If you're registered at University College, you have access to a free instructional service, the UC Writing Centre.

Our last day of opening in fall term is Dec. 7. You may now book appointments during spring term.

Attention: If you can't get an appointment, you may place yourself on the waiting list for as many days as you like. Appointments do become available through cancellations. Use the calendar on the welcome page to navigate to any specific day.

One of our instructors will see you as a drop-in starting at 20 minutes after the hour as long as the scheduled student doesn't shown. See our policies below.

Appointments: Our highly trained instructors will consult with you individually on course assignments at any stage and in any subject. Individual consultations are fifty minutes long, starting at ten minutes after the hour. To ensure that you get a spot, you may need to book three or even four weeks in advance, especially during the second half of term. If nothing is available, you may place yourself on our waiting list. If you have an appointment and need to cancel or rebook, please cancel at least one day in advance so someone else can have the spot.

To give all UC students a fair chance at access, we follow these principles:

• You may reserve up to three appointments at any one time and come as often as once a week. You'll benefit most if you work with us regularly.
• You may book your appointment with one particular instructor, though sometimes that instructor won't be available.
• People who skip more than one appointment may lose their access. After all, there are others waiting!
• Sorry, we don't look at application letters or admissions statements.

What We Do. We work with you to help you develop your capacity to plan, organize, write, and revise academic papers. That means we'll go over your written work intensively, at whatever stage you want to consult us. But it is ultimately your responsibility to generate ideas and to get those ideas on paper. Here are some of the ways we can help you:

• We ask about your assignment and discuss your plans with you, helping you understand your topic and clarify your ideas.
• We ask questions about your draft, because if you can articulate your ideas in speech, you'll more easily discover the right words to put on paper.
• We read your writing intensively. You can ask us to scan the whole paper to see if it's coherent, or we can go over one section in detail for style and effective reasoning.
• We demonstrate and teach skills in revising and proofreading, but we don't go through your paper and fix the language errors for you.
• We point you to published material about writing. We also provide you with our own handouts, which answer common questions. You'll find some of our more popular handouts in the racks outside Room 216. You can also see them online on the Web site Writing at the University of Toronto. We can refer you to other sources of help, including librarians, academic or personal counsellors, and courses on writing.

What You Can Do to Help Us Help You: A little forethought can help us work together efficiently. Here are some pointers:

• Be sure to bring in your assignment sheet and other course material to help define what your aims are for the paper.
• Please bring in any drafts in the form of double-spaced hard copies.
• Don't cancel your appointment just because you haven't finished the draft you were going to show us. We can work with you at any stage-and maybe talk with you about how to plan and compose your papers more efficiently
• Don't come in just before the paper is due. Leave time to do lots of revisions after the consultation.
• You will profit most from our teaching if you come back regularly to work on a sequence of skills in a variety of assignments.

Drop-ins: You may also see us on a drop-in basis if a student hasn’t shown up for a scheduled appointment. Here's our policy on drop-ins:

• You may drop in if the instructor's assigned student has cancelled or does not show by 20 minutes after the hour. Schedules are posted on the doors. Look through the windows on the doors of rooms 214 to 220 in Laidlaw Library to see if an instructor is available. Please do not interrupt a session in progress.
• Your drop-in appointment may be cut short if the scheduled student shows up.
• Please bring specific questions and consider ahead of time which part of your essay most needs attention.
• If you have already had an appointment during the week, we will limit your drop-in appointment to between 10 and 15 minutes.

To learn more about the other resources and services available to you as a UC student, visit the Registrar's files offering advice to new students.

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