Writing

Book an Appointment
 

Peer tutors help with written assignments for all Douglas College courses at any stage of the writing process.  You can get feedback on your writing from a tutor in two ways:

Real time

Peer tutors can meet with you for 25/55-minute sessions in-person at the New Westminster or Coquitlam campus or via Teams. In your tutoring session, tutors will support you in your writing process in the following ways: 

• help you evaluate and understand the assignment instructions
• discuss your questions about your writing
• review writing techniques, such as thesis development, organization and use of topic sentences
• suggest methods for improving your reading practices and writing
• identify error patterns in your writing and help you improve your editing skills

Submit a draft

Upload your writing assignments to receive thoughtful feedback from tutors, including guiding questions, suggestions, and resources to help strengthen your work.

As a Douglas College student, you also have access to WriteAway, a province-wide service that offers online writing support. Through WriteAway, qualified tutors from participating institutions review your draft assignments and provide constructive feedback to help you improve your writing skills.

Academic integrity and plagiarism

Book a tutoring session to review your understanding and skills for avoiding plagiarism. Choose the following appointments from the drop-down menu when making an appointment.

Avoiding plagiarism

• To learn how to paraphrase and quote effectively, without plagiarizing.
• In this appointment, you’ll focus on developing your paraphrasing and ability to use sources as evidence in your writing assignments. The tutor will introduce you to Douglas College Learning Centre resources available.  
• If you have a writing assignment you are currently working on where you are integrating sources as evidence, please bring it to this session.  A graded assignment will also work to review concepts with the tutor.

Using sources and citations

• To learn how to access and follow guides and manuals in order to use APA, MLA and other citation styles to format your writing assignments, as well as how to connect with a librarian for support with citation formatting.
• In this appointment, you’ll learn how to find the formatting and style rules needed for your assignments, as well as what aspects of the style and formatting are important in most college assignments. The tutor will introduce you to resources available, as well as help you come up with a plan to keep learning the skills needed.
• When booking your appointment, choose the citation style you want to learn about to ensure that you meet with a tutor who is familiar with that particular set of formatting and style rules.

Other academic integrity topics

• To increase awareness of the principles and concepts behind academic integrity and intellectual property, and to answer questions about academic integrity concepts beyond plagiarism and citations.
• In this appointment, you’ll build on your understanding of academic integrity. The tutor will also introduce you to Douglas College resources available, as well as help you come up with a plan to keep learning the skills needed.

Learn more about academic integrity resources at Douglas College.