The reasons behind this desire to see students before their completed work goes back to the underlying theme most writing centers have, that it is the writer that needs to be changed, not necessarily the text. By helping the writer in the early stages of the writing process most centers hope to be able to show students that they will in fact become more productive and efficient when they sit down to write on their own. Many writing centers offer resources, both on and off line, that aid students in some of the more basic of writing problems. These resources vary from handouts, to tutorials, to conferences on various topics. This notion of providing students with various opportunities to better their writing ability coincides with the higher goal of the writing center, which is to produce better writers.
Students visit with ideas, notes, parts of early drafts, and even final drafts.
The Writing Center is designed to offer students of all years and majors a place to get feedback on writing. The peer tutors who work in the Writing Centers are both undergraduates and graduate students. The Writing Center's goal is to help writers improve their writing in general, not to help writers improve a particular piece of writing. While not trained specifically in grammar, tutors work to identify consistent patterns of errors and will help writers to create strategies to avoid such errors in future. Tutors also help to identify inconsistencies of voice, problems with unity and coherence, difficulties with an argument's progression, weak theses, and a myriad of other trouble spots.