Preparing for Your Appointment

What to Bring to Your Appointment

  • Your assignment sheet, instructions, or guidelines from your instructor
  • The current draft you want to work on
  • Any earlier drafts, outlines, or notes that might be relevant
  • Any feedback from your instructor, classmates, or others that might be relevant
  • The sources used in your draft
  • Specific questions you want to address or thoughts about how you want to improve your work during your appointment
  • An open mind and willingness to collaborate actively with the consultant during the appointment

What to Expect During Your Appointment

  • An encouraging and supportive environment for talking about your writing
  • One-on-one assistance from a well-trained peer writing consultant
  • Someone to respond to your writing with thoughtful questions and to take your thinking and writing seriously

What Not to Expect During Your Appointment

  • Someone to edit or proofread your work
  • Someone to evaluate or grade your work
  • Someone to be fully knowledgeable about the content of your course

Policies

The CAS Writing Center supports thousands of students each semester across hundreds of different courses. The policies outlined here are intended to make sure that our services are accessible to as many students as possible. 

  • You must sign up under your own name for your appointment and provide accurate information about your course and assignment. Do not identify yourself as another student or use another student’s account to create your appointment. In addition, please do not falsely identify the course you are in or the assignment you want help with. These expectations are in accordance with Boston University’s Academic Conduct Code and students who do not follow them may be subject to the consequences outlined in that code.
  • You may schedule an appointment only with a consultant who is able to work with students at your class level. This information is listed next to each consultant’s name on our online schedule. By reserving appointments with incompatible consultants, you may be preventing other students from receiving support. If you sign up for a consultant who is not able to work with students at your class level, your appointment may be moved to an appropriate consultant if one is available at the same time or cancelled if one is not available. 
  • You should make every effort to arrive to your appointment on time. Students who are expecting to be late for their appointment should inform the Writing Center of their expected arrival by emailing writing@bu.edu or calling 617-358-1500. If you do not inform the Writing Center and are 15 minutes late for your appointment, you may have your appointment cancelled and given to anyone currently waiting for a drop-in appointment.
  • You should plan to make use of your full appointment time effectively. If you schedule an appointment, please make every effort to attend–or, if you are not able to do so, to cancel in a timely fashion. Appointments last 45 minutes and students are expected to use this time productively. Please be sure to come prepared to your appointment with enough to work on and specific questions or concerns to address with the consultant.
  • If you come to an appointment for just a few minutes to get credit for your class grading contract, your appointment will be cancelled. We may also contact your instructor to let you know that you have not used the Writing Center appropriately. 
  • You must be respectful of our consultants and their time. Please do not ask a consultant to meet with you before your scheduled appointment time begins or after your appointment ends. Please do not contact them via email to read your paper in advance of the appointment (they are trained to read efficiently and help you during the time allotted!) or to follow up with you after you meet. You should only use the Writing Center if you are willing to work with a consultant collaboratively, knowing that it is ultimately your responsibility to make choices about how you will revise your paper.
  • If you must change or cancel your appointment, please do so at least 9 hours in advance of your appointment time. To cancel your appointment, follow these instructions. You can also email writing@bu.edu or call 617-358-1500 during business hours. Please do not arrive for your appointment, inform the writing consultant that you have nothing to work on, and then leave; this prevents your appointment time from being used by another student who might need it. 
  • You may schedule one appointment per week. If you would like to request a second appointment within the space of a week, please email writing@bu.edu — while we can’t guarantee an additional appointment, we will do our best to accommodate you. 
  • Although you should make every effort to attend your appointment as scheduled, please do not come to the Writing Center if you are sick! We want you to take care of your health and we want our consultants to stay healthy, too. If you need to cancel your appointment at the last minute due to illness, please do so using our online scheduling system and email writing@bu.edu, and you will not be penalized for missing the appointment.

If you violate one or more of the policies listed here, you will receive an initial warning. Students who repeatedly violate these policies may have their privilege of using the Writing Center revoked for the remainder of the semester (or longer if the violation is particularly severe).