GUIDELINES
Regardless of your enrollment or employment, students, faculty, staff, and community members are welcome at the Writing Center. Though, priority for appointments will be given to those students currently enrolled at MCC. As a side note, all are welcome to sit, share space, and do work without having any appointment at all.
You may walk in and ask an available Writing Center person to make an appointment on the spot. We encourage appointments in advance simply because one guarantees time for you to be heard. Dropping in and signing up for an appointment on one of our computers is also welcomed. Sign-ups will be done through AccuCampus, and your appointment can be for 30 minutes or 60 minutes, depending on what you need. You are not required to use the entire time. For example, if you have a question or two that might take 15-25 minutes, select the 30-minute appointment option. We want to share your time wisely and will not force you to hang out with us.
It's best to take an active role in your appointment, which means coming ready to discuss your project, or your paper. Bringing a draft or notes on what you'd like to write about are helpful, but not mandatory. Assignment sheets and instructions are strongly encouraged so that we can better help you meet the overall requirements by understanding what your teacher is asking for.
Writing Center consultants are most interested in what you, the writer, think and hope to accomplish while you’re here, which is why our meetings will be conversations rather than like a class lecture.
All writers have error patterns that we make. We’re here to help you find those patterns in your writing and offer solutions for how you can change them (and still sound like yourself).
Please ask about our additional resources that include handouts about writing topics, like grammar, punctuation, APA and MLA formatting, among many others, so that we can still be some help to you when you’re not at the Writing Center.
How To Make A WRiting Center Appointment
1. From the MCCNEB.EDU page
a. Click “Canvas/Student Links”
b. Scroll to and click “AccuCampus”
2. Click “Make an Appointment”
a. Click “Writing Consultation”
b. Click “Choose Location”
c. Click “Make Appointment” for the campus you want to have the appointment, fill in the fields, and click “Search by Date”
d. Choose your appointment time and fill in the fields and click “Save”
WHAT TO EXPECT
You can expect to find consultants who are committed to working with students to get more comfortable with the anxiety that naturally comes with writing and assignments and turning that into thoughts on the page.
We will work with you to create an understanding of what your paper is about as a whole, how to communicate meaning to an audience, and ways to format according to style rules. Of course, we will also talk about smaller parts of the paper like sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, among many others. Really, we want to try to address anything you bring up about the world of writing and academia.
When you make an appointment through AccuCampus, you can write a note in the comment box to have us communicate with your instructor about your appointment and what we worked on and why, but we can also keep your appointment between us if you choose otherwise. We will always ask for your permission to email your instructor to let them know what we worked on in the Writing Center that day.
PROOFREADING POLICY
Those of us who work in the Writing Center believe that writing is a continual process, not simply some final product. Since students and consultants spend time together in appointments working like a team, we consultants want to focus on the ways you want to improve your writing. We want to hear what you think rather than proofread, or fix, your paper, like Word does with those suggestion underlines. Our goal is that you become the kind of writer who has the confidence and skills to revise your own writing but comes back to the Writing Center for the conversations anyway. We look forward to working together with you.