The Writing Center offers five types of appointments: Face-to-Face, Written Feedback, Online Realtime, Screencast Video Feedback, and Conversation Partners. While all five appointment types are versatile and useful for lots of different writers, writing processes, and kinds of writing, each one has its own unique qualities. Sometimes it’s hard to know which one is right for you and your writing! So let’s look at some common cases…
“I want to brainstorm some ideas for my project. I haven’t written anything yet, and I need help getting started!”
The best appointment types for brainstorming are Face-to-Face and Online Realtime. Face-to-Face appointments can be as short as half an hour and as long as two hours, and they are the “classic” appointment type: you come to the Writing Center, sit down with a tutor, and talk it through. Online Realtime appointments can be one to two hours long, and rather than physically coming to the Writing Center, you meet your tutor in an online space connected to our scheduling website, and you can use video or text chat, as well as a virtual “whiteboard,” to talk and work on your ideas.
In both types of appointment, you can talk to a tutor about your exigence (your assignment or whatever is prompting you to write), look at online resources, develop any initial ideas you might have, get help understanding your assignment, and make plans to move forward. Online Realtime appointments can be convenient if you live far from campus, on those snowy days when you really don’t want to leave the house, or even if you’re studying abroad! Face-to-Face appointments can be nice if you don’t have a lot of time (since they are one of only two appointment types that can be less than an hour long), if you just like meeting in-person, or if you are a more hands-on learner, as in the Writing Centers we have chalkboards, whiteboards, notecards, markers, and lots of other tools for diversifying your writing process.
“I want to practice speaking English for a job interview.”
If you are working to improve your spoken English, we have an appointment type just for you! Conversation Partners appointments are specifically designed for learners of English as an additional language to practice speaking English for a particular purpose or context, like an interview or presentation, or to work on specific skills, like pronunciation, fluency, idioms, or just getting more comfortable with conversational English.
Conversation Partners appointments can be half an hour or one hour long, and they take place in-person in the Loop or Lincoln Park Writing Center. Feel free to bring assignment or presentation materials, job application materials, and/or a translation dictionary to help facilitate your appointment.
“I commute from the suburbs, and it takes me a long time to get to campus.”
Just because you can’t easily come into the Writing Centers, doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from our services! Three types of appointments don’t require you to show up in-person: Written Feedback, Online Realtime, and Screencast Video Feedback. All three of these appointment types can be one to two hours long, but for Written Feedback and Screencast Video Feedback, you don’t even have to be available at your appointment time! You just have to upload a document before the appointment time, and that could mean fifteen minutes before or two weeks before–whatever works for you.
As discussed above, Online Realtime appointments are much like face-to-face appointments, except they take place in an online chatroom with text and video options. For an Online Realtime appointment, you do need to be available and online at your appointment time so you can talk to your tutor, but as long as you have internet access, it doesn’t really matter where you are.
For Written Feedback and Screencast Video Feedback, not only can you be anywhere, you also don’t need to be online for your appointment. You simply need to upload a document (or more than one, if you’d like to include your assignment, professor feedback, an outline, etc.) or attach a link to an ePortfolio or webpage. Written Feedback is best for papers, drafts, or even outlines, as tutors use Word comments to give you feedback, so your document needs to be in .doc or .docx format. For Screencast Video Feedback, on the other hand, tutors use Screencast-O-Matic to make a video talking you through your feedback and show you where and how you might revise. Since Screencast-O-Matic records everything on the screen, it can be used for all kinds of projects, not just Word documents. Screencast Video Feedback is great for ePortfolios, PowerPoints, webpages, and any other kind of multimodal project. Of course, it can be used for traditional papers as well, and is especially helpful if you’re more of an auditory learner and you’d rather hear your feedback than read it.
“I’m on my final draft; I just need help making some minor edits.”
When you’ve gone through a couple drafts of a paper, it can be find those final edits because you are so close to the work. That’s when an outside reader comes in handy. Especially handy is an outside reader with specific training and expertise to help you find the most effective ways to improve your work…a.k.a. a peer writing tutor! While tutors can help you with final draft edits in any appointment type, Written Feedback, Online Realtime, and Face-to-Face are likely to be the most effective.
Online Realtime and Face-to-Face appointments are great for this kind of work, because you and the tutor can talk through priorities, concerns, and confusions. Often in these appointment types, tutors will ask you to read your draft aloud, a strategy which can help you catch typos and things that “sound off,” like grammar and style issues. If tutors have questions or find a sentence confusing, they can ask you about it, and you can work together to edit the sentence so it becomes clear to an outside reader. This kind of collaboration can be difficult to achieve in the other appointment types, since you and the tutor aren’t in the same place (or online ‘space’) at the same time to talk things out.
Written Feedback, while it may not provide the same collaborative possibilities, is also well-suited to final edits, as your tutor works directly with your draft and any concerns you identify in your appointment form. Though peer writing tutors will not proofread or copyedit your paper for you, in Written Feedback appointments, they can use highlights to draw your attention to patterns, write marginal comments to give explanations, model revisions, or link to online resources, and give context and big-picture explanation in their summary letter. Written Feedback provides a unique opportunity for tutors to use writing to talk about writing, so you can learn not just from what they say in their feedback, but also from how they say it.
To recap…
While all appointment types (other than Conversation Partners) can be used at any point in your writing process, their unique characteristics mean that some may be better suited than others to particular kinds of work. Here’s a handy table showing what appointment types are best for various parts of the writing process:
And here’s a table showing the basic differences between appointment types:
Note that all appointments are scheduled in half-hour increments (one block on our online scheduling system, WCOnline, is 30 minutes), but some have a 1-hour minimum. For more information on appointment types, check out our website.
Whatever appointment type you choose, we hope to see you soon!