If it is your first time making an appointment at the Writing Centre, you will need to create an account in our online booking system. To create an account, follow these steps:

• Go to www.cbu.ca/writing-centre.
• Click the Book an Appointment.
• Click on Register for an account.
• Fill out the short registration form.
• Click Register.

Once you’ve created an account, you can book an appointment. To book an appointment, follow these steps:

• Go to www.cbu.ca/writing-centre.
• Click Book an Appointment.
• Sign in with the email and password you chose when creating your account.
• Click on the white rectangle of the appointment time you want to book.
• Fill out the short appointment form. Here you can choose between three different appointment types: in-person, Microsoft Teams, or written comments. Choose the appointment style that works best for you.
• Click Create Appointment.

You may choose to have an in-person appointment, a Microsoft Teams appointment, or a written comments appointment.

• In-person appointments require you to be physically present at the Writing Centre during your appointment time.

• Teams appointments require you to be present online via MS Teams during your appointment time.

• Written comments appointments do not require you to be present, either in-person or online. However, they do require you to provide a copy of your assignment for a writing advisor to review.

Yes. The Writing Centre offers two types of online appointments: a live audio-video call via MS Teams or written comments.

When you book an MS Teams appointment, a writing advisor will send you a Teams meeting invitation prior to your appointment time with instructions for how to join the call.

When you book a written comments appointment, one of our advisors will offer written feedback on your assignment, then upload the assignment back to your online appointment booking at the end of your appointment time, so you can review the feedback at your convenience. You can upload the draft of your assignment to your online appointment booking at least one hour prior to your appointment time, or you can send the draft to this email address: writing_centre@cbu.ca.

Note: Written comments appointments are most appropriate for individual assignments, as they are meant to provide detailed feedback on a single student’s writing. If you want written comments on a group assignment, you will receive written feedback on the parts you wrote only. If you want feedback on the entire group assignment, you should consider booking a virtual or in-person appointment for the group to discuss its writing questions/concerns.

The Centre is located on the second floor of the Library in room 233.

The Centre is open year-round, including the spring and summer terms, and during both fall and winter Reading Weeks. However, the Centre is closed when CBU is closed (e.g., holidays, inclement weather). For specific hours, please check our online appointment-booking schedule.

White means an available appointment; blue means another student has already booked the appointment; grey means the time is unavailable.

Typically, two weeks of the schedule are available for booking at a time.

For in-person or MS Teams appointments:

• Your Writing Centre appointment will involve a lot of talking–about your writing assignment, your ideas, and how to organize and express those ideas in writing.
• Your writing advisor will begin by asking what you want to work on, and if you have any specific questions or concerns.
• Your writing advisor will follow up with questions designed to provide a better understanding of your assignment and, if you’ve brought one, your draft.
• If you have brought a draft, you may be asked to read at least some of it aloud before you and your writing advisor discuss it.
• Your writing advisor will help you find opportunities for improvement, share writing strategies and direct you towards helpful resources.
• Throughout the appointment, you should bring up any concerns or questions you have.

For written comments appointments:

• You must upload the draft you would like feedback on to your appointment booking at least one hour prior to your appointment time. You can also email your assignment as an attachment to writing_centre@cbu.ca before your appointment time. However, to receive written feedback on an assignment, students must book an appointment first. Doing so ensures writing advisors have time scheduled that day to review the assignment. Students who email assignments without booking an appointment first will be asked to schedule an appointment before any feedback can be provided.
• During the appointment, one of our writing advisors will review your draft and provide feedback in the form of written marginal comments.
• At the end of the appointment, your writing advisor will re-upload the draft to your appointment booking, complete with their feedback, for you to access at your convenience.

You can book 10 appointments per term with a maximum of 2 appointments per week (and no more than 1 appointment per day). The Centre may limit appointments to 1 per week during busy times so as many students as possible can get help.

You should contact the Writing Centre Coordinator by emailing the Writing Centre at writing_centre@cbu.ca. Do not make appointments using a friend’s account.

Yes, you can make up to 5 Writing Centre appointments to discuss an honours thesis, directed study, or Advanced Research Project.

No. The Writing Centre is a tutoring service, not a proofreading or editing service. Having someone else check for and fix your paper’s grammatical and other mistakes is not the best way to improve your writing.

Our tutors will help you with grammar and expression issues, but they’ll do it by:

• answering grammar and usage questions
• pointing out and explaining recurring errors in your writing and how to fix them
• suggesting strategies for strengthening your proofreading and editing skills

This method is a much more effective way to help you build your writing skills. If you wish to work on grammar in a session, prepare beforehand by doing your best self-editing and proofreading, and bringing clear questions or marked sections of your paper along with you to discuss.

No. Writing advisors do not grade, or suggest potential grades, for students’ assignments.

Book your appointment as early as possible–at least a week before your preferred appointment time is best. There may be appointments available at the last minute, but appointment slots tend to fill up quickly during busy times.

We also recommend leaving a couple of days between your appointment and your assignment due date so that you have time to revise.

First, contact the Writing Centre by emailing writing_centre@cbu.ca to see if an appointment can be arranged for you. If an appointment cannot be arranged, you can be added to our waiting list in case a spot opens up. In the meantime, keep checking the schedule online–you may notice before we do that another student has cancelled an appointment, freeing up a slot that you can book for yourself.

If you have a draft of a paper, bring either a print copy of it or a laptop with the document on it to your appointment. You can also attach a copy of your assignment to your appointment booking or email a copy as an attachment to writing_centre@cbu.ca. We cannot print assignments.

You should also bring any assignment instructions and texts you are using for that assignment. For example, if you are writing a summary of a journal article, bring the article to your appointment. If you are writing an essay on Frankenstein, bring the novel with you. This way, if questions arise, you can consult the text. Bringing an assignment your professor has already marked may help you and your writing tutor decide what to work on.

No. Instead, you can attach a copy of your assignment to your appointment booking or email a copy as an attachment to writing_centre@cbu.ca. You can also bring a printed copy of your assignment or your own laptop or tablet.

Absolutely. You can come to the Writing Centre at any stage of the writing process, including before you’ve written a word or partway through a draft.

Yes, IF you get permission from your professor or instructor. You can show us an email from them giving you permission, or they can email or phone the Centre to let us know (writing_centre@cbu.ca or 902-563-1325).

No. You may only bring your own work to an appointment at the Writing Centre.

Certainly, but we’ll only be able to help you with the parts you’ve written. If your group members want to work on their portions, they must make their own individual appointments.

Your group can also come to the Centre as a group to discuss an assignment or questions you have in common, such as the assignment instructions, organization, citation, and formatting. All group members should attend group appointments. We will only review a section a student has written if the student who wrote it is present. This is so they can answer questions about the material and learn how to improve their own writing.

The Writing Centre can only help you with academic or university-related writing (e.g., assignments, theses, research projects). If the resume or cover letter is part of an assignment for a course at CBU, then you may book an appointment for help.

However, the Writing Centre does not offer help with writing personal job applications, resumes, or cover letters. If you require such assistance, contact Career Services at career_services@cbu.ca.

No, the Writing Centre does not use nor recommend use of Turnitin nor any other similarity-checking software.

However, some instructors use Turnitin to assist them in assessing student work. It is important that students understand what Turnitin is (and isn’t!) and know that they don’t have to submit their work through Turnitin if they have privacy and/or security concerns.

Turnitin is a text-matching tool that compares students’ written assignments with a database of web pages, academic books and articles, as well as other students’ writing. Once students submit an assignment, Turnitin generates a similarity index and an originality report for each submission. The similarity index indicates how much student writing is an exact match to writing from sources already in Turnitin’s database. The originality report highlights phrases in the student writing that match the text in an existing source in Turnitin’s database and provides information about and/or links to those sources.

Note that Turnitin is NOT a “plagiarism checking” tool and that there is no “plagiarism score.” It is up to the human assessing the work — your instructor — to determine whether any text in the student assignment that matches text in Turnitin’s database is properly cited or not. For example, quotations and citations used in your assignment would be reflected in the similarity index and originality report, but as long as you have properly quoted, summarized/paraphrased, and cited the sources you’ve used in your writing, you have not plagiarized.

Students should know the following:

• Turnitin is an optional tool within Moodle that some instructors use for assistance in assessing student work.
• Turnitin cannot determine if something is plagiarized; only humans can do that!
• Turnitin determines where words, phrases, and sentences in your assignment are the exact same as those in any of the works in its database. There are lots of instances in which it would be completely appropriate — and desirable even — for these matches to occur, including properly cited words, phrases, and sentences, and citations themselves.
• All submissions to Turnitin are housed on the Turnitin server based in California, and these files are subject to the USA PATRIOT Act, 2001.
• Your work and personal data are protected by provincial privacy laws and policies including the Personal Information International Disclosure Protection Act (PIIDPA) and Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPOP). This means that you don’t have to submit your assignments through Turnitin if you have privacy and/or security concerns.
• Instructors are not permitted to submit student assignments to Turnitin. A student must upload the file themselves within their own Moodle account to indicate that they consent to their work being submitted to Turnitin.
• Instructors must allow students to opt out of submitting assignments through Turnitin. Students can choose to opt out at any time during a course.
• If your instructor is using Turnitin for assignment submission but you do not want to submit your assignments through this software, you should contact your instructor as soon as possible to determine an alternative way to submit your assignment, such as through another submission tool in Moodle or by email.

Students can book up to 10 appointments per term with a maximum of 2 appointments per week (and no more than 1 appointment per day). The Centre may limit appointments to 1 per week during busy times so as many students as possible can get help.

Students who use their 10 term appointments and would like to book more for that term should contact the Writing Centre Coordinator by emailing the Writing Centre at writing_centre@cbu.ca.

If a student cannot attend their Writing Centre appointment, they should cancel as soon as possible so that another student can take the spot. They can cancel by following these steps:

• login to their Writing Centre account
• click on their appointment on the Writing Centre schedule
• click “Cancel Appointment” at the bottom of the appointment booking

If they are unable to cancel their appointment using these steps, they should email the Writing Centre at writing_centre@cbu.ca or phone 902-563-1325 to let us know they need to cancel.

For in-person and MS Teams appointments, students who do not attend their appointments and do not cancel in advance of their appointment time will have their appointments marked as “no-shows.” For written comments appointments, students who do not provide a draft for feedback by the start of their appointment time will have their appointments marked as “no-shows.”

After two no-shows, students will no longer be able to book Writing Centre appointments without special permission from the Coordinator, which they can obtain by emailing writing_centre@cbu.ca and requesting account reactivation.

We have this policy because we value time: yours and ours! Taking the time to cancel your appointment if you know you cannot attend (instead of just not showing up) means another student can use the time.

Students can make up to 5 Writing Centre appointments to discuss an honours thesis, directed study, or Advanced Research Project.

The Writing Centre is a tutoring service, not a proofreading or editing service. Writing advisors will help students with grammar and expression issues, but they’ll do it by:

• answering grammar and usage questions
• pointing out and explaining recurring errors in students’ writing and how to fix them
• suggesting strategies for strengthening students’ proofreading and editing skills

The Writing Centre’s goal is to teach to become better editors of their own work.

Writing advisors do not grade, or suggest potential grades, for students’ assignments.

The Writing Centre can provide feedback on take-home tests or exams but only IF students get permission from their professor or instructor. Students can show us an email from their professor or instructor giving permission, or the professor or instructor can email or phone the Centre to let us know (writing_centre@cbu.ca or 902-563-1325).

Students may only bring their own work to an appointment at the Writing Centre.

Groups can come to the Centre to discuss an assignment or questions they have in common, such as the assignment instructions, organization, citation, and formatting. All group members should attend group appointments. We will only review a section a student has written if the student who wrote it is present. This is so they can answer questions about the material and learn how to improve their own writing. In other words, one group member cannot bring another group member’s writing for review.

The Writing Centre can only help students with academic or university-related writing (e.g., assignments, theses, research projects). If the resume or cover letter is part of an assignment for a course at CBU, then a student may book an appointment for help.

However, the Writing Centre does not offer help with writing personal job applications, resumes, or cover letters. If students require such assistance, they can contact Career Services at career_services@cbu.ca.

The Writing Centre follows, and encourages students to follow, CBU’s No Perfume/Scent-Reduced Policy. Writing Centre staff have allergies, so please follow this policy when attending an in-person appointment.