WCOnline for Students: How to be a Good Tutee

In this video, the Writing Lab's own Daschielle gives new student clients a few pointers that can help them ensure their tutoring sessions are as productive as possible.
THE FOUR COMMANDMENTS OF GOOD TUTEE-DOM:
1: Give clear, detailed information about what sort of help you’d like with your document. General or vague descriptions, like “I need help with flow” aren’t as useful to your tutor. Similarly, if you’re doing Online tutoring, have a few ideas of what you’d like to talk about ready to go when the session starts.
Tutors will do what they can to help you if you don’t have any topics of concern in mind, but they’ll be able to do more if you come to the session ready to chat. You can even type out some messages to paste into the chat beforehand--lots of clients prefer this to coming up with messages on the spot.
Prefer chatting to typing? Google Docs has voice-to-text tools, as does Microsoft Office 365.
Google Docs: Select Tools, then Voice Typing.
MS Office 365: In the Word app, select Home.
2: Don’t treat remote tutoring like an editing service. The purpose of tutoring is to work with you on the skills that will help you become a more confident writer over time. This will often entail some aspects of error correction--fixing instances of poor grammar, adding clarity to confusing sentences, and so on. However, a tutor should be thought of mainly as a teacher, and not as an editor.
It’s not an efficient use of the tutor’s time (or yours) to slowly work through a lengthy document, correcting it over multiple sessions without any input from you. So don’t repeatedly submit the same document for tutoring without working on it between sessions. You’ll make faster progress (and become a better writer to boot) if you use the advice of previous tutors to revise your draft in between sessions.
3: Try to avoid pasting tons of text into the Online Tutoring window at once. This can make the tutors' work difficult, particularly if they're in the middle of editing something you've already pasted.
If you must paste lots of text at once, try to clear the distracting highlighting (using the little eye icon) so that you can indicate where you'd like to begin more clearly.
4: During online tutoring, try to give your tutor time to respond to each question in the chat window before sending your next one. Tutors sometimes need time to think before they are able to respond to your question. They might also get most of the way through one response, and then think of something better, and have to re-type things. If you're waiting for a response, remember that, 99% of the time, tutors haven’t forgotten about you--they’re just thinking about what to say.