For Students

Develop your writing skills and confidence. The Writing Center provides individualized, one-on-one support to all Champlain students during all stages of the writing process.

The Champlain Writing Center (CWC) provides free one-to-one writing consultations for any member of the Champlain community.

The CWC can help you develop ideas, create a coherent thesis, decipher an assignment, or organize your paper into a logical, coherent whole.

In short, if you would like to talk to a knowledgeable peer about your writing projects, get extra feedback, or simply make a good paper excellent, the Writing Center is the place to go. For answers to a few common questions, keep reading!

Common Questions About the Writing Center

  • Using Google Chrome, log in to TutorTrac with your Champlain credentials and follow the prompts. If you’d like to work with the same consultant at the same time every week, we can accommodate that¡ªjust call Leslie Van Wagner at (802) 865-8449.

  • Be ready to share any drafts of the project you’re working on and the assignment guide your professor has provided for you. If you want to brainstorm, just bring yourself and your assignment.

  • Any writing project you’re completing, both academic and non-academic! If you have a paper due in a course and don’t know where to start, we can help. If you have a short story you’re trying to get published and want a careful, sympathetic reader, we can help. If you’re writing a graduate school application and want to know about the codes and conventions of this work, we can help.

    Specifically, we can work with you on:

    • Research Papers
    • Essays
    • Case Studies
    • Creative Writing
    • Capstone Projects
    • Personal Statements
    • Storyboards
    • Business Plans

  • No, it does not matter what course you are working on. We can help with them all!

  • We can’t edit your papers or go line-by-line through the document for proofreading purposes. We can certainly talk about grammar and other sentence-level issues, but our goal is to help you understand these things better so that, next time, you’re able to uncover and fix these errors yourself. (In other words, don’t expect to leave the writing-center consultation with a grammatically perfect paper.)

    We also can’t promise an improved grade. The CWC is a non-evaluative place. This means that we don’t get into conversations or speculate about the likely grade of any given projects. However, we’re confident that what we do talk about will make you a better writer in the long run!

  • Yes! We can help you interpret your professor’s feedback and organize a plan to help get you started on your revisions. What we do during consultations is confidential.

  • At the CWC, we believe that every piece of writing tells a story. When a chemist writes, they are telling the story of how an observable process happens. When a creative writer composes a short story, they tell a story through conventional means like characters, setting, and plot. Creating the right kind of story is one of the cornerstones of good writing, and we can help you develop that story no matter what form it takes.