Online Writing Consultations

The Writing Hub provides real-time, one-on-one writing consultations free of charge for enrolled undergraduate and graduate students at UC San Diego. For Fall 2023, writing consultations for Undergraduate students can be face to face, synchronous online or asynchronous appointments. Writing consultations for Graduate students will all be online!

What to Expect in an Online Consultation

Our appointment system - MyWCOnline - allows for synchronous online conversations about writing, including "live" conversation through video or text-based chat as well as real-time document sharing. 

Like all Writing Hub appointments, you can expect your consultant to talk with you about your concerns with your writing project and to provide observations and actionable feedback for moving forward. All online consultations strive to uphold the Writing Hub's Core Principles and Practices. 

You can expect:

• Supportive, in-depth conversation about your ideas and your writing process.
• Friendly talk about your concerns/challenges with this project. The writing consultant will do their best to address your specific concerns as well as other things they see in your writing. 
• Insights into bigger writing contexts, meaning the consultant will work with you to uncover the bigger picture behind their suggestions and questions.
• Mutual problem-solving. If something is unclear in your writing, the consultant will talk with you about your thinking and bring those insights back to your draft. Together, you and the consultant will problem-solve to figure out what to do next.

Uundergraduate appointments are 30 minutes; undergraduate students can make 2 appointments per day (just not back-to-back) and up to 4 appointments per week. 

Graduate appointments can be 30 or 60 minutes (we recommend 60 minutes). Graduate students can book 1 appointment per day, and up to 2 hours of consultation per week.

What You Shouldn't Expect From an Online Consultation

• Asynchronous feedback: You will not be able to upload your paper and receive written comments later. All of our writing consultations are based on conversation, because our first principle is to help writers, not writing. 
• Comments written on the document or track changes: Before, during, and after a consultation, you maintain complete control and responsibility over your writing and your ideas. The consultant will not take notes on your paper nor cross out words already written. 
• Proofreading or editing: the consultant wants to engage you in your own work through conversation. So while they won't proofread or edit your writing, they will help you develop strategies for making sentence-level revisions for better clarity. 
• The Consultant to tell you "it's ready": In any consultation, including with final drafts, the consultant will work with you to determine what is working well and what is still unclear. It is beyond the scope of their role to tell you that any project is finished or ready to submit - that decision is up to you.