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 and the principles that guide the service. For questions about our daily operations, please visit our frequently asked questions (FAQ) page.
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?
A: When you bring your writing, or speaking, project to us we can act as your audience. Our goal is to help you communicate your ideas clearly. Using us as a reference for how your paper, or presentation, will be received by your audience allows you to make informed decisions about organizing your ideas to make them as clear as possible. While the feedback you get in a WSTS session certainly helps you with your current project, it also makes you a better writer, or speaker, for your future projects as well.
What happens during a session?
A: 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.
As you, or the consultant, reads your paper out loud, 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. You need to make the notes, so you can read and understand them later.
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.
- Writers need readers. Speakers need listeners.
We provide the greatest assistance to writers and speakers by simply being an audience member.
- Our aim is to improve individual writers and speakers.
Nearly all suggestions and strategies WSTS consultants provide can be used in future writing and speaking situations. We want to help you improve your current project, and the next one.
- By helping visitors to analyze assignments and recognize disciplinary writing and speaking conventions, they become more flexible writers and speakers within academia.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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