CAS Writing Center Consultations

At the hub of the Writing Program is the CAS Writing Center, which provides free one-on-one writing consultations for all students enrolled in WR courses. The Writing Center is staffed by undergraduate and graduate students. All student consultants take the two-credit training course WR 599: Tutoring in the Global University during their first semester of work in the Writing Center. 

All students enrolled in WR courses are encouraged to use the Writing Center. Consultants are trained to support students at any stage in the writing process and are familiar with the general assignment sequences of the Writing Program curriculum. They are also prepared to support students with the variety of genres typically assigned in WR courses, including oral/signed, digital/multimedia, and creativity/innovation projects. All consultants receive training to provide support to multilingual students as well.

Our expectation is that all instructors in the Writing Program will alert their students to this important resource. At the beginning of each semester, you may request to have a consultant visit your class to speak about the Writing Center’s services. You can also show students the video available on the main Writing Center website or encourage them to view it on their own time. 

Writing consultations work best when students come prepared with specific questions or areas of concern such as argumentation and thesis development, organization and structure, or style and mechanics. Please advise your students to come prepared to be actively engaged during their appointments. Please also encourage your students to schedule appointments several days in advance of the due dates for their assignments, so that they will have time to make revisions following their consultations. Also, please remind them that appointments fill up quickly during periods of peak demand, especially the last few weeks of the semester.

While faculty can and should encourage their students to make use of the Writing Center, they should not require it, either of individual students or entire classes. If a Writing Center appointment is included in your grading contract, we strongly encourage you to ask students to submit a brief written reflection or give a short presentation to the class, rather than simply providing “proof” they made or attended an appointment. You might also set an early deadline for students to book their first appointment. We have had a rare but increasing number of cases where students only briefly attend appointments and do not bring anything to work on, simply to satisfy the terms of their grading contract. Asking students to reflect on what they learned will discourage this behavior and make sure that students are using the Writing Center only when they are willing to get something out of the experience.

Faculty should be aware that the Writing Center is not a body that reports plagiarism either to individual instructors or CAS Advising. If consultants identify concerning passages in students’ work, they are trained to treat these instances as learning opportunities and help students rephrase or cite language that is not their own. This policy also applies to uses of Generative AI — consultants are trained to help students make informed choices and defer to individual instructors’ policies, as well as the Writing Program-wide guidelines provided in our syllabus template.

Faculty should also remember that consultants are students themselves, and that their Writing Center work is its own learning process. As such, consultants may occasionally give feedback that faculty judge to be confusing or unhelpful. Consultants also cannot be expected to have content knowledge of your specific course topic, and they may occasionally misinterpret readings or assignments. We ask faculty to be realistic in their expectations about Writing Center feedback, and to remember that we strive to teach our students to make their own choices about their own writing — which includes deciding how to use (or not use) the feedback they receive from consultants, as well as classmates and other readers. If faculty have concerns about the feedback provided by a consultant, they should speak with the Writing Center Associate Director or Coordinator; they should not contact the consultant directly.

If you or your students have any questions about the Writing Center, please contact Jacob Burg, Associate Director for the Writing Center, at burg@bu.edu, or Amy Bennett-Zendzian, Writing Center Coordinator, at albz@bu.edu.