of service we provide. On this page you can learn more about our mission, the principles that guide our mission, and some frequently asked questions (FAQ)about our daily operations.
Mission
Our mission is to support NC State undergraduate students who are working to improve their writing and speaking skills. To us that means providing students with choices to make about their writing, or speaking.
How do you do that?
When you bring your writing, or speaking, project to us we can act as your audience, helping you make sure what you want to say is what comes across on your page, or in your speeach. Using us as a guide to how your paper, or presentation, will be received by your audience allows you to make informed decisions about how to organize your ideas to make them as clear as possible. The assignment you bring to WSTS is a window to you as a writer, or speaker, and the feedback you get in a WSTS session will absolutely help you with the current project, but is also meant to make you a better writer, or speaker, over all.
What happens during a session?
A WSTS session is a conversation about your writing or presentation. You will sit down with a consultant, a fellow NCSU Student, who will first ask you many questions about the assignment, the work you've already done, your goals for the project, and your goal for the session. The more the consultant knows about what you are working on, and your goals, the better the consultant will be as your test audience member.
Next, either you, or the consultant, will read your paper out loud. It sounds crazy, but it really does help! Hearing what you've written out loud helps you to identify errors that you might not catch while you read because your brain often fills in what you meant to say on a page rather than what is actually written there. (Think about all the times you found a missing word, or the wrong "there," "their," or "they're" after you'd turned in the paper.)
As you, or the consultant, reads through your paper, the consultant will occasionally pause to ask you a question, or make an observation. Once you've talked through the issue, the consultant will give you time to make some notes on your paper. It's important for you to make the notes on your paper because you are the one who will have to go back to those notes when you sit down to work on your revision. You should be able to read, and make sense of, your own notes.
At the end of your session the consultant will help you set up a plan for revision. When you leave WSTS you should have a good idea of where to go next with your work.
Principles
These are the principles that guide our mission to support undergraduate writers and speakers.
- Our aim is to improve individual writers and speakers.
Nearly all suggestions and strategies can be used in future writing and speaking situations. We want to help you improve your current project, and the next one.
- Writing and speaking is a series of choices.
We want to provide choices for a writer, or speaker, to make; therefore we do not write on, or "correct" a visitors paper or speech. We offer you suggestions about what works, and what does not, for us as your audience. The final choice about any revisions remains yours.
- Writing and speaking problems are solvable.
We help visitors to identify patterns of error and manageable points of revision to help them solve their own problems and become more skilled writers, and speakers, in the process.
- By helping visitors to analyze assignments and recognize disciplinary writing and speaking conventions, they become more flexible writers and speakers within academia.
- Writers need readers. Speakers need listeners.
We provide the greatest assistance to writers and speakers by simply being an audience member.
- Consultants do not critique instructors, methods, assignments, personalities, and/or grading policies. They also do not speculate about the grade a writer, or speaker, may earn.
For more information check out or FAQ
Happenings
WSTS is closed for the year.
See you in August!
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