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Writing center

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Most colleges, universities, and many secondary schools maintain a Writing Center, which provides students with free assistance on their papers, projects, and reports from trained professionals, consultants, or peer tutors. Typical services include help with purpose, structure, and organization of writing and are geared toward writers of all levels and fields of study. In general, writing centers also offer assistance with grammar and syntax and help with citation of sources for research papers using one of various recognized formats, such as MLA, APA, and Turabian with emphasis on helping writers learn how to revise grammatical, syntactical, and citation problems on their own. Some institutions also offer an Online Writing Lab, often abbreviated as OWL.

A writing center usually offers individualized conferencing whereby the writing tutor offers his or her feedback on the piece of writing at hand; a writing tutor's main function is to discuss how the piece of writing might be revised for clarity and grammatical correctness. However, the tutor usually does not proofread nor edit the student's work. Instead, the tutor facilitates the student's attempts to revise his or her own work by conversing with the student about the topic at hand or about the writing process (i. e., the methodical ways that writers can use to produce a piece of writing) and/or reviewing compositional and grammatical principles.