Professional Tutor, Metropolitan State University

My name is Peter Gawtry. I am a professional writing tutor here at Metro State University. We're not just trying to help them with a paper, we're trying, and I tell them this all the time, to build better writers. And so, we see a lot, lot of people who wanna know how to make sure their citations are right, how to make sure that their papers are formatted correctly, make sure their reference pages look clean, and that kind of thing. We also have some drop-in services, so that can be a little hectic. It can be really, really interesting seeing four or five people in a span of an hour. That's a very common concern, because, in a way it's kind of... The way I kinda like to look at it, it's low hanging fruit. You can go and, oh that's on the score sheet and you know when you've got it done, you know when you've got it right, that's easy points to grab and hold onto. Okay. The content that's a little harder, and we often end up helping people with content along the way, making sure that it's smooth and makes logical sense, they don't have non-sequiturs that are kind of confusing the reader, that kind of thing, of course. Metro has a huge and very diverse student population. We have a lot of English-language learners. And so there's a lot of concern about, is my grammar right? Am I saying the right words? And we do help with that. But oftentimes, the end result is that we're pushing them along this track of developing the paper, developing ideas, making sure it's logical, and then kind of adding the polish at the end. And it's a good process, but those are kind of the most common things that we see. Some students come in once, and that's it. Some students come over and over and over, and that's great, too. There's several students with whom I've worked for, wow, probably three or four years. And that's one of the best parts of the job, because you really get to see them develop as a writer and really start to understand what they're doing on a much deeper level.