The Writing and Communications Center

We are highly skilled professional and peer writing consultants from a variety of disciplines who provide free assistance to Stevens students, staff, and faculty on their written and oral communications projects. We seek to empower writers by helping them develop the communication skills essential to their success in academic coursework and beyond Stevens. Our consultants respond in ways that best meet the needs of all students.

The WCC's appointment system is divided in increments of 60 minutes. However, the actual length of an appointment is 45-50 minutes. Consultants need the extra 10-15 minutes to fill out client reports and/or prepare for their next appointment. We limit clients to 3 appointments per week. Writers working on long-term projects (dissertations, etc.) may request standing weekly appointments.

Writers are asked to bring their prompt, research question, or pertinent job listing(s) to the appointment. Consultants will benefit from knowing information such as requirements, formatting, and deadlines of the piece writers are working on.

We serve current students, faculty, and staff from any discipline. We work directly with the original authors of texts, not their proxies (team members, compilers, editors, etc.). Clients must register with WCOnline to make appointment reservations.

Writing consultants do not edit, proofread, or correct client papers; we will, however, teach writers the skills necessary to proofread, edit, and correct their own work. Consultants avoid excessive directiveness that will result in the loss of a student’s original voice, style, and content.

We ask that writers respect consultants, other writers, and the Center's space. If a writer harasses another person, exhibits violent behavior, or deliberately damages property, they will be asked to leave and never return. Consultants reserve the right to end an appointment if the client is threatening, disrespectful, nonresponsive, unprepared, or creating health risks.

If writers need to cancel appointments, we ask them to do so as far in advance as possible so that those appointments become available for others. Writers must use WCOnline (the WCC's online appointment system) to cancel their appointments.

All consultants are trained to work with all types of writing and can help elucidate ideas about a topic regardless of their own experience of that topic. Graduate students or those with extended projects may inquire about scheduling weekly appointments with professional consultants, but these are dependent on availability.

Writers should upload their paper in the form of a Word document. A consultant will review the paper and return it to the writer, with comments, via email within one business day of the appointment time. Consultants will read through the first three pages (or ~1000 words) of the paper for an E-Consultation, unless an alternative area of focus is specified by the writer in the appointment form.

Large language models (LLMs) have significant limitations and problems, including “hallucinations,” failure to cite, and replication of biases implicit in their training corpuses. They can also discourage one's own critical thinking abilities. At the same time, we believe ChatGPT and other LLMs may be used productively for brainstorming, organizing ideas, and polishing texts. We thus invite students to bring generated texts to the WCC for analysis, so long as this is in compliance with their instructor's policy. We also offer sessions in which tutors will help students to engage with LLMs in effective and ethical ways. We insist that writers cite any LLMs that they use.