Writing Center FAQs

A Writing Center appointment is an opportunity for current HGSE students to meet with an advanced doctoral student to gain the skills needed to respond effectively to assignments, organize papers, manage research projects, and improve their writing. You can bring ideas, notes, parts of papers, drafts, and even final drafts. You do not need to have finished your assignment or have started writing your paper to make an appointment; you can meet with us at any stage of your writing process. Please bring a copy of the relevant assignment so that we can better help you. For more, please see Preparing for your Writing Center appointment.

To schedule an appointment, click the "Writing Center: Make an Appointment" button on the lefthand side of the page, under "Individual Student Support".  You will be sent a confirmation email after registering.

To make the most of the session, you should come with focused questions and be able to describe the specific goals you hope to achieve in working with a teaching fellow. Please also bring a copy of the assignment. For more, please see Preparing for your Writing Center appointment

All work submitted to meet course requirements is expected to be the student’s own. In the preparation of all papers and other written work submitted to meet course and degree requirements, a student must be careful to distinguish between ideas that are his or her own and those that have been derived from other sources. Information and opinions drawn from all sources are to be attributed specifically to these sources. It is the student’s responsibility to learn and use the proper forms of citation. Quotations must be properly placed within quotation marks and must be fully cited. All paraphrased material must also be fully cited. In all cases where ideas or material presented are derived from a student’s reading and research, the source used must be indicated. Students who submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to the original source, for whatever reason, face sanctions up to and including dismissal and expulsion. 

Students occasionally work with others or receive assistance in various aspects of their course work. Students should be very clear about how they are working with others and what types ofassistance, if any, they are receiving. Students should disclose to their professors any plans for outside professional assistance on editing, statistical work, or other matters central to completing their work. The student's professor will approve those kinds and levels of assistance that support, rather than supplant, the student's research, writing and learning. If assistance was approved, the student must specify what sort of assistance they received and from whom on the paper in question, upon submission. The goal of this oversight is to preserve the status of the work as the student's own genuine intellectual product. Students should remember that the Gutman Library Academic Writing and Research Services is available to assist them with assessing and editing their own work. This assistance has been sanctioned by HGSE.