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Students may come to the Center at any time on their own; they do not need a faculty referral. To apply for tutoring, students should simply drop in to the Center and speak to our friendly staff.

When students come to the Center for tutoring, they are assigned to an individual tutor for one-on-one help, to a small group, or to a class taught by a tutor. Assignments depend on the student's schedule and level of skill. Sessions are usually held once a week for fifty minutes, but that varies. Students who wish to do so may make two or three appointments a week.

The Center's tutorial staff offers help in all stages of writing:

Pre-writing: overcoming writing block, generating material, formulating a thesis, doing research
Writing: organizing, paragraphing, supporting one's points, expressing one's ideas clearly
Post-writing: revising, reorganizing, proofreading

Since tutors strive to develop and improve the writing abilities of their tutees, the Center recommends long-term tutoring once or more times a week for part of a semester or for an entire semester. Although some hours are reserved for "walk-ins," the best way for a student to use the Center is to plan to attend a number of sessions on a regular basis. The ideal situation is for students to come to the Center and arrange appointments when a paper is first assigned to them or whenever they feel that their writing could use improvement.

It is important to understand that tutors do not edit students' papers for them. Tutors do, however, teach editing skills as an important part of the writing process.

The Alan Siegel Writing Center not only offers one-to-one tutoring, but also computer-assisted tutoring. Equipped with fifteen state-of-the-art computers on which students can work on their writing and revisions, the Alan Siegel Writing Center also has a variety of user friendly grammar and writing software.

Mission Statement

Writing is the center of every academic and intellectual enterprise. The mission of the Alan Siegel Writing Center is to help students registered at all levels of the curriculum—undergraduate and graduate--become more competent, more confident and, in the long run, more independent writers. Our goal is to foster a friendly, comfortable, and non-judgmental environment in which students can discuss their writing difficulties and to assist and guide students who need or wish to improve their writing skills.

The Center is staffed, for the most part, by peer tutors at both undergraduate and graduate levels who have undergone at least one year of rigorous training in the writing process, tutoring paradigms, and Writing Center pedagogy, and who have interned in the Center and worked in the College’s immersion programs, that is, the FYE January program or summer academy. The peer tutors offer students supportive, personal attention at all levels of the writing process: comprehending an assignment, selecting a focused topic, developing a thesis, drafting a paper, organizing and developing an essay, citing sources and, finally, learning to incorporate into their own writing the grammatical and syntactical standards of written English. Rather than being a proofreading and editing service, the Alan Siegel Writing Center helps students become their own proofreaders and editors by teaching them the necessary skills. Ultimately, our vision is to impart to students skills that would prepare them for a writing intensive world, independent of course work and exams.

In terms of its role at the College, as an academic support service dedicated to improving the writing skills of all John Jay students across the curriculum, the Alan Siegel Writing Center is at the core of the College’s mission in supporting undergraduate education. The Center’s services are closely interwoven with several important initiatives that are integral to the College: General Education, Writing across the Curriculum and in the Disciplines/WI courses, CUNY test preparation via its ESL services, the First Year Experience and First Year Writing Program, and the SASP Early Start summer program. Through one-to-one tutoring, workshops in all areas of writing across the curriculum, and test preparation support, the Writing Center balances its involvement in all the undergraduate initiatives in its efforts to maximize literacies crucial to student success and to promote writing competence across the curriculum. Moreover, the Writing Center is also dedicated to improving the writing level of all graduate students seeking our assistance to help them achieve greater eloquence and clarity in their writing.