Graduate Student Support
The UNF Writing Center offers writing support for graduate students across disciplines, from education and English to business and nursing in person and virtually through via Microsoft Teams. Whether you find yourself starting from scratch and trying to respond to a given assignment or in the throes of revising a chapter of your dissertation, we’re happy to meet and work through ideas to help you with your writing and how you approach your future writing.
Setting Expectations
While our consultants are well read and trained in a variety of academic disciplines, they are neither methodologists nor experts in every field and cannot offer feedback on your conceptual or theoretical materials or methods. At the same time, our writing consultants are neither proofreaders nor editors. In these ways, our consultants focus on aspects of your writing, not the content in your writing. If you’re having challenges with your material or finding useful materials for your writing project, you will want to reach out to your faculty or reference librarian to discuss next steps. Instead, our staff will focus consultations on writing style, disciplinary conventions, synthesizing ideas, matching language to ideas and arguments, satisfying common reader expectations, etc.
When you visit with us, you can expect to...
- Discuss your idea generally so the consultant understands your overall idea
- Focus on discrete parts of your paper (as opposed to the entire document)
- Identify examples and illustrations of writing concerns in your paper, and
- Practice addressing those examples
As part of our writing center’s model, our consultants will not...
- Copyedit or proofread for every writing issue in a document or excerpt
- Offer feedback on conceptual or theoretical aspects of your project
Some Useful Tips
When possible, we do ask that once you've made your appointment that you email us a copy of the work you would like to discuss and be sure to identify who you are and the date and time of your appointment so we can ensure your consultant receives your material. If we can read through your longer writing in advance of your meeting, we can spend more meeting time working with you on your writing.
Note: for longer writing like the thesis or dissertation, we recommend making a series of appointments across a semester to allow you to work on your writing across time.
Seeking a Copy Editor
If you are looking for someone to offer line-by-line remarks or edits, we can connect you with individuals who perform such paid work. However, the writing center does not underwrite, countersign, or guarantee any work performed outside its office by suggested editors.