The Writing Center

The Writing Center offers free, drop-in tutoring for any UH Hilo student.  Peer tutors are selected for their excellent writing skills and trained to help writers gain independence and develop critical thinking skills, discover topics and develop ideas, generate and organize supporting information, and work on stylistic choices.  Peer tutors do not provide proof-reading or other editing services; instead they help students develop their own voices as writers and their own drafting and revision strategies, ideally over a number of tutoring sessions throughout the semester.

Coordinator's Welcome

Coming Soon!

Fall 2009 Schedule

Click Here for a detailed schedule for the Writing Center

Tips for a Successful Writing Conference:

  1. Come Early!  The best time to work with a writing tutor is when you first get the assignment: that way, you can work on the assignment feeling confident from the beginning.
  2. Bring ALL your materials.  It will really help the tutor (which of course means it will really help you) if you bring any information the professor has provided about the assignment, and all the work you’ve done for the assignment so far.  Key pieces of information you should bring if you have them: the due date, a writing prompt, previously graded assignments, notes (especially for research writing), previous drafts, an outline.  If you don’t have any of these, the tutor will certainly still try to help you, but it won’t be nearly as productive a session as it could be.
  3. Embrace the Writing Process.  Even the best writers in the world (some would say especially the best writers in the world) write several drafts before they ever begin editing for mechanical errors.  If you want to improve your own writing, embrace the drafting process, and let the tutors help you identify higher-order issues to improve (such as organization and support) before you even think about lower-order issues (like grammar and spelling).
  4. Be Realistic.  The tutors are wonderful people, but they are not magical people.  They cannot do your work for you.  They cannot replace your professor.  They cannot teach in one hour what you didn’t learn in four years of high school.