Graduate Student FAQs

Q. Do graduate students use the Writing Center for their own writing?

A. Sure. Members of the Writing Center staff provide one-on-one help at any stage of the writing process. You might be worried about getting started, organizing your paper, revising to meet a deadline, or editing to sound more professional. Or you might just want an outside reader to provide a fresh perspective. Our consultants will listen to your needs, think with you about your writing project, and help you develop strategies that work.

Q. What if I'm working on a thesis or dissertation?

A. There are often three special concerns when we work with grad student writing. The first is length. With longer papers, it helps a lot if the student comes prepared with specific questions. Or, in some cases, a grad student (or anyone writing long papers) may want to bring in a short, manageable chunk to work with in a session.

The second issue is technical expertise. Your writing center consultant is unlikely to have an advanced academic background in your own field. This means that your contribution to the session is particularly important. If the consultant says, "I don't understand this paragraph," you will want to decide for yourself whether the reader's problem is unclear writing or simply a lack of specialized knowledge.

Finally, there might be concerns about writing that are specific to your discipline. If you're writing a thesis in engineering, the writing consultant may not be familiar with the style manual commonly used in your field. If you're a business major, maybe your teacher expects your writing to be so to-the-point that it sometimes feels abrupt. The writing consultant can help you identify questions, but you may need to go back to your professor to find the answers.

Q. I'm buried in library research! How do I handle sources?

Lit reviews and documentation are major challenges in every discipline. Writing Center consultants are familiar with most of the conventions about paraphrasing, quoting, and incorporating information from sources into your own work. And we can provide current copies of style manuals and help you locate documentation information in them.

Q. How can I get my students to use the Writing Center?

A. You'll probably be teaching first or second year students, and they may not realize how important writing is in many disciplines. Call the Writing Center for ideas on how to help your students take writing assignments seriously. And, if you want to be sure that your students know about the Writing Center, ask us for brochures and pass them out in your classes.

Q. What other types of teaching help are available through the Writing Center?

A. If you'd like your students introduced to the Writing Center, or if you're assigning a particularly challenging writing task, you might want to have someone from the Writing Center do a class visit. Or if you're looking for good assignment ideas and information about how to grade papers fairly, you might like to look through our file of materials used by other UND teachers. Some GTAs ask their students to do group writing projects or peer response, and Writing Center consultants can help your students learn to work more effectively in their groups. Or maybe you have your own ideas for what you'd like to do and the kind of help you want -- just let us know what you need, and we'll do what we can to help.