Our mission is educational.

Consultants strive to facilitate learning during each session using productive conversation and active participation.

We ensure that writers maintain responsibility of their work. We help students learn how to develop a variety of strategies that they can use in any writing situation. By having our clients engage in this learning, they will become better writers, instead of just being able to produce better writing.

We believe that writing is not a solitary act and that writing becomes more effective when we talk about it. The Colorado State University Writing Center is dedicated to providing advice and help in every stage of the writing process. We want to engage the community in discussion about writing in multiple ways. These include face-to-face and online consultations, classroom presentations, and outreach to faculty, staff, and students.

Writers come to us with their own expertise, and we use our training, knowledge, and experience to build on those strengths. We offer resources and strategies to build writers’ beliefs in their own writing processes and abilities. Writers walk away with the confidence to make effective writing choices in any writing situation. In these ways, we support the shared goal of writing centers to make better writers, not just better writing.

We offer advice and resources at every stage of the writing process:

1. Starting: Understanding assignments, brainstorming, discussing and developing ideas
2. Researching: Finding a topic and choosing search terms, conducting searches (on the Internet and the library catalogue), evaluating sources, integrating material into your essay, documentation styles and citations
3. Drafting and Designing: Finding a focus, choosing a purpose, targeting an audience, developing a thesis or an argument, choosing a genre, designing your document
4. Revising: Improving your paper’s organization, expanding ideas, improving clarity and cohesion
5. Polishing: We will not proofread or edit a paper for you, but we will help you learn how to find and correct errors in punctuation, usage, and grammar.