What We Do

QWC tutors work with University of Arkansas students, faculty, and staff on all kinds of writing projects. We help writers with everything from essays to lab reports, personal statements to dissertations. You can visit us for help at any stage of the writing process: choosing and focusing a topic, performing research, developing an argument, organizing ideas, providing evidence and support, and improving grammar and usage. Some writers come in for appointments before they have a single word on paper; others bring in complete drafts.

Here are some concerns we hear from writers and a brief description of how we help with each:

“I don’ t know how to start.”

QWC tutors can help you understand an assignment or essay question. We can help you figure out how much research you need to do and how to go about that research. We can help you search for and understand sources. Many writers find it helpful to talk through their ideas before they start writing, and we’re here to listen and ask the kinds of questions that will help you think more deeply about your ideas and develop them into papers. Tutors can help you to create an organizational plan for your papers as well, so that you come away from a writing conference with a clear sense of where you’re going. You can also speak with tutors about specific strategies for overcoming writer’s block.

“Is my thesis good?”

QWC tutors can help you identify your main idea and make sure that your thesis statement conveys that idea accurately. We can also help you to evaluate the strength of your thesis statement by helping you to check it against your professor’s assignment. Finally, we can ask you questions that will help you to consider your argument from new angles, and thus to clarify and improve your ideas.

“Is it me, or does this seem sort of disorganized?”

QWC tutors can help you examine and revise the order in which you’ve presented ideas. We can also help you explore a variety of organizational patterns and strategies to discover those that will work best in your paper.

“My instructor always says that I don’t develop my ideas enough. What am I supposed to do differently?”

QWC tutors won’t reevaluate or comment on the grades an instructor has given you, but we will help you to understand instructors’ comments and improve your writing according to their suggestions.

“Is it a good idea to put my personal opinion here?”

QWC tutors can help you to reflect on your assignment to decide whether or not it calls for personal opinion and anecdotes. If the assignment does ask for your opinion, we can help you to decide how best to include, support, and explain it.

“Does this personal statement sound too egotistical?”

QWC tutors can help you consider your reading audience and decide whether or not the tone of your work is appropriate. We can also show you models of tricky documents like personal statements and resumes.

“Is this citation right?”

In addition to helping writers with planning, organization, and development, the QWC can help you to complete the final parts of the writing process. We can help you learn how to create effective transitions; adhere to specific documentation styles such as MLA, APA, and Chicago; and avoid disruptive grammatical errors.

“Will you proofread this paper for me?”

QWC tutors will not proofread your work. Doing so would be a violation of the University of Arkansas’s Code of Academic Honesty. Sentence-level correctness isn’t all of skillful writing, but it’s part of it, and having a tutor rewrite your work would misrepresent your abilities as a writer. The QWC takes care to maintain the trust placed in us by instructors. We guarantee that you will leave the QWC having accomplished work that reflects your own ideas and writing skills.

However, we are more than happy to examine your work for patterns of error and teach you how to correct and avoid those errors in the future. We also provide a number of quick guides to individual grammatical concerns, such as parallelism and comma use. You can find these handouts in the Center itself (315 Kimpel Hall) and on our website under “Resources for Students.”