Letter to the Editor by Cody Goehring, Undergraduate Writing Consultant

The NDSU Center for Writers seeks to help any NDSU-affiliated person with their writing-related needs. Our goal, as articulated by Director Stephen Disrud is to “help the NDSU community be their most successful in academic, professional, and research writing tasks.” Brooke Anderson, one of our undergraduate writing consultants/ tutors, says that we’re “a group of [people] who just want to help [others] learn how to write and get better at writing, improving things they already know and skills they already have.” And, that’s really who we are: people committed to helping others improve their writing. 

So, how do we do that? We offer a variety of free services including one-on-one consultations, workshops, and writing groups. 

One-on-One Consultations

We primarily focus on one-on-one sessions with both undergraduate and graduate students where we provide individualized feedback and a space to talk about writing. The client (you!) and consultant (one of us) sit down together to chat about your paper. Each session will look a bit different depending on consultant, client, stage of writing, and assignment. We can work on any writing from classwork and essays to research articles and grants to resumes and cover letters to scholarship essays and personal statements.

The session usually starts with discussion about the project you are working on and your immediate concerns. After that, we usually go through the assignment sheet for understanding and make sure the project hits the mark. Then, we focus on the writing priorities like making sure you understand the genre and your specific audience, explaining American academic styles, creating a clear thesis, going through your content, working on essay and paragraph organization, highlighting grammar and punctuation, helping you choose words, or revising citations.

Further, we offer suggestions that you can take if you want, but we keep the ownership of the paper yours. In our comments, as Brooke states, “we are not going to tell you that your paper is bad” or “that you’re terrible at writing.” Kira Eliason, another undergraduate consultant, expands, “We’re not here to judge; we don’t view clients differently based on their work or their questions.”

While we don’t accept dropped off papers for grammar and editing checking, we can talk about sentence-level issues in a session. In these consultations, we focus on helping you develop strategies and skills to do the writing and editing work on your own: locating grammatical patterns that keep popping up and helping you notice and correct them as well. We’re all about helping people become better writers who naturally produce better writing.

Depending on our varied skills and expertise, it can be helpful to pick a consultant experienced in the field and genre for work with content, but it can be just as beneficial to have an outsider’s perspective for writing flow and audience considerations. Further, with our different personalities, you may click with certain consultants instead of others. Brooke encourages you to “try a different consultant” if you don’t jive with the first one, and that everyone “get[s] something no matter what session [they] come to.” Just try us out once, and we can point you in the right direction for what you need.

Apart from one-on-one sessions, we also have group consultations in which you can come in and talk about your group work. For these, we usually answer questions based on content and writing and make sure the piece has one consistent voice.

Writing Workshops

We put on writing workshops for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates interested in research and academia. This semester, we are offering a workshop series on literature reviews and another about writing the four main sections of research papers: Introduction, Methods, Discussion, and Results (IMRaD). Kristina Caton, our senior graduate consultant and faculty liaison, describes our workshops as “guided practices and opportunities to work on drafts with consultant help.” They’re awesome for getting introduced to the genre, coming in with a highly specific question, or anything in between! 

Other Writing-Related Programs and Events

If you just need accountability, encouragement, and support to get some writing done, we host weekly writing groups that meet with a trained consultant.

Functioning similarly to writing groups, Mind the Gap is our program dedicated just to helping graduate students in their last semester bridge the gap of not graduated to graduation and finish their degrees strong. 

Once a semester, we host Disquisition Bootcamps for graduate students. They tend to be 3-4 days long with various workshops, individual writing time, consultants available for questions, free lunch, and a writing community-like atmosphere. 

We also collaborate with other student support entities on campus to promote writing.

Further, we can visit classes to promote the Center and give brief presentations about writing, assignments, and the writing process. 

Contacting Us

So, how do you contact us? Our website is www.ndsu.edu/cfwriters/. Here, you can find more about us, schedule appointments through the “schedule an appointment button,” and locate some great writing resources. You can also sign up for events on our myNDSU page, reach us via email at ndsu.cfw@ndsu.edu, call us at (701)231-7927, or follow us on Instagram @ndsucenterforwriters. We’re located on the lowest level of the main NDSU library, suite 16; feel free to pop in and see if we’re available for a walk-in session. We’re open Monday through Thursday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and Friday from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. We look forward to seeing you and getting some writing done, together!