GWS Fall 2024 Schedule

First day of Tutoring -- Monday, September 16, 2024

Last Day of Tutoring -- Friday, December 13, 2024

Schedule a GWS Appointment

Graduate Writing Service tutors are experienced writers and teachers of writing from multiple disciplines -- with scholarly and professional backgrounds in the humanities and social and physical sciences. 

We are available weekdays and evenings to work with Cornell graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff to refine and develop strategies for drafting and revising writing projects and teaching materials. 

During a typical session, Graduate Writing Service tutors may help writers to:

• get started with writing projects and teaching artifacts by brainstorming ideas, planning organizational schemes, evaluating materials, defining research questions.
• explore ways to shape coherent arguments, make strong use of evidence, work with appropriate citation conventions.
• consider questions about depth of analysis, organization, thesis statements, paragraph development, audience expectations, style, sentence structure.
• identify patterns of error in grammar or usage in order to develop effective strategies for line editing.

We offer three different types of appointments: you can meet with GWS tutors on campus at 172 Rockefeller Hall; you can meet with GWS tutors for a 60-minute digital appointment using an internet-based video, audio, or synchronous messaging platform, or you can submit a draft for a GWS tutor's written feedback.

Our tutoring program is by appointment only, so to get started, you need to register for an account.

Next, you need to decide how you would like our feedback.

If you select a FACE-TO-FACE APPOINTMENT, unless otherwise noted, you will meet in 44 Klarman Hall.  We strongly recommend that you upload a draft 24 hours before your scheduled appointment time. 

If you select an ONLINE APPOINTMENT, you will meet with a tutor in a platform similar to a Zoom or Skype. You and the tutor can view, edit, and discuss your draft synchronously. You will be able to see each other (if you both enable the video feature), chat out loud (if you have a microphone or camera), or type in a messaging window on the right side of the screen. To prepare for your appointment, you should:

• upload a draft within 24 hours of your scheduled appointment time.
• a few minutes before your scheduled appointment time, log in to the scheduling site at https://cornell.mywconline.com
• click on your red appointment block
• look for red text in the middle of the pop-up window "Start or join online consultation."
• click "Start or join online consultation" to open online meeting
• Tutors are prepared to help you navigate technology issues—they will email you to check-in and offer help should you have any trouble “showing up.”

If you select an eTUTORING APPOINTMENT, you must upload a draft 24 hours before your scheduled appointment time. The tutor will read and respond to your draft and upload written comments by the end of the scheduled timeslot. eTutoring appointments are reserved for clients who have already met with a writing tutor to discuss the current writing project. When you submit an appointment request, name the tutor you met with and briefly describe the work plan you established with them.

The Graduate Writing Service is generally flexible in our work with writers, but the following guidelines may help you to better understand how we function.

Cancellation Policy

Writers should cancel tutoring appointments no less than 8 hours before the scheduled appointment.

We understand that you may not realize until the last minute that you cannot attend your tutoring appointment. As a courtesy to tutors and to wait-listed writers, please be sure to cancel as soon as possible.

If you miss three appointments (without canceling them) within a 12-month period, your WC Online account will be automatically disabled. After one month, you may contact the GWS Director to request that your account be reinstated.

Editing/Proofreading Policy

Editing is a crucial part of the writing process. In order to produce precise and polished prose, writers must direct attention to the sentence-level. And, as is the case when refining prose for clarity and concision, developing strategies for editing your own work requires time, practice, and patience.

Tutors at the Graduate Writing Service are available to provide certain kinds of micro-level support. Tutors will clarify rules, explain conventions, provide examples, and guide writers as they revise their own sentences. Tutors will discuss style, language, and rhetorical choices. But tutors are not editors – they cannot correct grammar, syntax, punctuation, or typographical errors. With sentence-level work, the tutor's goal will be to help you identify an error and correct it on your own. 

Here are some of the reasons why we have a NO-EDITING policy:

• There is no pedagogical value in having a tutor edit a writer's paper. Writers do not learn when other people correct errors for them. The GWS’s primary goal is to ensure that students have access to learning opportunities, so during tutoring sessions, tutors use specific pieces of writing to engage broader discussions about academic writing and to encourage robust interventions into student writing processes.
• Copyediting someone else’s writing requires a highly specialized skill set. Writing tutors are not professional editors; they simply do not have the training, experience, or desire to perform such technical work.
• Tutors are Cornell University students themselves. They cannot complete assignments for other students. As such, deep collaboration of this kind, line-by-line editing, could violate Cornell University’s Code of Academic Integrity and thus put writers and tutors at risk.

Editing/Proofreading Strategies

Editing is hard work. Even experienced writers can come up against severe obstacles as they home in on the word, paragraph, or page: Writers may be fatigued or stressed or facing a new kind of writing task. They might speak and write other languages, or they might be managing learning differences or disabilities.  They might have knowledge gaps or unevenly developed skills. They might be reaching to learn.

Tutors at the Graduate Writing Service are eager to help writers become more confident, efficient, and effective readers and editors of their own writing. Here are several typical strategies tutors will use for sentence-level writing work: 

• LOCATE PATTERNS. Writing tutors read through significant portions of a writing project (no more than 5 pages) and identify ONLY phrases or sentences in which a writer's choices interfere with clear and effective communication. Writing tutors, for instance, may observe grammatical or mechanical errors (such as, run-on sentences or subject-verb agreement); and/or syntactical habits that obscure clarity (such as, overusing "this" and "that" or nominalizations). Writing tutors circle recurring patterns or put check marks in the margins to signal repetition. Writing tutors then explain what they see and work with writers to revise.
• SELECT A PASSAGE OF TEXT. Writing tutors read through a short section of a writing project (one paragraph, perhaps, but no more than one page) and identify a range of grammatical, mechanical, or syntactical issues. Writing tutors circle phrases or sentences throughout the short section or put check marks in the margins to indicate questions about a writer's choices in the marked lines. Writing tutors then explain what they see and work with writers to revise.
• READ OUT LOUD. Writing tutors listen as writers read aloud portions of their writing (no more than 3-5 pages) and mark any places where writers say something different than what is on the page. Alternatively, writing tutors read papers out loud while writers mark any places that do not sound as intended.

Cornell Writes! Tips from our community of writers

Cornell Writes! is a digital newsletter sponsored by the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines and the Cornell University Graduate School.

Each week, a member of our writing community shares a writing strategy from their own writer’s toolkit. Weekly tips are designed to help writers at all levels and across disciplines to become more comfortable with their drafting processes; to build concrete and flexible practices for using writing to explore, develop, and present ideas; and to connect writers, who may sometimes feel isolated or alone, to a community grounded in our shared investment in writing. #writelikeabear

Cornell Writes!

Cornell Writing Centers Writing Guides

Handouts and videos developed by Knight faculty and tutors, and link to online writing resources.

The guides collected here provide overviews of specific writing skills, components of academic writing, or process-based advice that writers may find useful. The guides offer explanations, strategies, examples, templates, and other types of writerly advice.

CWC Writing Guides

Self-Advocacy: Resources for Students

Sample letters, tips, and other resources to help students who use English as an additional language to better communicate with faculty.

The English Language Support Office compiles here  resources for students who use English as an additional language to self-advocate for pedagogical conditions that support their learning and allow them to better showcase their knowledge.

Tamar Gutfeld

Assistant Director

PhD Candidate, German Studies

I am a PhD candidate in German studies, and research representations of families in 20th-century literature and film in critical connection to crisis and authority. I have tutored at the Knight Institute since Fall 2019, and work with students from all disciplines on experimenting with language between scholarly convention and individual writing patterns. In a meeting with me, expect to be asked questions about your preferences and choices as a writer. My tutoring sessions are a space to discuss everything and anything related to the writing process, from the prewriting phase to the final touches. I work from within the text and emphasize your position as its author.  

As assistant director of the GWS, I strive to promote the center’s work throughout the university. We would love to collaborate with you on your next workshop idea, departmental write-in, or writing group needs. Please feel free to contact me: tg388@cornell.edu.

Ariel Estrella

PhD Candidate, Department of Literatures in English

I am a sixth year doctoral candidate in Literatures in English, with a minor in Latinx Studies. I primarily work with contemporary poetry and visual art by queer people of color. My research looks into immateriality as a lens to understand the provisional aesthetics of incomplete, interrupted, and otherwise disrupted works.

My strength as a tutor is within FWS instructional support (such as lesson plans, course design, responding to student writing, and assignment writing). I draw from my teaching experiences here at Cornell: I have taught five FWS courses, acted as a TA/reader many times, and spent a summer working as a WRIT 7100 graduate assistant. I also offer a special service in addition to my appointment blocks for peer classroom observations. You can arrange a visit by emailing me at ame247@cornell.edu. Apart from pedagogical development, I am especially skilled at working with clients who are experiencing writer's block or who are in a planning/visioning stage of their writing process.

Dominique Joe

PhD Student, Department of Literatures in English

(on leave)

I am a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English. My research interest centers around Black women’s writing, African American literature, African diasporic writing, and 20th-21st century literature. While my work is primarily situated in literary studies, I am very interested in writing and the writing process required from a wide variety of disciplines.

As a tutor, I like to approach the revision of writing from a place of questions to create a dialogue and discussion between me and the writer I am working with. This conversation will also largely be based on the needs and concerns that the writer communicates. Within sessions, depending on the needs of the writer, I will focus first on organizational concerns, argument construction, and flow, before delving into things such as sentence structure and word choice. My ultimate goal from any tutoring session is to leave you with tools, suggestions, and potentially new ways of approaching your own writing.

Ryan Randle

PhD Candidate, Medieval Studies Program

I am a PhD Candidate in the Medieval Studies Program, with a Graduate Minor in Media Studies. My main research interests center on the intersection between practical effects and bodily affects associated with the Horror genre in late medieval performance culture and postmodern horror cinema.

During my time here at Cornell, I have served as the Graduate Reader for one course, designed two different First Year Writing Seminar (FWS) courses, taught for a total of five semesters as the Graduate Instructor of Record, and served as a WRIT 7100 Co-Facilitator on three different occasions. In addition to my expertise in academic writing and university-level writing pedagogy, I am also a Medieval Section Editor at The Sundial, an open-access publication facilitated through the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) dedicated to connecting premodern pasts with inclusive futures. My work there primarily consists of soliciting pieces from medieval and early modern scholars with exciting perspectives and making their research accessible to a more general audience.

Due to the breadth of my writing, editing, and teaching experience, I feel extremely comfortable working through a wide variety of writing needs. As your writing tutor, I would like to approach our meeting times as a venue of community-centered writing practices with an emphasis on clearly articulating ideas (we write to be understood!) and developing strategies to work around professional, personal, or time constraints.

The John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines employs matriculated graduate students to work as peer writing tutors at the Graduate Writing Service.

Graduate Writing Service tutors are experienced writers and teachers of writing from multiple disciplines. Tutors are available weekdays and evenings to work with Cornell graduate students, postdocs, and faculty to refine and develop strategies for drafting and revising writing projects and teaching materials of all kinds:

• dissertation chapters, seminar papers, research proposals, grant applications, conference presentations, professional articles
• job letters, teaching philosophies
• teaching materials (syllabi, writing assignments & lesson plans), and responding to student writing

Job Description

• GWS tutors typically work 5 hours per week. (Tutors set their own hours.)
  • Tutors can choose to meet with writers face to face on campus. (Office space is available.)
  • Tutors can choose to hold tutoring sessions online – via video conference or synchronic, text-based discussion. 
  • Tutors can choose to tutor electronically (eTutor) and provide written feedback on drafts that writers submit online.
• Tutors are expected to attend one-hour monthly staff/professional development meetings. 
• Additional opportunities include special projects assignments and promotion to Senior Tutor and Graduate Assistant Director.
• Academic-year tutors earn between $17.00 and $19.00 per hour.
• Summer tutors earn between $18.00 and $20.00 per hour.

How to Apply

• Prerequisites: Enrolled status, experience teaching or tutoring and/or successful completion of WRIT 7100 or WRIT 7101.
• Materials: Submit a CV and letter of interest detailing relevant employment or coursework to Dr. Tracy Hamler Carrick (tracyhcarrick@cornell.edu).
• Deadline: Applications accepted on a rolling basis.

• Have you visited the Graduate Writing Service recently? Would you like to offer us your feedback? Click here: GWS Feedback.
• For answers to questions about the Service or if you need special assistance, contact Dr. Tracy Hamler Carrick, Knight Institute Writing Workshop Director and Graduate Writing Service Director.

Cornell Help for Engineering Communication

The CHEC maintains a website with useful information pertinent to writing and presenting in engineering fields. Follow this link to learn more about writing abstracts and literature reviews, including equations in your writing, formatting presentation slides, and writing captions for visuals, among other topics.

Cornell Writing Centers

The CWC provides support for individuals at any stage of the writing process. It is a free resource available to all of Cornell—undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, faculty, and alumni—for nearly any kind of writing project: applications, presentations, lab reports, essays, papers, and more. Tutors serve as responsive listeners and readers who can address questions about the writing process or about particular pieces of writing. All tutors have training in supporting multilingual writers, working with writers remotely, and in supporting writers working on application materials. Follow this link to make an appointment at the Cornell Writing Centers.

English Language Support Office

ELSO offers writing and speaking support to multilingual and international graduate and professional students that meets the needs of students in diverse programs, from diverse linguistic backgrounds, and at diverse points in their graduate careers. offers individual consultations by trained peer tutors on any type of writing – from job application materials to dissertation chapters – at any point in the writing process – from brainstorming to finalizing. The GWS is available to all graduate and professional students.  Follow this link to learn more about ELSO's coursework, workshops, and tutoring programs.

Local Editors and Proofreaders

The Knight Institute maintains a list of local editors and proofreaders. Although their services are not free, many on the list offer a sliding scale rate. Follow this link for a current list of professional editors and proofreaders for hire.  

Resources for Writing Competitive Fellowship Applications

The Graduate School offers a series of fellowship preparation workshops, consultation and peer review services, and an informative website. 

Write-Ins

Graduate and professional students with writing goals are invited to the Big Red Barn every Monday-Friday, 8:00 to 11:00 a.m. Be more productive and accountable; write with a supportive community. Sign in with your goals for the day, use the Barn during a quieter time, and enjoy coffee and tea. 

Write Together at Home

Write Together at Home provides graduate and professional students and postdocs with community, structure, and resources to support their writing. This program is designed to kick-start summer writing practice during the month of June, as well as to help establish writing practices and peer writing networks that will sustain writing throughout the summer.Follow this link for more information about the Write Together at Home: Graduate Writing Program.

GWS Workshop

Ready to set new goals for your writing?

Join GWS tutor Tamar Gutfeld & GWS Director Tracy Hamler Carrick for a hands-on workshop for drafting and revising.

Setting Goals for Your Text

Thursday, February 8, 2024

2:00pm - 3:15pm

In this workshop, we will discuss and reframe common conceptions about goal-setting to build a sustainable writing practice. 

We will discuss how our texts work...for us!

And we will work with our own drafts to set the goals that serve us best.

Bring a draft of any kind, at any stage!

Register here