I am not your copyeditor

"My paper's done, so I just need some help with editing. I just need you to look it over for like, run-ons and punctuation mistakes."
Not the best way to start a session. This particular client had never been to the writing center before (obviously) and was very up front about what he wanted. He seemed to want to get things done quickly and with minimal effort on his part. So the next thing to do was to explain that that's not quite how our session would go.
He didn't seem to get it.
I gave him a description of what we try to do in the WC similar to ones I've given before, but he seemed to think that writing tutors who wouldn't just point out your mistakes had kind of missed the point. In any case, he didn't argue, and we moved on. He didn't see the point of reading aloud either, but I know from experience how very helpful it is (for native speakers at least), so when he said he didn't really want to, I offered to do it for him. As it turned out, reading out loud was beneficial for this client as well. He read along on his copy of the paper (thankfully, I had a client that didn't even want to do that), and often caught his own mistakes as I read through them. When I noticed consistent errors in his reference section, we discussed what style he was using (MLA) and he informed me that he'd used an online generator to create it. I've told several people now--those are not trustworthy. The best thing (I think) is to have a working knowledge of the easier ones and a good reference site, or book I suppose, for the rest of them.
A nice thing about working with this particular client is that he was partially right--he didn't need a lot of help with the kinds of things other clients often do when they come in. His paper was generally well-written and well thought out, with good evidence and an interesting topic. He followed his thesis and used a variety of sources to back up his ideas. When we started going through his paper again, I could bring up ideas instead of helping him with organization, or flow, or evidence, or any of the many other things that prevent a topical exchange of ideas. Sometimes he had already thought of things that I mentioned to him and he was already going to add them (this was a draft). Sometimes, though, I brought up ideas that he had just not thought of, and in the end I felt as though in the future he would probably be better able to self-edit and maybe even think about his ideas from more and different angles. I think it turned out to be more productive than either of us expected it to be, which was a nice surprise. I wouldn't mind having another session kind of like that sometime.