ARC Writing Lab: What to Expect from Your Tutor

Tutor Session Guidelines:

A tutor will scan the paper and determine whether mechanics limit his ability to understand the writing sample.  If so, he will pick out one example of as many mechanical problems as time allows.  Subsequently, he will indicate his general impression of which two or three of the following items pose the greatest challenges to the writer. He will highlight multiple examples of these errors without correcting them.

Mechanics checklist:

• Sentence fragments
• Run-on sentences
• Odd number of commas between subject and verb
• Subject/verb agreement problems
• Pronoun/antecedent agreement problems
• Pronoun consistency problems
• Verb tense consistency problems
• Dangling modifiers, especially beginning participial phrases
• Faulty parallelism

Subsequently, the tutor will move on to address organizational issues and the strength of the thesis statement and supporting arguments.

If the tutor is able to begin working on organization and thematic topics right away, she will highlight mechanical errors as she reads and confirm that the writer understands the nature of these errors. 

Tutors will not proofread papers in order to find and mark all errors.

An editing checklist can be found here.