Send Us a Draft

Frequently Asked Questions

This is one of our online learning support services where you send us what you are working on and we will respond to you by email, in writing, or through a video. We set up this service so we can better connect with students who:

  1. Are in off-campus programs
  2. Are looking for after-hours support
  3. Are not able to come into our physical space
  4. Prefer to work online asynchronously

This is here to make our services more accessible to you, so check out the other FAQ questions and see if this might be something you’re looking for.

We will send you a written or a video response with strategies and approaches that address your main concerns. You are welcome to request a format type, or if you say, “whatever format best suits my concerns,” then we will pick the response type we think will work well.

Our responses normally focus on one or two things that you ask us about. Our form asks for your main concerns and where you are in your work—we use these to understand your needs and to compose our responses. This might look like feedback on how your work is aligning with the assignment description, sharing with you how we interpret your organization and structure, or maybe asking you some questions to help you think through your main ideas.

We know that lots of different feedback can be overwhelming, so our responses are often limited in how much we’re responding to. That said, you are always welcome to write back to us. We didn’t cover something you wanted to hear about? Ask us! Realized you wanted to ask about something different? Go ahead! One response from us isn’t everything, but we hope it can be something helpful in your process.

We acknowledge that you know your work better than we do, so we appreciate your guidance in helping us know what feedback to provide. We can share with you how we respond to your work, things that work well for us, strategies that might be helpful for you, and tips and tricks when writing into specific fields and genres. Thing is, we do this best when we can hear from you about where you are in your work. We know this can be hard to explain, so we’d like to share with you some ways we do this ourselves:

  • “I’m really just trying to get words on the page right now since getting started is tricky for me. Do you have any thoughts on how I can expand on the ideas I have here?”
  • “I’m about to turn this in and I’m really just looking for another person to look over it. Is there anything standing out to you that is confusing or doesn’t make sense?”
  • “I’m working on my transitions right now. This is my third draft and I have all these ideas but I’m not sure how they’re connecting. What connections are you seeing between them? What can I do to refine my connections?”

Give us your own sentence or questions about your work and what you’re looking for in the submission form!

 

When you submit your work to us we do our best to send you a response within 48 hours. We ask for that time to match your work with one of our studio assistants and for them to read it and compose a response.

We want to be responsive to your learning style and what is going to work well for you. To that end, we have a space on our request form where you can disclose any disability or accommodations information you would like to share. You can also tell us what kind of responses are helpful for you and your approach to learning. At the same time, we strive to keep accessibility in mind with all our consultations, regardless of what you choose to share with us; it is not necessary for you to disclose any disability information for you to get support.

We are a learning support service, so our foremost goal is to work with you on developing strategies to become a more effective editor yourself. Sometimes this will include identifying patterns of grammatical error and describing ways you can address those errors. Other times we may model a suggested approach to reworking a paragraph. However, we don’t “fix” papers because then it takes over your voice in the process. 

Nope! We are happy to respond to your work at whatever stage you are at. That can be brainstorming, notes, full drafts, or anywhere in between or outside of those things. Sometimes it can be helpful to submit your work to us at different stages—you are welcome to submit an outline, get a response, write a draft, and then submit again!

You are most likely to get a response from one of our studio assistants, who are all students like you. We come from a variety of disciplines so you may have a geology major or a creative writing major writing or sending a video to you, but we are all trained in supporting research, reading, and writing across disciplines. Alternatively, we also have some subject librarians on staff who may be responding to your work as well

Yes! Here is an example of what a response might look like:


Hi Anna!

My name is Rose, I’m the Studio Assistant responding to your draft submission. I noticed this is your first time using our online services, so I wanted to give you an idea of how this works. I read through your draft keeping in mind the concerns you’ve mentioned. Then I respond to them with my thoughts and strategies you can use as you continue to revise. If you have more questions or are still feeling unsure about anything, don’t hesitate to respond to this email and we can try something different!

Before I start my response, I wanted to thank you for sharing your work with me—this being your first time with our online services, I wanted to acknowledge that sharing writing with someone else can often be a nerve-wracking thing, so thank you for trusting me with it.

I really enjoyed reading your analysis, especially since I haven’t had the chance to revisit The Hunger Games through any critical or theoretical frameworks before. I haven’t read the series in years and your writing got me rethinking a lot of the social structures at play in the books!

I saw on your draft submission that you listed your main concerns as “Fulfilling assignment expectations” and “Reading & Evaluating Sources.” I’m going to respond to one at a time:

Fulfilling Assignment Expectations

  • Rewriting the Assignment Strategy:
    • You mentioned that it’s been hard matching the amount of analysis your professor seems to be looking for. The assignment description you attached has a lot of requirements and they aren’t organized based on the components your professor wants, so I can see how this has been tricky! One of the first things I like to do when I get an assignment like this is to rewrite the description for myself. This can help you narrow down all the information to get the specific things that need to be in your blog. For your assignment, I reorganized the bullet points into two categories: Theory text and Secondary text. Then I bolded the things that have to be in your blog post (like “at least three examples”) and I wrote in italics the things you have written (like [Foucault’s theory on prisons] as your theory text). As you start to fill out the things in italics, you can see where you have met the analysis expectations and spots that might need a little more clarification.

Reading & Evaluating Sources

  • Clarifying your three examples
    • One thing I noticed when I was rewriting your assignment description is that your professor asked for three examples from your secondary text (in this case, The Hunger Games). Be sure that you also explain your secondary text, so that readers can follow your argument; in other words, provide an overview and any relevant information about that text, including the explication of at least three examples.” From what I could tell, it looks like you’ve inverted this and used three examples of Foucault’s theory with matching application in The Hunger Games. I think this approach could still match your professor’s assignment description if the paragraphs where you explain the connection to The Hunger Games have clearly marked examples within them.
    • For instance, your last example from Foucault’s theory—Constant surveillance—pairs with your description of how the society functions in The Hunger Games: “they could be the perfect citizen and still face punishment and discipline just like how someone could be the model prisoner, but they are still being watched” (4). I love this sentence because it weaves together your analysis of how The Hunger Games society is structured and how it reflects the prison system. It would be really useful here, for me as a reader, to have some specifics about how this plays out in the books. Is there a character who was a perfect citizen but still faced punishment? Are there specific examples you could point to of how the theory of constant surveillance works within the world of The Hunger Games? You’ve already done the work with specific examples of Foucault’s theory (like the panopticon example), now it’s about doing the same thing with your secondary text. 
    • It might be helpful to write out what each of your examples were—both Foucault and The Hunger Games examples—and where you see them being explained in your paper. Here is my version of this:

 

Paragraph 3:

  • Theory Example ONE: Perpetual Assessment
    • Hunger Games Example ONE: Reaping

Paragraph 4:

  • Theory Example TWO: “Worsening Results”/ “Unwilling to Waste”
    • Hunger Games Example TWO: Children’s exploitation before their death in the Games
  • Theory Example THREE: Constant Surveillance
    • Hunger Games Example THREE: How the Hunger Games society functions

 

I hope my thoughts are helpful as you’re finishing up your paper! If you need anything, want to clarify, or chat about anything else, please don’t hesitate to respond to this message!

Thanks,

Rose

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