Make an Appointment
with an English Writing Consultant

The English Writing Consultants offer one-on-one tutoring to all graduate students, and are especially helpful for international students who need to improve their general English writing skills. The consultants operate within three dimensions, helping students in the following ways:

Language needs awareness
  • Diagnose English writing difficulties and understand own needs for language improvement,
  • Discuss writing issues in a culturally sensitive environment,
  • Understand cross-cultural differences in logic, topic development, rhetorical patterns, and/or argumentation,
  • Clarify misunderstandings of faculty feedback,
  • Locate and effectively use resources for independent and/or guided English writing practice and developement.

Macro-level writing difficulties
  • Understand the linguistic realizations of the conventions of research genres,

  • Enhance overall communicative effectiveness, substantiation of claims, and use of appropriate discourse features,

  • Clarify purpose to ensure appropriate discourse structure,
  • Choose appropriate linguistic signals and signposts in the development of scientific arguments,
  • Use appropriate language structures to sustain consistency and cohesion,
  • Improve understanding and use of strategies for concise and precise writing,
  • Use appropriate language structures to express author stance.

Micro-level writing difficulties
  • Address recurrent grammatical and stylistic errors,
  • Clarify the meaning of unclear sentences and phrases,
  • Make appropriate lexical choices to clearly express intended meaning in small stretches of text,
  • Expand academic English vocabulary.