Praxis 14.3

PR AXIS

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a writing center journal

14.3: STYLE & PEDAGOGY

VOL 14, NO 3 (2017): STYLE & PEDAGOGY TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COLUMNS

From the Editors James Garner and Alejandro Omidsalar Making Tutoring Strange: The Pedagogical Aims of Tutor Training Meredith McCarroll Tutoring Translingual Writers: The Logistics of Error and Ingenuity Beatrice Mendez Newman

FOCUS ARTICLES Reconsidering Reading Models Diana Awad Scrocco Challenging Perceptions: Exploring the Relationship between ELL Students and Writing Centers Joseph Cheatle Learning about Something Means Becoming Wiser: The Platonic Dialogue as a Paradigmatic Model for Writing Center Practice Kathryn Raign Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities: Meeting the Needs of Multilingual Graduate Writers Talinn Phillips Inclusion for the Isolated: Writing Tutoring Strategies for Students with ASD Kristeen E. Cherney Style Makes the Writer: Expanding Considerations of Style in the Writing Center Edward Santos Garza Eavesdropping Twitter: What Students Really Think about Writing Centers Chris Leary

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Diana Awad Scrocco, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English at Youngstown State University where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in professional writing, composition, and pedagogy. She earned a Ph.D. in Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice from Kent State University before collaborating with Joanna Wolfe at Carnegie Mellon University to establish the first communication center on the campus.

Joseph Cheatle, Ph.D., is currently an Associate Director in the Writing Center at Michigan State University. Before working at MSU, Joseph was a Lecturer of Professional Communication in the English Department at Case Western Reserve University as well as a consultant in the Writing Resource Center. At Miami University, where he received his PhD in English, he worked at the Howe Writing Center as a graduate student consultant. His interests include improving the writing center for students throughout the university, creating multiliteracy spaces in writing centers, and implementing best practices for training graduate student and professional consultants.

Kristeen E. Cherney is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Composition at Georgia State University, where she has also worked in the institution’s Writing Studio. Her research interests include disability studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, literacy studies, and composition pedagogy. In addition, Cherney teaches first-year writing courses with themes of literacy studies and primary research.

Edward Santos Garza, M.A., (Twitter/Instagram: @edwardsgarza) has published work in Enculturation, Reflections, and the Houston Chronicle, among other venues. He is a graduate of the University of Houston and Texas State University, where he earned his Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Composition.

Chris Leary, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College in Queens, NY. He received his doctoral degree from CUNY’s Graduate Center in New York, NY. Before joining QCC, he was a writing tutor for fifteen years, at several universities in New York.

Meredith McCarroll, Ph.D., served as Director of the Writing Center and Director of Writing Fellows Program at Clemson University 2012-2015. She is now the Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Southern Cultures, Avidly, Appalachian Journal and is forthcoming in Writing in the Performing and Visual Arts: Creating, Performing and Teaching Across the Disciplines Book Series.

Beatrice Mendez Newman, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Writing and Language Studies Department at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where she teaches first year writing and advanced composition classes. Her research, focused on translingual writing, has been published in several collections and in the Writing Center Journal, the English Journal, Voices from the Middle, and HETS Online Journal. She has also published several books on preparation for Texas educator certification exams. Dr. Newman serves as an NCATE reviewer, a reader for NCTE journal manuscripts, and judge for the NCTE Achievement Awards in Writing.

Talinn Phillips, Ph.D., founded and directs the Graduate Writing and Research Center at Ohio University where she is also a faculty member in English. Her work has appeared in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, WPA: Writing Program Administration and in books by University of Michigan Press and Parlor Press.

Kathryn Raign, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where she has served as the Director of Composition, Director of Developmental Writing, and Director of the UNT Writing Lab. She is the author of several texts, including: Writing for Results: An Introduction to Writing in the Real World of Science and Technology, The Decisive Writer, and Writing Now. Her research interests include the history of the writing lab, the origins of professional writing, and writing center practices. !

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 3 (2017)

FROM THE EDITORS James Garner & Alejandro Omidsalar University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com We here in the Praxis editorial office proudly present our summer 2017 issue, entitled “Style & Pedagogy.” This issue’s articles range from technical and assessment-based concerns about ELL students and tutor training to more freewheeling looks at writerly style, a concept that often goes overlooked in our still-emergent field. We are confident that this issue has something for anyone and everyone with an interest in writing center labor and theory.

Our first column, penned by Meredith McCarroll, addresses student resistance to tutor training courses, pulling from her tutor training experience and research on training programs at Clemson University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. McCarroll makes the point that knowing that you know how to write is just as important as knowing how to write for student tutors. In this issue’s latter column, Beatrice Mendez Newman of the newly minted University of Texas Rio Grande Valley details helpful and practical strategies for one-on-one work with non-native English speaking students, especially those from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. I (Alejandro) had the privilege of watching her give a presentation on the subject at SCWCA 2017, complete with participation and input from the very students whose linguistic progress she was discussing.

The first focus article of this issue finds Diana Awad Scrocco interrogating whether the traditional writing center model of reading students’ writing during consultations is effective for tutors working with advanced students composing discipline-specific papers. Instead of reading papers during the consultation, tutors would employ the read-ahead model, in which students submit their work for the tutors to read before consultation, which Scrocco posits might allow tutors to address advanced writers’ overall concerns more strategically and effectively.

Though the read-ahead method has a few limitations, advanced students might ultimately receive more useful feedback if tutors have the time to read their clients’ work beforehand. Scrocco makes a compelling case that future writing center scholarship should consider the benefits of this model.

In his article, Joseph Cheatle lays out an insightful study of the perceived needs of ELL students versus those of native English speakers when both

populations come to the writing center; surprisingly, his research reveals a striking similarity in student desires for writing center consultations, regardless of their proficiency (or lack thereof) with the English language. Among the various salient points raised, Cheatle argues that—aside from introductory ELL courses—there still are not enough resources for English language acquisition at the university level.

Though that news may be less than welcome to some administrative ears, we here at Praxis believe it is a crucial message, and one that deserves repeating.

Paired with the tutoring strategies in Newman’s column, Cheatle’s observations provide a great deal of food for thought about how writing centers can continue improving their accessibility to students from various linguistic backgrounds and skill levels. While cutting-edge tutorial practices are a big part of what we cover here at Praxis, we also thoroughly appreciate the classics. In her article, Kathryn Raign delves into the Platonic concept of elenchus to model useful vocabularies for student tutors to draw upon when questioning their tutees.

Talinn Phillips’s article provocatively suggests that the commonplace notion that graduate student writers, as nascent experts in their fields, arrive to graduate school fully formed as writers harms multilingual graduate student writers. Providing two fascinating IRB-approved case studies with multilingual graduate writers who felt the sometimes uncomfortable weight of various institutional pressures as their identities shifted from novice to expert, Phillips offers a number of ways that writing centers can adjust their practices to accommodate the needs of these graduate writers as they find their places in their chosen disciplines.

In keeping with this issue’s concerns about pedagogy and accessibility, Kristeen E. Cherney has composed a thoughtful piece about how writing centers can (and should) improve accessibility for students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). She proposes a number of helpful suggestions derived from the universal design principles to make our centers more ASD-friendly, as well as providing an efficient literature review on the admittedly understudied subject of writing centers and ASD. Last, but certainly not least, we close the issue with a pair of articles on the subject of style and its place in

From the Editors • 2 writing centers. Edward Santos Garza directly challenges the writing center shibboleth that casts style as a lower order concern, generally unworthy of tutorial interference. Demonstrating an incisive and charismatic flair all his own, Garza champions style as a tool for “helping writers navigate genre, helping writers take ownership of their work, and helping writers find themselves amid the ocean of academic discourse.” Chris Leary adds perceptive considerations of popular culture (namely the online feud between rappers Drake and Meek Mill) to shine a light on how our students think of and discuss both the idea of originality in writing and the writing center itself on Twitter. Leary’s deft readings of tweets, magazine excerpts, and quotes from hip hop luminaries culminate in one of the most enjoyable and compulsively readable articles published during our tenure as Praxis editors. While we are on the subject of style, we are happy to mark this issue as the premiere of our new cover layout.

On the note of editorial tenure, we unfortunately have to end this issue’s letter from the editor with some bad news. James Garner, one of the longestrunning editors in the brief history of Praxis, is leaving our office this fall for an administrative position at the University Writing Center here at the University of Texas at Austin. We will miss his editorial prowess, his wisdom, and his boundless knowledge of punk and hardcore. But, as one editor leaves his post, another rises to fill it. James and I would both like to welcome Sarah Riddick, our incoming managing editor. Her varied and lengthy experience in the worlds of freelance writing and editing will maintain the quality that has become the signature of Praxis.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 3 (2017)

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MAKING TUTORING STRANGE: THE PEDAGOGICAL AIMS OF TUTOR TRAINING Meredith McCarroll Bowdoin College mmccarro@bowdoin.edu “I don’t think that we even need this class.

Tutoring is really intuitive and the class is pointless.”

These were the words of a student whose poor performance in our tutor training course meant that she was not invited to serve as a Writing Fellow after the course. As the three-credit course over our 15week semester was coming to a close and I made my way through annotated bibliographies and research proposals from the other students in the course, I wondered if she was right. Had the course been pointless? As I walked into the Writing Center during a particularly busy time of day and witnessed a dozen small gestures and phrases that made me proud, I thought again of the student’s assessment. Was she right?

As the director of a program with strong support and an extensive method of recruitment and training, I understand that there are other tutors who forego an official training course and instead learn by doing. I assume that some excellent tutoring takes place in those centers and with those tutors. So in the course that I teach—where we study the history of composition pedagogy, write evaluations of observed tutoring sessions, host guest lectures in second language learning and tutoring, travel to present at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, and conduct local research on our own campus—could I do less with the same results? Is this a waste of time?

In the preface to Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow writes, “I think teachers learn to be more useful when it is clearer that they are not necessary” (vii).

Elbow argues, here and elsewhere, that “learning is independent of teaching” and that learning to write is more about time spent writing than lessons in writing (xviii). In this vein of thinking and teaching, the teacherless classroom is not only possible—it is preferable. Perhaps the same could be said of the selfguided intuitive tutor.

The training course for Writing Fellows at Clemson borrows from other well-established programs and courses. As my colleague Michael LeMahieu and I were designing the first training course, we drew heavily from the strong program at University of Wisconsin, Madison. The course aims to balance theory and practice, exposing students to the chronology of thinking about writing “labs” so that they understand that the current iteration of the

Clemson Writing Center should not be taken for granted. Students read what have become seminal texts in the field of writing center theory and practice: Ben Rafoth’s A Tutor’s Guide; Elizabeth Bouquet’s Noise from the Writing Center; Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth’s ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.

We read composition theory, touching on the key debates and shifts. Students present research on composition textbooks over the past 130 years. We work to understand the ways that meaning is made and that knowledge is constructed, guided by Kenneth Bruffree. The conversations of this course wax philosophical at times, but they always remain grounded in practical application. Students will begin tutoring the following semester, and are driven by a concrete need to know what to do. We thus spend as much time observing tutors and watching and analyzing tutoring film as we spend working through theory. Students voice anxieties, veteran tutors share their experiences, and by the semester’s end, a new cadre of Writing Fellows has formed—prepared and confident. If we skipped all of that work, could the tutoring remain as effective?

Early in our course, I ask students to write a Literacy Autobiography. I define the assignment in very loose terms, encouraging students to become aware of literacy’s definitions as they choose how to write about their own experiences. The result is a range of reflections and a discussion that leaves most of us feeling even more confused. Generally, someone in the room shares early recollections of parental cuddling and Harry Potter. Sometimes there are reflections on journals and stories that made these students—in elementary school—feel like writers. But always, without fail, there is a teacher responsible in these literacy narratives. And usually, it is a hard teacher. Someone who pushed the student to think harder, to revise, to do more research, to extend their vocabulary. It astounds me, in a post-Peter Elbow world, that every student gives the credit for his or her literacy to a teacher.

After noticing this trend, I mentioned it to the students. Weren’t the teachers merely providing a setting for writing and the reading to take place? I tried to convince the students that they were the ones doing the learning and growing. The understanding that emerged from this conversation was summed up

Making Tutoring Strange • 4 best by a student who said, “I think that it isn’t knowing how to write that feels different. It’s knowing that you know.”

As Critical Race Theory spawned Critical Whiteness Studies in the 1990s (not too long after Elbow’s teacherless classroom was praised), scholar David Dyer called on scholars of film to see whiteness anew. Only then, he argued, can whiteness be stripped of its unearned normative power. In order to see whiteness, Dyer says that we must “make whiteness strange” (9). Although Dyer is writing about social and institutional power, this awareness seems similar to the awareness that my student acknowledged in writing. It is not merely the practice of writing that makes one better, though no one would deny the necessity of practice. For my students to think of themselves as writers, they first had to see the label anew. They had to make writing strange in order for the process and the label to have meaning. They needed to look at writing askance, wrestle a bit with the practice of writing, and question the power of the label “writer.”

Only then could they claim it. Only then could they write.

After an extensive interview process, a select group of exceptional students are chosen to be the new class of Writing Fellows. Each year, ten students are selected from a pool of around 75 applications. By the time that the search committee evaluates and ranks the candidates, we are convinced that these students will thrive, and are eager to have them get to work. At that moment, we begin to think of them as Writing Fellows. They have been chosen, and we name them.

Yet, they are not truly tutors.

Perhaps if, at that moment, I threw a few words of caution to the students and asked them to tutor, they would figure it out. Many would tutor beautifully… intuitively, even. I remain convinced, though, that the process of becoming a tutor is important. Beyond the interpellation of an object, the training course places the tutor-in-training in the uncomfortable active position, forcing them to see writing as a struggle, to question the right that one has to tutor a peer, to doubt the validity of the Writing Center, and to engage—finally—in the assertion of those rights and the assertion of their claim to that position. The tutor training course should do more than guide intuitive tutors toward their destiny with reassuring articles that are meant to assuage anxiety and confirm instincts. Rather, the tutor training course should make tutoring strange. Only then can students see anew the role of the tutor well enough to actively step into that space.

When my former student doubted the validity of our course on peer tutoring in writing, my feelings

were hurt. I felt defensive. I worried that she was right.

Ultimately, her insistence that tutoring is intuitive and obvious demonstrated that she was not the right fit for our program. She made evident that she was unwilling to question, to take apart, and to make strange the thing that was clear—as in invisible—to her. She also forced me to see my role as a teacher and Writing Center Director as strange. Her challenge made me see my role and more actively embody it.

It may be possible to tutor on intuition. The tutoring that I encourage, and the tutoring that makes me proud, is neither intuitive nor is it the result of teaching, per se. The ability to tutor effectively does not come from reading a particular essay or from engaging in primary research. The tutoring that makes my job feel worthwhile, and makes me feel “useful” (if not “necessary”), is the result of engaged critical thinking. It evolves with each tutoring session and is self-reflexive. The tutoring that I teach cannot be taught. The best tutoring is the result of making tutoring strange. Only then can the tutor embody an identity that had previously been a mere superficial marker.

Works Cited Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford UP, 1998.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 3 (2017)

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TUTORING TRANSLINGUAL WRITERS: THE LOGISTICS OF ERROR AND INGENUITY Beatrice Mendez Newman The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley beatrice.newman@utrgv.edu The writing center is perfectly positioned to take the lead in institutional responses to the exigencies of translingualism. Translingual writers—writers who move with variable facility between linguistic and rhetorical expression in two or more languages— present challenges and opportunities for writing center workers. At the core of writing center work with translingual writers is the question of how we can help writers find voice and agency in environments that ostensibly privilege standardization in language use.

Translingual writers in the writing center challenge us to push the boundaries of institutional support for writers whose linguistic multiplicity results in innovative, non-traditional discourse.

The emerging reality of translingualism offers a platform for reconstructing traditional pedagogies in English as a Second Language (ESL). Traditional ESL praxis posits that learners move through stages of interlanguages in a deliberate trajectory from the native language (L1) to the target language (L2), with those stages being structurally distinct language systems (Brown 243). This theory works ideally when learners have had formal education in L1; phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic knowledge of L1 can be adeptly and consciously scaffolded into the L2 linguistic system. However, as increasing numbers of college students come to our institutions with experiential knowledge but no formal instruction in L1, traditional ESL praxis seems limited. Thus, writing center tutors need logistical bearings first, to objectively observe speech and writing structures in translingual discourse, and second, to help translingual writers recognize, define, understand, and expand the linguistic choices they are making.

Logistics and Practicalities Debunking the deficit view. Translingual writers frequently approach the center with a sense that their writing marks them as fringe members of the academic community. Instructors who recommend or require that translingual writers visit the writing center for tutoring inadvertently reinforce this sense of deficiency. Unfortunately, this extrinsically imposed need to visit the center seems punitive as well. As

writing center workers, we need to recognize affective differences between clients who seek tutoring on their own and those who show up at the center because an instructor has deemed their writing deficient. In tutoring interactions, this distinction takes shape on an attitudinal continuum: at one end is the pole of selfmotivated willingness to improve writing by working from established understandings of rhetorical expectations for academic writing tasks; at the other end is the pole of uncertainty and possible confusion caused by the effort to shape linguistic confidence while functioning in a second language system.

Translingual writer Alondra Ceballos helps us see how potentially frustrating this process can be: I have a hard time putting my thoughts in writing. I believe that it has something to do with my bilingualism. Sometimes, I feel that a word can only be expressed in Spanish and cannot translate in English. What I am trying to say often gets lost in translation. . . . I used to think of Spanish and English as a switch. I could either be on Spanish or English. But the switch metaphor no longer applies to me. I may be writing in English but I am thinking in Spanish or a combination of the two. My mind is made up of a jumble of Spanish and English. (Newman, Gonzales, and Ceballos) This linguistic “jumble” is frequently manifested in the deficiency that translingual writers feel as they function in traditional academic spaces. In his “introduce yourself” essay, Carlos, a first-year writer, offers a glimpse into how linguistic multiplicity can lead to general academic insecurity (This excerpt preserves Carlos’ exact wording): Writing wasn’t really for me, it had too many rules to follow and I really didn’t understood them. In the first day of class I had come into the room that I feared the most. This course was one of my weakest this semester. I had that mentality of thinking negative about my writing and kept saying to myself “How in the world would I pass this class.”

For Carlos, the English classroom becomes ground zero for his sense of deficiency as a translingual writer.

This expectation of failure creates a negativity that can

Tutoring Translingual Writers • 6 stifle our efforts in the center. A writer who fears failure also eschews the risk-taking that results in linguistic and rhetorical growth. In the center, we may not immediately change the attitude of a student like Carlos, but understanding the source of his resistance— the long-established feeling of deficiency—can help us create safe pedagogical methods that will enable him to forge bravely into linguistic ventures.

A starting point in countering the deficit view is the recognition of the supreme effort required to achieve fluency in two languages. Astrid, a student in my first-year writing class, chose to emigrate to America independently as a middle schooler.

Eventually, she triangulated the points of academic success, translingualism, and personal goals, as she explained in this excerpt from her introductory first year writing essay: I didn’t know any English and my new teachers didn’t know any Spanish, but after my freshman year was almost over I started little by little understanding more English.

During my senior year I moved back to Mexico but I never changed school, I had to cross the border every single day to make it to school and it would take me sometimes two hours. Now that I am starting college, I still live in Mexico, and I come and go back every single day. It’s hard to cross every day, especially because of Mexico’s situation with the insecurity, but my dreams and goals are in the U.S.A and it doesn’t matter how difficult it is, I know it’s not impossible.

Astrid’s story is not unusual in borderlands institutions where a majority of students demonstrate some level of translingualism; but it may be atypical in settings where translingual students are a minority. Astrid’s story of actual border crossing, fraught with realities of readjustment, otherness, and persistence, suggests that translingualism is far more than acquisition of a new language: translingualism represents a sustained effort to overcome material obstacles. Astrid writes of crossing the border every day, an experience that spatially places her in a constant transition between nations, culture, experience, and language. Translingual writers, even if they are campus residents, bring that spatial and experiential multiplicity into the center, and we should glean important insights about working with translingual writers from Astrid’s story.

In their interactions in the writing center, translingual students may not always share their backstories, but those stories powerfully inform every writing venture; every writing attempt becomes an opportunity for linguistic shortcoming, for academic failure, and for affirmation of the sense of deficiency.

When writing center workers are attuned to the expansiveness of translingualism, tutoring interactions can become opportunities to restructure translingual writers’ self-perceptions as members of the academic community. The center becomes a space where the failure and deficiency that characterize other academic spaces can be replaced with the potential for success.

Understanding “error.” When we talk about linguistic crossings, we cannot avoid talking about “error” in the traditional ESL view. In the classic article, “The Study of Error,” David Bartholomae reiterates the established language learning dictum that error is evidence of linguistic intention, idiosyncratic but not random (255). In the realm of ESL pedagogy, this linguistic idiosyncrasy refers to the uniqueness of the learner’s language, where “the rules of the learner’s language are peculiar to that individual alone” (Brown 243). When we use the term idiosyncrasy to characterize linguistic effort, we celebrate the learner’s dexterity in negotiating multiple language systems. In the tutorial environment of the center, this means looking beyond what appears to be erroneous; instead, we need to discover what the writer might be trying to express through translingual innovation.

In working with translingual writers, we should push Bartholomae’s assertion a bit further and look at translingual structures as approximations that merge dual and sometimes multiple linguistic competencies in structures that objectively can be described as errors, transfers, direct translations, or cross-linguistic influences (Brown 250-258). As writing center workers, we need to admit that we are often unsure of how to proceed when faced with a text that offers evidence of translingual strategies. Indeed, translingual writing can present an interesting variety of apparently aberrant structures, as the opening of this research paper, written by Valeria, a first-year writer, demonstrates (The writer’s original wording is preserved): (1) A lot of people have a misconception of what marketing is about, they see a banner or a television commercial and they think that is marketing but is just advertising.

(2) The concept of marketing is making the costumers succeed, selling your idea and everything you make, analyzing the pros and cons of your competition, making what the costumers want their business, is using the marketing mix strategies like place, promotion, product, and price.

I must be honest: when I look at writing like this, I wonder, “Where do I begin?” In our tutoring work, we

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Tutoring Translingual Writers • 7 do not simply point out errors; we must strive to explain the structure and to move the learner to a higher level of competence and confidence. That’s why attempting to understand the provenance and rationale for error is so important in the context of writing center tutoring. For example, in Valeria’s piece, costumers in sentence 2 could be flagged as a spelling error or as an incorrect word choice. In English, we would pronounce costumers (a somewhat unusual construction) as costume with an added –er. In Spanish, the word costumers is pronounced exactly like customers.

What appears to be an odd error is actually a translingual crossover; it is not likely that a native speaker of English would make this error. In sentence 2, “but is just advertising” represents a typical Spanishto-English omission of the pronoun because in Spanish, an inflected language, the verb es is sufficient to express the English it is. Valeria’s writing, perhaps on the surface, does not directly reveal significant translingual crossover because the errors are relatively easy to correct with a bit of directive tutoring; however, understanding the rationale behind these errors can help a tutor provide learner-specific guidance which can inform the writer’s approach to future writing.

Understanding how and why errors happen is vital to fostering self-reliance in translingual writers.

However, sometimes it is a challenge to try to decipher intent in a text that appears filled with errors. An example from first year writer Nano, writing about how he made his career choice, shows how linguistic “noise” created by an abundance of errors can threaten the construction of meaning (The writer’s original phrasing is preserved to emphasize errors that indicate intent): My interest in joining the medical field came after i got ran over on april 20, 2009. Every time i had surgery to save my left leg i saw how much efford everyone in the room was giving to succed. Nurses, surgeons, anestesiologist, everyone, before the anestesy did its efffect.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the errors in this excerpt show profound linguistic deficiency. In my work at my border institution, writing like Nano’s is not a novelty; it is a daily reality. Thus, I can offer logistical strategies for working with writers whose translingualism seems to stretch boundaries of linguistic acceptability. Realistically, we understand what Nano is saying because the passage demonstrates a high level of linguistic approximation. In Spanish, that cumbersome “how much effor[t] everyone in the room was giving to succe[e]d” would be much more elegantly phrased through the powerful verb-object construction hizieron esfuerzo (they made an effort),

which Nano approximates in structures that apply L1 grammar in an L2 context. The consistent use of lower case “i,” is relatively easy to explain. In Spanish, the first-person pronoun yo or mi is embedded into inflections; the first-person pronoun rarely appears as a distinct word and, when it does, it is not capitalized.

Thus, the lower case “i” is not so much an error as an approximation based on linguistic crossover. Analysis of translingual approximations requires tutorial patience, ingenuity, and explication. We can’t just say the structure is wrong or, worse, “What are you trying to say?” or “Why are you using this structure?” Instead, we can be proactive and say, “I think I see what you’re trying to say here; let’s work at recalibrating this sentence so that it says exactly what you’re trying to say.” It is important to show translingual writers that their hybrid structures are meaningful and that their writing is not a linguistic curiosity (Matsuda 482).

Nuances of translation. Translingualism naturally involves varieties of translation from L1 to L2. A simple “rule” for writing center workers is to critically but objectively examine expressions that seem odd or aberrant, perhaps even illogical, such as these examples of false cognates, where words in two languages have similar spellings but different meanings: • Using assist to mean attend: in Spanish, asistir means attend, so a translingual writer might write about assisting a class instead of attending a class.

• Using intoxicate to mean “poisoned,” as in “One of the results of deforestation was the intoxication of animals.”

• Using dominate to mean master: a student might write about dominating English or dominating a game because dominar in Spanish means to prevail.

• Using distressed to mean unstressed, where the Spanish prefix des- (meaning “without”) is approximated by conflating the English dis- or de- to invent a new meaning for distressed. In an essay sharing her strategies for reducing stress, a writer explained that she became “distressed” by taking long bubble baths. This specific linguistic innovation does require a bit of translingual expertise; ordinarily, a tutor might simply point out that distressed is misused in this context (which, honestly, was my first impulse). But, it is such an aberrant use of the word, that it should trigger some linguistic sleuthing into the rationale for the construction.

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Tutoring Translingual Writers • 8 Using humble as a translation of humilde, which in Spanish means meek or simple. So a student might write about being brought up in a “humble” home to mean growing up in poverty.

When we are puzzled by a text that appears to be indecipherable, we should discipline ourselves to look beyond the aberrance to try to discover communicative intent. What we should not do as writing center workers is to force students into further otherness by focusing on the wrongness of their linguistic choices.

In many cases, we can guess at the meaning, and letting the writer see our effort to construct meaning is a powerful tool in working with translingual writers.

From a descriptive perspective, errors of linguistic transitioning are actually quite resourceful approximations.

As we tutor a translingual client, we can describe what the writer is attempting to do linguistically without proffering prescriptive commentary about the incorrectness or inappropriateness of the structure.

Discovering the writer’s grammar. Sometimes, translingual writing seems overwhelmingly “wrong,” appearing to be riddled with errors of all types, as in this analysis of Phantom of the Opera written by Felix, a first-year writer (his original phrasing is preserved, with italics added to emphasize structures that replicate Spanish rhythms): On this film, the art of music is between a conflict, light vs. darkness fighting to get the love of a beautiful opera singer/chorus girl named Christine Daaé in where she will have to decide between the art of darkness that the Erik, the phantom, or known by her as her “Angel of Music” offers, or the shelter of light to protect her from the darkness, a shelter Raoul offers her, a man Christine had a romance with when they both where Childs.

In Spanish, this would be a lovely, fluid sentence; in English, it veers toward lengthy obfuscation with distracting linguistic errors. In working with translingual students, though, it is crucial that we celebrate the linguistic effort upfront and then step back and recognize apparent error as approximation grounded in transference of Spanish forms into English syntax. In this excerpt, the use of on reflects the logical translation of the Spanish preposition en (which stretches semantically from our on through in).

Furthermore, this error is perhaps a phonetic conflation of three vowels that sound remarkably similar in Spanish. For a Spanish speaker, the vowels in the Spanish en and the English on and in are almost indistinguishable. Thus, this prepositional error is •

actually a linguistic choice based on logically applied semantic and phonetic knowledge.

In where appears to be an illogical structure until we consider the use of the Spanish donde, a conjunction that can be used to explain a cause and effect relationship, which is what the writer is trying to do in this construction. Finally, childs seems a gross error until we consider that in Spanish, child is niño with a simple plural (niños) instead of the irregular English plural. We come back to the classic competence versus performance binary when we look at structures like the ones in this passage: instead of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by apparent error, we must consider what the writer is demonstrating about his/her operational translingualism.

Deciphering intent. When a translingual writer’s text appears to be incomprehensible, I ask the learner to just tell me what he/she intends to say. A reality of this strategy, however, is that the writers are usually so wrapped up in the spoken reconstruction that they aren’t really listening to their own words. As their writing coach, I urge them to try again, this time slowing down so we can jot down some of the reconstructed text. Yes, sometimes, I quite directively repeat what I heard them say, making sure I praise them for the clarity of expression in their speech.

Asking a translingual writer to look away from a problematic text and simply tell a tutor what he/she intended to say offers numerous pedagogical benefits.

First, the writer recognizes that linguistic choices in writing do not always successfully reflect intent. Next, the writer sees the tutor or instructor as someone who is interested in understanding rather than as a critic solely focused on finding errors. Finally, the writer sees the tutor as a partner in reshaping linguistic form to fit rhetorical intent.

In the context of translingual pedagogy (which we are shaping as we discover the realities of translingualism), we need to find ways of helping learners recognize their capabilities without quashing their efforts to express themselves. My translingual writers often demonstrate defensiveness about their linguistic competency. They pre-emptively tell me that they aren’t “good” in English or that writing is their worst subject. They expect to be told what is wrong with their writing instead of what works and why it works. The writing center can be the institutional space where linguistic diversity is celebrated, where error is seen not as deficiency but as evidence of brave choices in linguistic intent.

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Tutoring Translingual Writers • 9

Translingual Centering Writing centers are at the forefront of the evolving need to devise and implement robust pedagogies for helping translingual writers claim their space in the academy. We cannot overlook the reality that most college instructors, including many writing instructors, lack the specialized knowledge needed to work effectively with translingual writers. This is perhaps the most salient aspect of the writing center’s role in institutional response to translingual writers. At the core of how we work with translingual writers is the issue of assessment: every time we examine a translingual text, we are assessing the text on linguistic, rhetorical, disciplinary, and sometimes even political levels. In the recent article, “Beyond Translingual Writing,” Jerry Won Lee broaches the conundrum of assessing translingual writing without actually having firm understandings of how we value/position/affirm translingualism in the academy (186). I believe writing centers can solve this conundrum: writing centers, through their evolving experience in examining linguistic multiplicity can explain, demystify, and clarify translingualism for the whole institutional community.

As writing center workers, we can contribute richly to discussions of translingual writing by reconstructing traditional theories and practices in second language acquisition; we know how to look beyond what appears to be erroneous in order to discover linguistic, rhetorical, and communicative intent. When we partner with translingual writers to help them discover how to say what they want to say, how to cast their disciplinary knowledge in appropriate linguistic structures, and how to claim their spots in the larger realms of academic spaces, we edify the learner and reshape understandings of linguistic crossings.

10.1632/pmla.2014.129.3.478. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Newman, Beatrice Mendez, Rachel Gonzales, and Alondra Ceballos. “The Dynamics of Triangulation and Directive/Non-Directive Approaches.” South Central Writing Center Association Conference. February 2017.

Works Cited Bartholomae, David. “The Study of Error.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 3, 1980, pp. 253-269. http://www.jstore.org/stable/356486. Accessed 15 March 2017.

Brown, H. Douglas. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching: A Course in Second Language Acquisition. 6th ed, Pearson, 2014.

Lee, Jerry Won. “Beyond Translingual Writing.” College English, vol. 79, no. 2, 2016, pp. 174-195. http://www.ncte.org/journals/ce/issues/v79-2.

Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Lure of Translingual Writing.” PMLA, vol. 129, no. 3, 2014, pp. 478483. www.mlajournals.org, doi: Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 3 (2017) www.praxisuwc.com!

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RECONSIDERING READING MODELS IN WRITING CENTER CONSULTATIONS: WHEN IS THE READ-AHEAD METHOD APPROPRIATE? Diana Awad Scrocco Youngstown State University dlawadscrocco@ysu.edu Abstract After a decade of working in writing centers as a tutor and administrator, I have experienced and witnessed many challenging consultations. A particularly vexing type of consultation occurs when tutors work with advanced students writing in unfamiliar disciplines and genres. In this article, I consider whether the reading method employed during such consultations supports or detracts from tutors’ efforts to offer helpful advice. Specifically, I ask: When and how should writing tutors read students’ drafts to best support and engage them? How do the specific needs of student writers factor into selecting the best reading method? To respond to these questions, I first describe the results of a review of 70 well-known universities’ writing center websites, which reveals that the majority of centers require tutors to read students’ writing for the first time during consultations. Next, I posit some limitations of during-consultation reading models and argue that the read-ahead model may better meet the needs of some studentwriter populations. To provide a framework for the read-ahead model, I illustrate strategies that may be implemented to prepare tutors for consultations, drawing on research-based techniques that a more-senior director and I used at a private doctoral-granting university as we established the first writing center on the campus. I conclude by suggesting that directors consider the read-ahead method as yet another tool in their vast arsenal of pedagogical techniques, particularly when tutors must work with advanced writers from unfamiliar disciplines.

Imagine this common writing center scenario: An advanced writer arrives at a consultation with a research paper from a discipline outside of the tutor’s area of expertise. The tutor asks the writer to explain the context and criteria for the paper, which takes roughly ten minutes. The tutor warns the writer that they only have time to tackle a portion of the paper, so the writer poses some questions about the mostconcerning section. With about thirty minutes remaining, the writer begins reading the selected passage aloud while the tutor takes notes on several areas of concern. After the writer has read about four pages aloud, the tutor begins offering feedback. Left with approximately twenty minutes, the tutor poses questions and offers advice related to the writer’s misplaced thesis statement, unclear transitions, and use of passive voice. The appointment draws to a close, and the tutor and writer develop a revision plan. As the writer leaves, the tutor feels uneasy about the consultation; after all, the writer’s text was an unfamiliar genre addressing an unfamiliar topic, and time simply ran out.

After a decade working at three different writing centers in three different roles, I have encountered this scenario countless times, often wondering whether the reading method tutors use supports or detracts from their efforts to offer constructive feedback. As an undergraduate peer tutor, I worked in a center where tutors read papers silently at the start of appointments before discussing the writing with students. As a graduate-student tutor and assistant director, I worked in a center where writers read their drafts aloud as tutors took notes to prepare for discussions. Most recently, as a faculty member and associate director, I collaborated with the director to launch a new writing center at a private doctoral granting university; there, students submit papers and supporting documents before consultations, and tutors use the read-ahead method to strategize for tutorials in advance. My experiences have encouraged me to reflect on an important, reoccurring issue for writing center scholars and administrators: When and how should writing tutors read students’ drafts to best support and engage them? How do the specific needs of student writers factor into selecting the best reading method?

To respond to these questions, I first describe the results of a review of 70 universities’ writing center websites to characterize trends in reading methods.

Next, I discuss some limitations tutors face when they encounter drafts for the first time during consultations.

I then use my experience in a center that exclusively uses the read-ahead approach to argue that this method may enable tutors to meet the needs of some student writers, specifically advanced writers from disciplines unfamiliar to tutors. I also illustrate some strategies that might prepare tutors to work with such writers. I conclude by suggesting that writing center administrators consider the read-ahead method as an alternative to traditional reading models.

The Status Quo In Writing Center Reading Methods The first step in analyzing writing consultation reading methods is to understand typical models used in writing centers across the country. To gain insight into common writing-tutor reading practices, I

Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 11 conducted an informal review of 70 universities’ writing center websites for descriptions of what occurs during tutorials, and I categorized the centers’ stated reading models. I generated this list of writing centers by consulting the top 50 universities in the latest U.S. News and World Report “National Universities Ranking” and The Best Colleges’ “Top 50 Colleges and Universities in America.” Because 30 institutions on these two lists overlap, my final list included 70 different universities, all of which house writing centers on their campuses.

Certainly the sample used in this informal review is not representative of all centers, and future research might extend my analysis to account for a wider range of institutions and might directly contact writing center directors to confirm the reading models their tutors use. Still, given the reputations of the universities included in this list, my review offers some insight into the status quo of writing center reading practices in some of the top universities in the United States.

My informal review reveals that 48 out of 70 writing center websites explicitly instruct students to bring hard-copy drafts to appointments, suggesting that their tutors read, analyze, and generate feedback on students’ writing during consultations (see table 1).

Emphasizing dialogue, many of these websites echo Stephen North’s claim that students come to the center “to talk about [their] writing, preferably to someone who will really listen, who knows how to listen, and knows how to talk about writing too” (440). Six of these centers state that they support tutor-writer dialogue by reading students’ papers aloud during consultations (see table 2). Other sites simply assert that the first part of the appointment involves reading the paper and the rest of the time is spent on the writer-tutor conversation; although these centers do not specify whether papers are read aloud or silently, the requirement to bring printed drafts to appointments suggests that tutors encounter students’ writing for the first time during consultations.

Only eight of the seventy websites in my review directly address the question of whether tutors read drafts before consultations (see table 2). Six of these eight centers explicitly invite students to send their papers to tutors prior to scheduled appointments.

However, four of these centers set parameters for the practice and only allow advanced writers with lengthy papers to submit papers before consultations.

Furthermore, one of these centers clarifies that tutors can choose not to read papers in advance out of personal preference, while another’s website provides the disclaimer that tutors may lack time to read drafts ahead of time. The other two of these eight centers stipulate strict policies against submitting papers before

consultations. Eighteen universities’ writing centers do not specify any reading method on their websites.

As this informal review indicates, the prevailing reading models in writing centers involve silent or oral reading during consultations. The prevalence of during-consultation reading should not surprise anyone familiar with writing center pedagogy. Well-established theories discourage writers from perceiving tutors as editors who read and correct their papers and, instead, encourage writers to see tutors as expert readers who provide critical feedback in real time (Harris 3). As such, many centers’ consultation models aim to deemphasize texts and emphasize writer-tutor discussions (Bruffee 91), enacting North’s well-known motto, “Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (438)—still the most widely cited principle of writing center work three decades later (Boquet and Lerner 176). To support this focus on the writer, most current tutor-training manuals tout the read-aloud approach as pedagogically superior to silent reading (e.g., Gillespie and Lerner 30; Ryan and Zimmerelli 49).

Advocates of the read-aloud model argue that this strategy increases students’ engagement in tutorials (Barnett 45), improves writers’ authority (Gillespie and Lerner 30), and enhances their ability to self-correct (Capossela 11). Corroborating this recommendation with a survey of tutor and student preferences, Joyce Adams found that students most prefer reading their papers aloud while tutors comment and least prefer when tutors read papers silently before giving advice (4). Considering this research, one might predict that more than two-thirds of the centers in my review use some method of reading during consultations.

Drawbacks to During-Consultation Reading Models Despite the dominance of during-consultation reading, several scholars have questioned the value of these models, especially the read-aloud approach.

Although many argue that reading aloud helps students detect their own errors, Patrick Hartwell points out that when students read their work aloud, they often misread what appears on the page (121) and instead read what they think appears on the page (Bartholomae 267). Even if reading aloud did help students to consistently correct local errors, most writing center practitioners and scholars advocate a focus on higherorder concerns (HOCs); yet, Rebecca Block’s study found that, in both writer and tutor read-aloud tutorials, more than half of writer-tutor conversations centered on lower-order concerns (LOCs) (91).

Recurrent debates on the widely used WCenter listserv reveal other concerns about the read-aloud approach,

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 12 including whether the method truly engages writers more actively in consultations (Block 5) or whether reading aloud actually supports most students’ learning styles (Block 7).

Research on reading practices reinforces these concerns about reading aloud. For instance, a study by Franklin et al. reveals that “participants reported more mind-wandering while they were reading aloud” than during silent reading (205); these findings challenge the perception that students who read their work aloud to writing center tutors are more actively engaged in analyzing their writing. Stressing another problem with the student-read-aloud approach, Heather Robinson notes that students may experience a processing problem as they “engage with their text both visually and auditorily at the same time, resulting in a possible loss of information” (31). These studies suggest that reading aloud during consultations may actually undermine fundamental writing center goals of keeping writers focused on their work and enabling them to identify their own writing issues.

In addition to concerns about how reading aloud affects writers, research on reading comprehension raises questions about how reading aloud may affect tutors’ ability to understand and analyze student writing during consultations. While some research suggests that reading aloud enables people to comprehend and recall text meaning better than silent reading (Collins 82, Hale et. al 17), other work finds no difference in comprehension between oral and silent reading conditions (McCallum et. al 241). Perhaps more relevant to writing center tutoring, though, is Samuel Miller and Donald Smith’s study, which compares students’ comprehension during oral reading, silent reading, and listening as a text is read aloud. They conclude that stronger readers—which writing center tutors tend to be—comprehend more from texts that they read aloud or silently than they do from texts read aloud to them (Miller and Smith 73).

This study suggests that writing center tutors who listen to writers read their texts aloud may comprehend less content than tutors who read student writing silently or aloud to themselves. Similarly, Diakidoy et al. found that, in older school-aged children, reading comprehension rates exceeded listening comprehension rates, perhaps because academic instruction focuses on “reading and learning from text” rather than learning from listening to texts being read aloud (68-69). This educational emphasis on reading only increases as students progress through high school and college, potentially creating comprehension challenges for writing center tutors who must listen to writers read their texts aloud. Although the conditions and student populations examined in these studies differ from

writing center contexts, they raise questions about how reading models affect comprehension; in so doing, this body of research suggests that writing center reading practices should be employed thoughtfully.

On a more practical level, reading a student’s paper aloud during a consultation consumes a great deal of time. In a study comparing silent and oral reading, McCallum et al. found that “students reading aloud took approximately 30% longer than those reading silently, on average,” yet they showed no greater comprehension of the material they read (245).

Likewise, in a writing center context, Block reports that “the average reading in standard tutor-read or clientread sessions ended just under the half-way mark” (2).

Because most centers in my review allot 30 to 50 minutes for appointments, Block’s finding suggests that writers can expect fewer than 25 minutes of writer-tutor dialogue during such consultations, especially if papers are read through without interruption as Gillespie and Lerner recommend (30).

Block’s solution to this time issue is a different duringconsultation reading approach derived from Barbara Sitko’s point-predict method of reading aloud. In contrast, I question whether during-consultation reading practices should be used at all with particular groups of students, especially upper-level writers from different disciplines. Because when and how tutors read complex writing may affect their comprehension and pedagogical approaches, administrators ought to critically analyze the reading models they enable and promote in their centers. Often, however, writing center administrators adopt reading models from senior colleagues, tutor-training manuals, or longstanding traditions.

Employing during-consultation reading models may be particularly problematic when tutors must simultaneously read (or listen as texts are read aloud) and analyze advanced writing from unfamiliar disciplines. The challenges of understanding texts with unfamiliar content have been examined in research on students’ reading comprehension. An early study of elementary school children’s ability to understand and analyze unfamiliar texts reports that “general knowledge of the topics was the strongest predictor of ability to draw inferences and elaborate” on a text on which students lacked prior knowledge (Marr and Gormley 89). Similarly, in their research on middleschool students’ reading comprehension of unfamiliar content, Stahl et al. assert that students who read an unfamiliar text with challenging vocabulary words more often struggled with “the recall of details, [. . .] the relations between concepts, and [. . .] the order of events” (41). Comparable results have been found among high school students; Cromley and Azevedo

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 13 conclude that high school students who were familiar with relevant vocabulary and contextual information on a topic showed greater reading comprehension than students without vocabulary and background knowledge (311). This line of research suggests that writing center tutors may struggle to comprehend, analyze, and develop feedback for advanced student writers whose texts contain unfamiliar content, especially when they must generate that feedback on the spot during a writing center consultation.

Compounding these comprehension concerns, tutors encountering papers for the first time during consultations must brainstorm appropriate feedback in real time—often, without assistance from other tutors or supervisors. Some research suggests that this pressure may put tutors at risk of prioritizing lowerorder concerns (LOCs). For example, Jo Mackiewicz’s study of writing tutors’ consultations with engineering students reveals that, when tutors encountered unfamiliar genres and disciplinary content, they defaulted to a concentration on LOCs: “Lacking the ability to analyze how well students’ writing adhered to conventions of engineering writing, the three nonexpert tutors disregarded what is considered good tutoring practice by focusing on surface features of writing” (“The Effects” 319). Perhaps more unsettling, the tutors in Mackiewicz’s study provided genreinappropriate advice about these surface issues (“The Effects” 319-320). Although Mackiewicz does not attribute the tutors’ incorrect advice to their reading methods, I posit that, when writing tutors encounter challenging, upper-level papers from unfamiliar fields, during-consultation reading models may undermine their intentions to focus on HOCs. Moreover, Dana Ferris suggests that inexperienced teachers—much like writing tutors—often struggle to identify and prioritize problems in students’ writing after just one reading: “They are so inexperienced at looking at student writing at all that they do not know what to look for or what constitutes a problem or issue or feedback point that their commentary should address” (170). In the writing center, during-consultation reading practices may exacerbate this common problem by requiring tutors to analyze students’ writing while concurrently developing an instructional plan. This task may become even more overwhelming when tutors must work with advanced students from unfamiliar fields, leading them to focus on local concerns that seem more concrete and manageable.

Certainly, during-consultation reading models may serve students’ needs well in particular situations.

Similar to reading research showing that students recall less from unfamiliar texts (Cromley and Azevedo; Marr and Gormley; Stahl et al.), my experiences suggest that

tutors who are familiar with the writer’s genre and field can use during-consultation reading quite effectively.

For example, when students bring writing from composition courses, tutors—who often have humanities backgrounds—likely know what to expect from these genres and can generate well-prioritized advice while reading or listening as a paper is read aloud. Thus, in centers where most writers bring familiar genres, during-consultation reading approaches may work quite well. Furthermore, some centers employ tutors from a range of departments and consistently pair tutors with writers from related disciplines; these tutors may be well equipped to provide writers with appropriate feedback in real time.

However, what happens when student writers cannot schedule appointments with tutors who have knowledge of their genres or disciplines? And how well does during-consultation reading accommodate writers who bring lengthy texts and do not know which section requires attention? More fundamentally, do during-consultation reading approaches provide enough benefits to justify consuming half or more of the appointment time? While I do not contend that during-consultation reading should be abandoned entirely, the read-ahead model may enable tutors to support certain writers more effectively. Notably, this method can be implemented prudently to maintain focus on the writer. Below, I describe how one writing center employs the read-ahead method to serve a specific population—advanced writers from nonhumanities disciplines. Others may be able to adapt this model to serve their own student-writer populations.

The Read-Ahead Method: Possibilities and Considerations The context of the writing center under consideration.

Before describing the read-ahead model used in the writing center under consideration, I must explain the context associated with this center because, as Pamela Childers suggests, developing a strategic center requires considering institutional contexts, goals, student populations, and resources (55). This writing center differs from some in that more than half of the center’s patrons are graduate-student writers (38% master’s degree students, 16% doctoral students, and 2% post-doctoral students, faculty, or staff); the overwhelming majority of these writers are non-native English speakers from non-humanities departments.

To support this population, this center employs mostly graduate-student tutors, and all tutors undergo a rigorous semester-long practicum course in which they work with scholarship related to tutoring, teaching, and

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 14 genre-specific writing. Certainly, this writing center’s client base and training resources differ from some institutions, but many centers—including several in my review—serve advanced writers from diverse disciplines; accordingly, the model I describe here may contain elements that other directors find useful.

Undoubtedly, writing center tutors face specific challenges when working with graduate-level and other advanced writers. Judith Powers’ early work in this area outlines the obstacles tutors face when tutoring advanced writers: 1) writers’ lengthy texts cannot be addressed within normal timeframes; 2) instructors’ and advisors’ feedback often lacks detail and context; and 3) writers sometimes pressure tutors to focus on editing instead of global issues (13). John Farrell also points out that tutoring advanced students requires basic knowledge of highly specialized genres, formats, and jargon, all of which tutors typically lack (4).

Moreover, such students sometimes resist tutors’ advice about their writing because they lack subjectarea expertise (Waring 162). To tutor upper-level writers from unfamiliar fields, these scholars suggest involving students’ advisors in the tutoring process (Powers 15), encouraging a “consultant model” of tutoring rather than a novice-expert paradigm (Farrell 4), and educating tutors about different disciplinary conventions and content (Garbus 173; Walker 373; Waring 163). While these authors offer remedies for tutoring advanced writers, they do not address the question of whether during-consultation reading practices place unnecessary pressure on tutors or whether different reading strategies might improve consultations with such writers.

A description of the read-ahead model. The writing center under consideration has employed the readahead approach since its launch in Fall 2012. The readahead procedure requires writers to submit their papers and supporting documents before their scheduled appointments. Supporting texts include assignment prompts, grading rubrics, model essays, and other materials (see fig. 1). To provide the pedagogical and rhetorical contexts for these materials, the online scheduling system prompts writers to describe the assignment, the stage of the draft, and their writing concerns.

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Writer schedules an appointment, attaching the paper, prompt, rubric, and model essay(s).

Tutor reads documents, consults with supervisors and colleagues, and outlines a plan.

CONSULTATION: Tutor asks the writer to describe concerns, negotiates the agenda, employs research-based approach(es), and concludes by creating a revision plan.

Fig. 1: The Read Ahead Model

Because tutors receive relevant documents in advance, they plan their instructional strategies prior to consultations. Before meeting with writers, tutors use dedicated preparation time—typically 10 to 15 minutes per appointment—to read the writers’ documents, review them with supervisors or fellow tutors, consult outside resources, and outline their plans for consultations. During appointments, tutors ask writers to explicate their writing concerns, and they negotiate an agenda that both deem beneficial. Tutors then implement research-based approaches, including prioritizing HOCs, providing genre-specific advice, reading pertinent passages aloud, and helping writers find resources to use independently. Consultations end with tutors and writers collaborating to compose revision plans; during this stage, they focus on summarizing and implementing a few key lessons.

Below, I detail the rationale for our read-ahead model to elucidate how other writing center administrators might appropriate this approach to meet their student writers’ needs.

A rationale for requesting drafts and supporting documents.

The impetus for requesting drafts and related materials in advance stems from the well-established theory that tutors—like all readers—provide better feedback when they understand the context and evaluation criteria of a text (North 443). While writing prompts offer tutors insight into the context of an assignment, many writing center directors often report that the specificity and clarity of prompts vary widely across instructors; therefore, receiving prompts before appointments enables tutors to work with supervisors and other tutors to glean the course and disciplinary perspectives surrounding the written work. Additionally, tutors review instructors’ rubrics to gain insight into how the writing will be evaluated so that they can explicitly reference assessment standards during consultations.

This explicit attempt to use evaluation criteria may lead to higher levels of student engagement and satisfaction; as Carolyn Walker and David Elias report, students

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 15 prefer writing conferences that begin by identifying specific criteria for the writing and then evaluate the student’s text against those measures (266). Giving tutors opportunities to analyze evaluation guidelines with supervisors and other tutors may increase the likelihood that they can explicate instructors’ expectations to writers.

Once tutors review the assignment’s contexts and criteria, consulting model essays allows them to see how these elements manifest in strong examples of the genre. Compelling research from Davida Charney and Richard Carlson suggests that writers who work with model essays produce texts with better organization, more topical information, and stronger proposition statements (88). Thus, giving tutors access to model essays may facilitate their ability to read student drafts in a more targeted manner and prepare them to provide better feedback. For instance, when planning for consultations, tutors may assess how certain rhetorical moves in a model essay meet the instructor’s criteria; then, they may search for similar moves in the student’s draft and develop focused questions and advice for student writers based on the model essay’s rhetorical structure.

Planning instructional strategies. Because tutors using the read-ahead method receive papers and related documents in advance, they can brainstorm, find resources, seek guidance, and experiment about strategies before consultations (see fig. 2). For example, if students do not attach instructor-provided model essays when they schedule their appointments, tutors may use preparation time to find strong models in library databases, online, or in-house archives. Or, if tutors are struggling to identify the most important issues to prioritize during a consultation, they can brainstorm techniques with supervisors or fellow tutors. Strategizing with others before appointments may encourage tutors to focus on HOCs; by improving their familiarity with the writing context, tutors may be less likely to default to a focus on LOCs like the tutors in Mackiewicz’s study (“The Effects”). Also, preparing a list of priorities and questions in advance may allow supervisors to monitor whether tutors focus on a few critical concepts during each consultation (Harris 47).

More broadly, regularly collaborating with fellow tutors and supervisors distributes the responsibility of conducting effective consultations from one tutor to the entire center, more closely adhering to the collaborative essence of writing center work.

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Read Texts Prompt

Draft(s)

Model Essay(s)

Brainstorm

Model(s)

Seek Resources Textbook(s)

Website(s)

Confer with Others

List of Question(s)

Plan Approach Writing Concept(s)

Teaching Strategy(ies)

Fig. 2: Preparing for Read-Ahead Consultations

When developing strategies for consultations with upper-level writers, tutors may benefit from learning about discipline-specific genre and rhetorical expectations (Garbus; Walker; Waring). Although writing tutors cannot be conversant in all academic genres across all fields, some well-known research explicates cross-disciplinary findings about academic writing that tutors may utilize during preparation time.

For example, John Swales’s research on the rhetorical moves employed in scholarly literature reviews— establishing the territory, identifying a gap in the research, and presenting one’s work as filler for the gap—can be used when tutors are preparing to work with advanced students on research-based writing.

During their preparation time, for instance, tutors may label Swales’s rhetorical moves in a discipline-specific model text and then develop questions and strategies for guiding the writer to implement the same moves in their own writing. Teresa Thonney’s work also reveals trends in academic writing that tutors may use when planning for consultations. For example, she argues that academic writers assume a voice of authority by implementing field-specific vocabulary and “lexical bundles” in their writing (Thonney 353; 355). One preparation technique could involve tutors highlighting authoritative lexical bundles in a model text to generate a framework for teaching writers to assert authority in their own drafts. As these examples suggest, tutors can use their preparation time to select and prepare pedagogical strategies based on established, researchbased writing principles.

Conducting read-ahead consultations. Because they plan for consultations, tutors who use the read-ahead method should feel more equipped to pose guided questions and evidence-based advice while tutoring writers from unfamiliar fields. Preparing concrete consultation strategies may also help tutors to avoid a common pitfall Mackiewicz identifies in her analysis of tutor discourse: offering indirect suggestions rather than explicit advice or instruction (“Hinting” 365).

Ideally, strategizing with fellow tutors and supervisors

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 16 empowers tutors to offer writers explicit advice and instruction, which Jessica Williams suggests may increase the likelihood that writers revise according to tutors’ feedback (185). In addition, developing concrete plans that focus on HOCs may encourage writers to address meaningful global issues during revision (Williams 184). Finally, collaboratively generating a revision plan may improve the chances that writers will recall and use tutors’ advice during their revision process; developing a revision plan may also create more continuity in the learning process if writers return to the center for subsequent appointments.

Notably, the read-ahead model does not eliminate reading aloud during consultations. In fact, tutors can use the read-ahead method to employ the read-aloud approach more selectively during appointments. For example, when tutors recognize problems in a draft’s organization or tone, they may select representative passages to read aloud during consultations to illustrate where students’ communication breaks down. Reading aloud can also show writers how to adapt common lexical bundles from model texts for their own purposes. Moreover, when tutors identify areas in students’ writing with stylistic issues, reading aloud can draw attention to awkward syntax or clause-boundary problems. In practice, the read-ahead strategy may actually enable tutors to target the areas of students’ texts that may be most beneficial to read aloud during consultations.

Mitigating The Limitations of The ReadAhead Model Although the read-ahead method may offer benefits, receiving student papers before consultations presents some challenges that must be addressed. One key issue with the read-ahead technique is logistical: this model requires that writers submit their drafts, supporting documents, and writing concerns prior to appointments. Common online scheduling systems make such an interface possible, but directors must work with their campus communities to establish a new culture of writing center work in the same way North argued for educating campus communities about his idea of a new writing center three decades ago (441). For the read-ahead approach to succeed, students must become accustomed to working on their writing in advance, seeking supporting resources and input from their instructors, and sending documents before their appointments. Writing center directors should also collaborate with faculty whose students frequent the center to acquire a database of strong model essays from common courses and genres. In short, writing center administrators must help their

campus communities to understand that providing tutors with more resources will enable them to support students’ writing progress more comprehensively.

Another potential limitation of the read-ahead model relates to time. While reading ahead makes more consultation time available for writer-tutor dialogue, this model requires at least ten minutes of tutor preparation time per appointment. This preparation time must be built into tutors’ schedules, and lastminute appointments must be adapted to accommodate tutors’ planning time. Directors can manage this constraint using a few strategies: 1) only use the read-ahead method for students with long or advanced papers; 2) base tutors’ preparation time on the length or complexity of drafts; and 3) warn students that appointments scheduled late will be shortened to provide tutors with time to prepare for consultations. Of course, during-consultation silent reading and reading aloud also consume consultation time, so tutor-preparation time is not truly “additional” time. And even if setting aside preparation time leads to fewer appointments, these consultations may be more meaningful and effective because tutors have had an opportunity to strategize in advance with support from others.

Pedagogically, the read-ahead model presents challenges related to agenda negotiation, which must be addressed to avoid focusing disproportionately on the writing (North 438). Because tutors develop their plans before students arrive for their appointments, writers’ agendas may be more quickly sidelined with the read-ahead method than with during-consultation reading models. To mitigate this drawback, writers should be prompted to describe their concerns when they schedule appointments, and tutors should consult writers’ concerns as they develop their pedagogical plans. Directors must encourage tutors to be attentive to writer agendas that conflict with theirs and must remind them to begin all consultations by asking writers to elaborate on their concerns. After the traditional agenda-negotiation period, tutors should be prepared to modify or abandon their original instructional plans if writers’ concerns drastically differ from theirs because, as Walker and Elias’s study demonstrates, students prefer and learn most from conferences that align with their agendas (277).

Conclusion: The Read-Ahead Method is Another Pedagogical Tool Despite potential limitations, the read-ahead method offers several possible benefits. Primarily, advanced student writers may receive better feedback because tutors have had an opportunity to plan their

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 17 pedagogical strategies in advance after consulting with supervisors and fellow tutors. This model may also give tutors a richer experience with teaching; instead of offering their first reactions to students’ writing, tutors who use the read-ahead method must critically analyze texts and select pedagogical strategies based on writers’ specific needs, a process that closely mirrors the act of teaching. Finally, the read-ahead approach may allow writing center administrators to assess and guide the focus of consultations more consistently.

These potential advantages must be confirmed with future research. For instance, scholars might examine whether tutors’ foci and quality of feedback differ with the read-ahead method than with duringconsultation reading. Researchers might also empirically test the effectiveness of the read-ahead approach by comparing students’ revisions after readahead consultations and after consultations in which tutors use other reading models. Additionally, others might conduct observations and interviews to determine how closely tutors tend to adhere to the instructional plans they develop prior to consultations.

Finally, scholars might test my anecdotal evidence that students and tutors prefer the read-ahead method by conducting surveys or interviews in centers that implement both reading strategies; directors might also be included in future survey or interview research to determine the prevalence of the read-ahead method, survey how different centers implement the method, and assess administrators’ perceptions of this model.

Although the read-ahead model must be studied further, writing center directors should consider this method as yet another tool in their vast arsenal of pedagogical techniques.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Sara Newman for reviewing multiple drafts of this article and for serving as my mentor. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to the Praxis editorial team and my reviewers, whose constructive feedback helped me to shape the final version of this manuscript.

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433-446.

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173-201.

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Appendix Table 1 List of University Writing Centers Requiring Hard-Copy Drafts for Consultations Method on Website Hard-Copy Required for Appointments

University Writing Centers • Boston College • Boston University • Bowdoin College • Brandeis University • Brown University • California Institute of Technology • Carleton College • Colgate University • College of William and Mary • Columbia University • Cooper Union • Cornell University • Dartmouth College • Davidson College • Emory University • Georgetown University • Georgia Institute of Technology • Harvard University • Harvey Mudd College • Johns Hopkins University • Lehigh University • Massachusetts Institute of Technology • New York University • Northeastern University • Pennsylvania State University • Pomona College • Princeton University • Purdue University • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute • Texas A&M University • Tulane University • University of California Berkeley • University of California Davis • University of California Los Angeles • University of California San Diego • University of Chicago • University of Florida • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign • University of Michigan • University of North Carolina • University of Notre Dame • University of Pennsylvania • University of Southern California • University of Virginia • Vanderbilt University • Wake Forest University • Washington University in St. Louis • Wellesley College

Sample Website Passage(s) “All papers must be printed out before your session. Papers cannot be printed out in the CLFC. Please bring one copy for yourself and one copy for your tutor to look over.”

(Boston College) “If you have a draft or an outline, bring two copies to your appointment. Please also bring your professor's assignment prompt, if available.” (Colgate University) “Please bring printed, double-spaced copies of your writing. Print your work before your appointment.” (Johns Hopkins University) “Please bring 3 things with you to your appointment: (1) your assignment, (2) a hard copy of your work (it is difficult for us to work with you if you only have your laptop and no hard copy), (3) and your goals for the consultation and/or the issues you wish to discuss with us.” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) “Bring a hard copy of your draft and any other relevant materials, instructor’s comments, assignment guidelines, notes, etc.”

(University of Florida)

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Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations • 20 Table 2 Stated Reading Methods on Universities’ Writing Centers’ Websites Method on Website Read-Aloud Method During Appointments Specified

Read-Ahead Option Specified

University Writing Centers • Carleton College • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute • Tulane University • University of Michigan • University of North Carolina • University of Notre Dame

• • • • • •

Amherst College California Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University University of California San Diego Swarthmore College Yale University

Read-Ahead Option Prohibited

• Harvard University • Wake Forest University

No Method Specified

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Berea College Bucknell University Case Western Reserve University Claremont McKenna College Duke University Middlebury College Northwestern University Rice University Stanford University Tufts University University of California Irvine University of California Santa Barbara University of Rochester University of Texas at Austin University of Washington University of Wisconsin Madison Washington and Lee University Williams College

Sample Website Passage(s) “We encourage consultants to work side by side with writers, suggesting they read aloud the portions of their papers they want to focus on, as a way for them to ‘hear’ themselves and learn the process of selfediting.” (Carleton College) “If you are working on a written piece, the consultant will ask if you are more comfortable reading your work aloud or hearing it read.” (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) “We will make every effort to review the draft in advance of our meeting with you, but we may not always have time to do so.”

(California Institute of Technology) “Many tutors will read your paper in advance, although a few prefer that you do that work together.” (Yale University) “Writing Center tutors do not provide written comments on your paper, and we cannot read your paper ahead of time.”

(Harvard University) N/A

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CHALLENGING PERCEPTIONS: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ELL STUDENTS AND WRITING CENTERS Joseph Cheatle Michigan State University cheatlej@msu.edu Abstract In an attempt to create more meaningful and effective assessment, the Howe Writing Center at Miami University implemented a new post-consultation/exit survey. During the course of the Fall 2012 semester, over 800 students responded to the post-consultation survey. Writing center theory has documented the limitations of the post-consultation survey; however, this type of feedback still represents the best and most accessible way to assess and expand the knowledge of writing centers. This assessment project provided important feedback concerning the writing center at Miami University about student demographics that use the writing center, including academic year and classes students wanted to work on.

The assessment project also contributes to writing center theory and discourse by providing a different narrative for non-native English speaking students and native English speaking students that use the writing center. The assessment challenges the view that writing from non-native English speaking students is only concerned with so-called "lower order" writing issues and writing from native English speaking students is primarily concerned with so-called "higher order" writing issues. Instead, it was found that non-native English speaking students are interested in working on many "higher order" concerns and were very similar, after sentence-level concerns, in their writing needs to native English speaking students.

One of the many distinctions we make in writing center studies and within writing centers is between English language learning (ELL) students (also commonly referred to as non-native English speaking students) and native English speaking (NES) students.

Unlike other distinctions, like those between disciplines or academic years, this one is more significant to writing centers because ELL students often disproportionately use the writing center in comparison to their native English speaking peers, and these two populations are often viewed as distinct and notably different. As ELL populations at institutions of higher education increase—due primarily to high international student enrollment—the need for writing center assistance for ELL students also grows. In response to this increase in enrollment, most writing centers have instituted special training sessions and workshops for consultants working with ELL students, often focusing on sentence-level concerns and bridging potential cultural gaps. The heightened attention to ELL students provides centers the opportunity, as Dennis Paoli contends, to reconsider a writing center's ideology and practices (171).

Writing center scholarship also reflects the increasing importance of ELL students through books and numerous articles devoted to the topic. The essays collected in ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors (edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth) provide a broad overview of issues confronting ELL students and Generation 1.5 Learners, as well as those who work with them in writing centers. More recently, Rafoth's Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers advocates that writing centers draw on the fields of second-language writing and applied linguistics in order to train consultants and tutors to meet the needs of ELL students. In the introduction, Rafoth asks, "How can directors and tutors better prepare for the growing number of one-to-one conferences with multilingual writers who will come to their writing centers in the future?" (1-2). Rafoth's question is a driving force for this project. Despite the increased attention by these works and other numerous articles published in WLN, Praxis, and The Writing Center Journal, there is much that is not understood about the relationship between ELL students and writing centers; furthermore, most of what we know about ELL students in the writing center comes from anecdotal evidence and personal experience. This study responds to the large number of ELL students using the writing center and the need for more scholarly attention to the relationship between ELL students and writing centers.

Working with quantitative data collected from an exit-survey, I drew four conclusions—some of which confirm the experiences of many people working in the writing center and some of which are new contributions to our understanding of the relationship between ELL students and writing centers. The first conclusion, which confirms many practitioners’ experiences in the center, is that ELL students schedule consultations more frequently after their first year than NES students. The second conclusion is that ELL students and native English speaking students want to work on similar assignments. The third conclusion, which furthers our understanding of ELL students and complicates a common perception, is that beyond sentence-level concerns, ELL students are very similar to native English speaking students in what they want to work on versus what they actually worked on

Challenging Perceptions • 22 during a consultation. The fourth conclusion is that ELL students want to work on, and actually do work on, many of the same “higher order” (global) and “lower order” (local) concerns as native English speaking students.

There is a tendency in the writing center to think that ELL students want help primarily for grammar, spelling, and editing. I often hear this complaint from peer tutors and colleagues who believe that ELL students view, and utilize, the writing center as an editing service. This goes against the overarching philosophy that consultant are trained, as Stephen North and Jeff Brooks contend, to "Improve the writer, not the writing" (qtd. in Hawthorne 1).

According to North and Brooks, consultations should focus on transferable concepts, like organization and use of evidence, rather than localized issues, such as individualized spelling and grammar errors. While a consultation that focuses on correcting language concerns may improve the individual paper, it will most likely not improve the writer. Because writing center ideology does not focus primarily on sentencelevel issues, during training consultants are consistently told that they are not editors and should not, therefore, focus primarily on sentence-level concerns or correcting spelling and grammar errors; when students ask for help correcting language issues, we are trained to steer them towards more global concerns, like thesis, organization, and use of evidence.

My own experiences in two writing centers tend to support this narrative about ELL students. In client report forms (filled out when students schedule a consultation on WCOnline or other scheduling system), ELL students usually put spelling, grammar, or editing as one of their main reasons for the consultation. When ELL students arrive in the center, one of the first things many do is state they need help on editing or sentence-level issues. Consultants are then faced with a difficult decision—address these issues or go against ELL students' stated desires by focusing on more global issues. Jennifer Staben and Kathryn Nordhaus noticed this same dilemma in consultations with ELL students, "Because writing centers strive to be studentcentered, writing conferences with English as a second language (ESL) students often make tutors feel that they are faced with an impossible choice: comply with the ESL students' invitation to focus on grammar and other surface errors or ignore the ESL students' requests and focus on the whole text." (78)

This tension can result in dissatisfaction from the student, the tutor, or both. Causes of frustration for all parties, according to Sharon Myers, include "unrealistic expectations about language learning embedded in our institutional arrangements for ESL students; the historic de-emphasis of sentence pedagogies; a conception of culture which excludes the structures of languages; [...] and the failure to recognize the depth of the 'sentence-level' problems involved in second-language processing." (52) Myers raises a number of important concerns, including unrealistic expectations as well as the lack of specialized consultant training for working with language issues and ELL students; in particular, this lack of language training results in confusion and frustration because tutors are often unequipped to teach language to ELL students. As Myers points out, these issues are widespread among writer centers and, I would argue, systemic among entire institutions.

One reason ELL students could view the writing center as an editing service is that they are under pressure to talk and write like a native English speaker.

According to Carol Severino, ELL students receive pressure to speak and write like native English speakers from numerous sources, "[...] the feedback and pressure they receive from their professors, their supervisors, their dissertation advisors, and their journal editors convinces them that they need to feel this way" (57). This can be especially true for ELL students taking disciplinary-specific classes with teachers who either are not trained, or do not feel required, to teach the English language to students. In addition to a lack of training or desire to teach language, Muriel Harris and Tony Silva point out that faculty can also have unrealistic expectations for ELL students (referred to as non-native English speaking students by Harris and Silva), "[...] but there are faculty who do have unrealistic demands about the level of correctness, who expect non-native speakers of English to write error-free prose, not to have a written accent, and so on" (531). The demand for error-free prose is unrealistic because language-acquisition takes many years of language immersion and study, time ELL students may not have. The focus on language issues is a problem because, for Staben and Nordhaus, it can result in a situation that ELL students "are so focused on the language—on trying to wrestle their complicated thoughts onto paper using language abilities that are not yet sufficient to the task—that they may not realize that the change in language and in culture necessitates a different approach to

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Challenging Perceptions • 23 communicating those thoughts to others."

(80-81) Language functions are such an overwhelming concern that even though ELL students may want to work on more global issues, they remain focused on language issues because language proficiency is viewed as the initial step that must be completed before addressing more global issues.

Understanding and addressing these concerns and tensions is important because of the significance of writing centers to ELL students: writing centers are often the best learning resource for ELL students of all academic years, majors, and disciplines. In this time of limited academic resources, writing centers take on amplified importance for ELL students because, outside of ESL classes completed early in their academic careers, there are often very few resources for ELL students to work on English language acquisition; writing centers may not even provide the desired benefits for those ELL students seeking help with English language acquisition. Ilona Leki highlights the significance of the writing center to ELL students: Writing centers may be the ideal learning environment for students whose first or strongest language is not English: one-on-one, context rich, highly focused on a specific current writing need, and offering the possibility of negotiation of meaning (i.e., conversational back-and-forth that is thought to promote second language acquisition). That bilingual and multilingual writers recognize the benefits of writing center support is clear from the increasing numbers of second language (L2) students who take advantage of it. (1) For Leki, writing centers provide the one-on-one help that ELL students need while also being specific and meaningful. Writing centers also offer ELL students a chance to work on their writing while also participating in language learning. They are also places where ELL students can go to understand an assignment prompt or when they are confused about the requirements for an assignment. And while the writing center may be an ideal learning environment for ELL students, it is also one of the primary, and sometimes only, supportive learning environments at an institution.

One way to examine and help explain this relationship between ELL students and the writing center is through assessment. At the Miami University Howe Writing Center, where this project was conducted, one important form of assessment is the consultation exit survey, administered after a consultation, which was modified to focus on the relationship between ELL students and the writing center. Drawing

on the learning outcomes of the university and the writing center, this project had three guiding research goals that could be significant to other writing centers and contribute more broadly to writing center research: 1) Provide an overview of native English speaking and ELL students who schedule consultations with the writing center, 2) Understand the type of writing both groups of students wanted to work on and the type of writing they actually worked on during the consultation, and 3) Explore differences during consultations between ELL students and native English speaking students.

Institutional Background Information Located in Oxford, Ohio, Miami University is a medium-sized four-year institute of higher education focused on undergraduate teaching and learning. The school enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students. The Howe Writing Center completes nearly 4,000 consultations each academic year and is utilized by a significant portion of Miami University’s undergraduate population. With a generous donation from the Howe family, the Howe Center for Writing Excellence was established in 2006 and is well funded, supporting consulting, faculty outreach, and writing throughout the university.1 The writing center, housed in the Provost's office with a full professor tenured in English as director, employs about 40 undergraduates and 6 graduate students, in addition to an associate director, student writing center manager, international program specialist, and specialized graduate students working as assistant directors.2 In developing this post-consultation survey, it was important that consideration was given to both the Howe Writing Center and the larger writing center community. The survey drew upon Neal Lerner’s belief that “we need to link writing center outcomes to larger writing center values and theories, as well as to college/university-wide goals” (1). Therefore, this assessment builds upon the learning outcomes of the institution while connecting to broader writing center discourses. Having a dual focus ensures that the center can join discourses particular to the institution as well as discourses important to the broader writing center community. Because Miami University is focused primarily on undergraduate education, the assessment only considers undergraduate students. In addition to the orientation of the university towards undergraduate students, two of the center’s stated primary goals affected this project. The first goal is “To foster a culture of writing in which students welcome the writing instruction they receive in their courses, seek

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Challenging Perceptions • 24 additional opportunities to write outside of class, and strive continuously to improve their writing skills.”3 The second goal is “To assure that all students—from the most accomplished to the most needful—have ample help outside of their classes as they strive to improve their writing.”4 As the two goals state, the center seeks to appeal to all different levels of writing, majors, and classes throughout the university; therefore, our survey attempted to obtain information about a wide range of students. Meanwhile, the broader questions that the survey asks do have potential significance for writing centers outside of Miami University because they further our understanding of ELL students—an issue that applies to nearly every writing center and institution.

consultation questions were divided into what students wanted to work on during the consultation and what they actually worked on during the consultation.

Students were able to check multiple options because they usually want to work on and actually work on a variety of (and sometimes different) things during the consultation. Open-ended questions were used where students could respond in more detail to questions about the improvement of the writing center, improvements for the consultation, and about whether or not, and why, students will use the writing center again. The goal for all of the questions was to encourage students to give responses about themselves, the writing process, and the consultation.

Limitations

Methodology After each one-on-one consultation, students were asked to complete an online survey at computers located in the writing center. All research subjects were at least 18 years of age and were required to sign a consent form to participate in the survey. Survey results remained anonymous and the research project received IRB approval. Data collection took place during the duration of the Fall 2012 semester. Survey questions were designed to elicit from students the following information: 1. Distribution of majors and class standing among students visiting the writing center 2. Types of writing students bring to the writing center 3. Course assignments students bring to the writing center 4. Topics students initially sought to address in their appointment 5. The topics actually addressed in their appointment 6. Attitudes about writing 7. Satisfaction with the session—both how it was conducted and its outcome 8. Perception of the writing center after the consultation The survey consisted of 44 questions and took about 5-10 minutes to complete (see the endnotes for a link to the survey).5 In addition to general demographic questions, the survey asked students to self-identify as either a native English speaking student or a nonnative English speaking student. For questions about student satisfaction with the consultation, students used a Likert scale and were able to check strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, or strongly disagree. The

There were two primary limitations to this study: the first is the use of a survey to collect information, while the second is the attempt to use assessment in one center to make broader arguments about writing centers in general. Because the survey was optional and required student consent, only about half of the students who scheduled a consultation at the writing center completed a survey. While this is a sizeable number of participants, some may not have participated as a result of "survey-fatigue" that college students can experience or the fact that students are less likely to complete a longer survey that takes up too much time. Even if students are willing to take the post-consultation survey, a bias against exit-surveys exists among some centers because they are viewed as ineffective and unable to provide meaningful responses. Beth Kalikoff, in an examination of exitsurveys at the University of Washington-Tacoma, warns that students often "perceive themselves as having little enough time to go to the Writing Center and even less to fill out evaluations. They gave perfunctory answers or left the Center without completing a form" (5). For example, students may check the same box for each question as a way to complete the form as quickly as possible; additionally, students rarely provide useful responses to open-ended questions in surveys. As Kalikoff points out, when actually completed, students usually give little thought or time to exit-surveys as they hurry to leave the center.

In "How Are We Doing? A Review of Assessments within Writing Centers?," Miriam Gofine also questions the value of exit-surveys, pointing out that responses are generally overly positive. She notes that these positive responses are not helpful in creating meaningful assessment: "the feedback from the surveys was not conducive to the greater goals of improving services or detecting variation in client experiences of

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Challenging Perceptions • 25 the writing center" (Gofine 42). Isabelle Thompson, who echoes Gofine's concerns, believes that the results from post-consultation surveys at the writing center at Auburn University were "too positive to be useful or believable" (44). Students generally provide positive results immediately after consultations because that is when they perceive the most help on their writing; sometimes, over time, satisfaction with the consultation may go down.

Despite the limitations of consultation exitsurveys, they are a valuable way of collecting data.

Building upon an already established form of assessment made it easier to collect data from students who had come to expect to complete a survey after a consultation. Furthermore, the number of students who completed the survey was much higher than was possible using other forms of assessment, like focus groups or observations. Also, because of the number of students who completed the survey, there was a diverse student demographic represented in the data.

The second limitation is using assessment in one writing center to make arguments about other writing centers. Writing center assessment is often difficult because centers across higher education are rarely the same: they can be small or large, well-funded or not, part of the English department or independent, and often have different roles and goals dependent on their institution. According to Diana Bell and Alanna Frost, these differences result in a difficulty isolating variables between centers. However, Pam Bromley, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg, in their exploration of cross-institutional quantitative assessment, "suggest the need for a new disciplinary focus beyond the local" (15). Bromley, Northway, and Schonberg point out that assessment does not need to focus only on specific institutions, but can focus on writing centers as a discipline. The result of this kind of disciplinary focus means that, when framed this way, local writing centers can contribute to broader writing center theory and praxis.

The key to this assessment was to make sure that the research questions were not based on a unique problem for a single writing center but focused on disciplinary issues beyond the local. From the start, we wanted to focus on ELL students, including differences and similarities between them and NES students. The first concern was to determine during which academic year both groups of students were scheduling consultations. The second was to determine what class students scheduled for. The third was what students wanted to work on versus what they actually worked on during the consultation. And the fourth was to view consultations within the framework of "higher" and "lower" order concerns. While these issues may be

locally important to our center, they also have implications for other centers that grapple with how best to serve ELL students and how to meet student expectations during consultations.

Results and Discussion About 800 exit-surveys were completed. Using self-identification, 548 NES students completed the survey while 258 ELL students completed the survey.

Survey results were first used to create a profile/demographic of students that scheduled oneon-one consultations, including academic year, major, type of writing, and class (if applicable) that assigned the writing. This demographic information is writing center-specific, and most likely differs for each writing center based on numerous institutional factors. The remaining results are divided into four sections, each contributing to an understanding of the relationship between ELL students and the writing center. The first section, "First Year and Beyond," examines during which academic year students schedule consultations at the writing center. "Class Assignment" examines the class for which students are scheduling consultations.

The third section, "What Students Wanted to Work On and What They Actually Worked On," looks at writing needs before and during the consultation. The last section, "Higher and Lower Order Concerns," builds on the previous section by looking at what order of writing ELL students and NES students are working on by placing their writing within the categories of “higher” and “lower” order concerns.

First Year and Beyond Among self-identified NES students, the vast majority of students (72%) who scheduled consultations indicated that they were in their first year (see Figure 1). Student visits dropped off by a large margin between the first year and subsequent years, with fewer NES students scheduling consultations during their sophomore (12%), junior (7%), and senior (9%) years.

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Challenging Perceptions • 26

Figure 1. Writing center consultations for native English speaking students based on academic year.

Meanwhile, first year ELL students used the writing center the most, but the drop-off during subsequent academic years was not as drastic as among NES students (see Figure 2). First year ELL students comprised 34% of students, sophomores 30%, juniors 22%, and seniors 14%. First year and sophomore ELL students used the writing center 64% of the time while juniors and seniors made up 36% of consultations.

ELL students were more likely than NES students to continue to use the writing center after their first year, with 66% of ELL student consultations occurring after their first year, while only 28% of NES student consultations occurred after their first year. !

Figure 2. Writing center consultations for ELL students based on academic year.

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As responses show, after their first academic year, NES students (see Figure 1) were much less likely to schedule a consultation with the center compared to ELL students (see Figure 2). There are many possible explanations for these results, four of which are posited below. One possible explanation is that the center is highly publicized during international student

orientation, which suggests that more information about it as a resource circulates among international students. A second possible explanation is that ELL students are likely to take composition classes beyond their first academic year. This might explain the high number of sophomore students but does not sufficiently account for the high number of junior and senior ELL students who schedule consultations. A third possible explanation is that writing centers function as one of the primary resources for ELL students on campus; ELL students continue to use the center in high numbers because of this reason. This explanation highlights the continued need by ELL students for the services that writing centers provide for all years of schooling. A fourth possible explanation is that faculty and staff encourage ELL students to visit the writing center throughout their academic careers. Most likely some combination of these explanations, and perhaps more, contributes to the high use of the writing center by ELL students, and the data highlights the importance of the writing center for ELL students beyond the first academic year.

Class Assignment A second significant result is the similarity between ELL students and NES students on the assignment they work on during a consultation. Students were asked which course, if applicable, they were working on. Among NES students, 278 of 466 (60%) consultations were for introductory English composition classes; among ELL students, 99 of 146 (68%) wanted to work on introductory English composition assignments. One explanation for the high use of the writing center for introductory composition classes among both demographics is that writing-intensive courses lend themselves to the use of the writing center. Additionally, composition faculty members tend to highly promote the writing center among their own students. Another consideration is that students struggle with composition courses because they are not usually discipline-specific, and composition classes ask for modes of writing with which students may be unfamiliar. However, there may be other factors that contribute to this result.

All students at Miami University must complete required writing courses, which helps explain the high number of students scheduling consultations for help in those courses. Because introductory composition classes are required for all students as part of the core curriculum, they are some of the most highly enrolled classes at Miami University. In addition to the two composition courses required for all students, ELL students must complete two additional ESL composition courses.6 Both ELL students and NES

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Challenging Perceptions • 27 students can test out of composition classes and complete credit before enrollment. However, the fact that introductory English composition classes are required does not sufficiently explain why students do not bring as much work from other classes or their major to the writing center; rather, the high number of consultations for composition classes—and the low number of consultations for classes other than composition—reinforces the fact that, despite rigorous outreach to faculty and students, the common perception remains that the writing center is for introductory composition courses.

What Students Wanted to Work On and What They Actually Worked On One implication of this assessment project for the broader writing center community is the examination of what aspects of writing students wanted to work on versus what they actually worked on during the consultation. While most writing centers, through services like WCOnline, can track what students want to work on prior to the consultation, tracking what they actually worked on is much more difficult. Even if centers wanted to track consultation/client reports, doing so for a large number of students would be extremely time-consuming and difficult. The method used in this assessment provides one way to examine this important type of information after the consultation. As part of the survey students completed after the consultation, they were asked to check boxes concerning their writing before and during the consultation. These are self-reported responses and may differ from what consultants may report happened during the consultation.

The writing-specific results to these questions were divided into four categories: drafting, revision, editing, and other.

Drafting Brainstorming Organization Sentence structure Introduction Thesis Body paragraphs Topic sentences Transitions Conclusion

Revision Meets assignment requirements Discuss professor’s comments Expanding the paper Shortening the paper Clarifying ideas

Editing Grammar Spelling Sentence fragments Passive voice

Other General review ELL concerns Another reader

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Editing (cont.)

Verb choice Paragraph structure Formatting Citing sources General editing Polishing Language concerns

Rather than limit student responses, students were able to check as many boxes as they wanted in each category.

The top ten areas students wanted to work on and what they actually worked on, along with the percentage of students, are included below.

Writing Aspects Students Wanted to Work On ELL 1. Grammar 63% 2. Organization 43% 3. Meets assignment requirements 40% 4. General review 34% 5. Sentence structure 30% 6. Body paragraphs 25% 7. Spelling 25% 8. Thesis 24% 9. Clarification of ideas 24% 10. Brainstorming 23%

Native English Speaking 1. Meets assignment requirements 48% 2. Organization 47% 3. Clarification of ideas 44% 4. Grammar 44% 5. General review 42% 6. Body paragraphs 29% 7. Polishing 29% 8. Brainstorming 28% 9. Sentence structure 26% 10. Formatting 26%

Writing Aspects Students Actually Worked On ELL 1. Grammar 55% 2. Organization 40% 3. Meets assignment requirements 38% 4. General review 34% 5. Sentence structure 28% 6. Brainstorming 22% 7. Sentence fragments 21% 8. Spelling 20% 9. Thesis 19% 10. Body paragraphs 10%

Native English Speaking 1. Meets assignment requirements 47% 2. Organization 44% 3. General review 41% 4. Grammar 37% 5. Clarification of ideas 36% 6. Body paragraphs 29% 7. Polishing 29% 8. General editing 27% 9. Thesis 26% 10. Brainstorming 23%

The results both reaffirm the common perception that ELL writers are visiting the writing center for sentence-level concerns ("editing"), while also challenging this simplistic understanding of ELL writers. Grammar was the first category for what ELL students wanted to work on and what they actually worked on during the consultation. It is not surprising that ELL students would choose grammar because the term "Grammar" often functions as a catch-all for any sentence-level, editing, or language concerns in ELL writing. ELL students may also gravitate towards “Grammar” because it is a word that students actually

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Challenging Perceptions • 28 know and understand (as opposed to other aspects of the writing process, which may be less clear). As Sharon Myers notes in her work "Reassessing the 'Proofreading Trap': ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction," ELL students "present a common dilemma to writing centers—the desire for sentencelevel interventions from their tutors" (51). Anecdotally, consultants in the Howe Writing Center expressed their own concerns that they are functioning more as editors of grammar and spelling rather than as collaborative consultants. The perception, and reality, that writing centers are utilized for sentence-level intervention and local concerns by ELL students is prevalent and widespread, which leads to a sense of frustration for both consultants and students as needs and services may not match.

However, as this survey shows, three of the top four aspects of what students wanted to work on are the same: grammar, organization, and meets assignment requirements.

Wanted to Work On ELL 1. Grammar 2. Organization 3. Meets assignment requirements

Native English Speaking 1. Meets assignment requirements 2. Organization 3. Clarification of ideas

two groups actually worked on during consultations was similar. Out of the ten areas that students indicated they worked on during consultations, only three were different: ELL students chose Sentence Structure, Sentence Fragments, and Spelling while NES students chose Clarification of Ideas, Polishing, and General Editing. Despite the ELL student’s sentence-level concerns, ELL students and NES students are very similar.

Higher Order and Lower Order Concerns The data concerning what students wanted to work on and what they actually worked on can challenge assumptions about “higher order” (global) concerns and “lower order” (local) concerns as they are used to think about ELL and NES student writing. A common assumption is that NES students want to work primarily on so-called "higher order" concerns, such as organization, brainstorming, and thesis statements.

There is also an assumption that ELL students want to work primarily on so-called "lower order" concerns, such as grammar, spelling, and editing. This perception of student writing, regardless of how simplified or wrong it might be, permeates institutions, writing centers, and the student body. In examining what students wanted to work on and what they actually worked on within the context of higher order and lower order concerns, I drew three conclusions. The first is that ELL students are concerned with "higher order" issues in their writing. The second is that NES students are concerned with "lower order" issues. And the third, which flips a common narrative, is that there are more similarities than differences between ELL students and NES students.

A commonplace perception about ELL student writing is that they want to work primarily on "lower order" concerns. However, when the top ten aspects of writing ELL students wanted to work on were examined, the evidence presented a different story.

While Grammar was the most frequent concern for ELL students, it was also an important consideration for NES students. The percentages for both groups of students for Organization and Meets Assignment Requirements were similar. Organization was the second aspect that both groups of students wanted to work on the most, and the difference between ELL and NES students was only four percent. Both groups were also separated by only eight percentage points for Meets Assignment Requirements. Among the top ten that each group indicated they wanted to work on, the only differences were that ELL students indicated Spelling and Thesis while NES students indicated ELL Students Wanted to Work On Polishing and Formatting. The fact that eight of ten Higher Order Concerns Lower Order Concerns areas that students wanted to work on were the same 1. Organization (2) 1. Grammar (1) indicates the similarities between these two groups in 2. Meets assignment 2. General review (4) terms of their desires during a consultation. requirements (3) Much like what students wanted to work on, what 3. Body paragraphs (6) 3. Sentence structure (5) 4. Thesis (8) 4. Spelling (7) they actually worked on during a consultation was 5.

Clarification of ideas (9) similar between ELL students and NES students. The 6. Brainstorming (10) top four areas that ELL and NES students actually worked on during consultations were the same: While grammar ranks first for ELL students, six of the Grammar, Organization, Meets Assignment top ten aspects of writing ELL students wanted to work Requirements, and General Review. While it is on are considered "higher order" (global) concerns: assumed that ELL students want to work on local Organization, Meets Assignment Requirements, Body concerns and that NES students want to work on Paragraphs, Thesis, Clarification of Ideas, and more global concerns, data points out that what these Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 3 (2017) www.praxisuwc.com!

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Challenging Perceptions • 29 Brainstorming. In terms of what ELL students actually worked on during the consultation, five parts were "higher order" (global) concerns and five were "lower order" (local) concerns.

ELL Students Actually Worked On Higher Order Concerns 1. Organization (2) 2. Meets assignment requirements (3) 3. Brainstorming (6) 4. Thesis (9) 5. Body paragraphs (10)

Lower Order Concerns 1. Grammar (1) 2. General review (4) 3. Sentence structure (5) 4. Sentence fragments (7) 5. Spelling (8)

One of the more unexpected findings is that nearly a quarter of ELL students wanted to work on their thesis and 43% on organization. These findings suggest that ELL students know the many different components of the writing process and may want to work on those considerations during a consultation. Moreover, findings suggest that ELL students wanted to work on more "higher order" (global) concerns than native English speakers did during consultations.

It is often assumed that NES students want to work on "higher order" (global) concerns in their writing. But when the top ten aspects of writing that native English speakers wanted to work on during their consultations are examined, only five are "higher order" concerns while five are “lower order” concerns: Native English Speaking Students Wanted to Work On Higher Order Concerns 1. Meets assignment requirements 2. Organization 3. Clarification of ideas 4. Body paragraphs 5. Brainstorming

Lower Order Concerns 1. Grammar 2. General review 3. Polishing 4. Sentence structure 5. Formatting

NES students indicated a desire to work on more "lower order" aspects of their writing than ELL students. When the top ten aspects of writing students wanted to work on are compared with what they actually worked on during a consultation, there is little difference between ELL and NES students in both categories. Eight writing aspects are the same for what students wanted to work on during consultations and seven are the same for what students actually worked on. These similarities point out that there is more in common among these two groups of students than what is often anticipated.

Conclusion This project drew on quantitative data to provide important insights into, and further the conversation about, the relationship between ELL students and the

writing center. One of the significant contributions of this research is the finding that ELL students do not want to work on just local editing issues but are also interested in working on more global issues. Writing centers are already positioned to work on these nonlanguage issues; however, in order to get to this point, writing centers must overcome the common misperception among administrators and faculty that the writing center can, and should, address language concerns; in fact, for some it seems inconceivable that the writing center does not primarily address these concerns. According to Steven Bailey, "From an institutional standpoint the dominant assumption among administrators and faculty alike is that writing centers should perform remedial work with non-native speakers of English" (1). Administrators and faculty may send ELL students to the writing center with the express command to ask for help with sentence-level concerns. At least two factors, among many, are contributing to this view of the writing center. The first is that some faculty members expect that ELL students should be proficient in writing and speaking the English language—expectations that are too high because, after introductory ESL classes, there are very few opportunities for students to learn the English language. The second factor, building upon the first, is that ELL students are under pressure to correct language issues in their work; the result of this pressure is that ELL students seek out institutional resources, primarily the writing center, that may be able to help them "sound like a native speaker." But, writing center consultants are usually not trained or equipped to work as English language teachers and instructors. Because of the prevalence of the assumption that writing centers are fix-it shops for papers, it falls to the writing center—as one of the only and often best learning resources for ELL students on campus—to change perceptions that consultants are there to "fix" the English of international or ELL students (Bailey 1).

Instead of relying on the writing center to address the language concerns of ELL students, institutions should provide more resources for ELL students to learn the language after the introductory ESL classes often taken during a student's first year. If institutions can provide the language learning resources that ELL students need, then writing centers can play an important role in ELL student learning; rather than focusing solely on sentence-level issues, writing centers can improve the writer and not just the assignment.

Furthermore, consultants can help ELL students to bridge the cultural knowledge disparity gap. ELL students, particularly international students, can struggle learning in academic institutions that may value different types of knowledge, learning, and

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Challenging Perceptions • 30 thinking than they are used to. As Susan Blau and John Hall suggest, and as this project points to, the differences between ELL students and NES students may be more cultural rather than as part of the composition process. Blau and Hall point out that "we have to spend more time—perhaps more than we already do—educating ourselves and our tutors about cultural differences which affect writing and accept that an understanding of cultural differences is essential knowledge for a tutor working with NNES [non-native English speaking] students" (25).

The video Writing Across Borders also highlights some of the cultural differences between students: some cultures do not present the main point at the beginning of an essay but circle the main point; some only use information from classroom lectures and readings in their work; some are not very direct; some rely on readers to differ pronouns rather than the writer; some expect more reader participation; some have different preferences for style and word choice; some may rely on long and elaborate sentences versus short and direct sentences; and some may not place as much emphasis on citing sources. Additionally, some cultures may have difficulty bridging the student/teacher relationship because of the tendency to view the tutor as a teacher rather than as a peer.7 In searching for a solution to these broad cultural differences, Blau and Hall suggest that we need to change how we tutor non-ELL students (29). In addition to functioning as a cultural informant, Blau and Hall believe that "One way to resolve this bind over how to organize a session with NNES writers is to interweave the discussion of global and local concerns" (35). For example, focusing on the thesis can effectively address both local and global concerns by addressing sentence-level concerns while also challenging students to think about how the thesis functions as an argument for the entire paper. This strategy also works well for topic sentences, use of evidence, etc. In each instance, students can address specific examples of language while addressing global concerns. Since language concerns are rarely the only problem in ELL student writing, or any writing for that matter, there is ample room for intervention by consultants into global concerns. According to Staben and Nordhaus, "Acting as a cultural informant about U.S. academic expectations—rhetorical or otherwise— and focusing the writer's attention on the text as a whole is vital precisely because no matter the background of the ESL writer, language can be an overwhelming and blinding concern" (80). By moving beyond language issues and focusing the writer's

attention on the text as a whole, writing centers can help provide a lexicon for ELL students to articulate their learning needs as well as provide a way to improve the writer and not just the specific assignment.

The last result of this assessment is the way in which it prompts future projects. First, we can research ways to change administrative, faculty, and student perceptions of the writing center. We can also work even more closely with ELL students in order to match writing center services with student needs. I recommend starting with Rafoth's Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers as a way to think about how the presence of multilingual writers has "required directors and tutors to rethink what they know about their own language, learning languages, and academic discourse generally" (136). Lastly, we can explore ways of improving training for consultants to work with ELL students by focusing on communication and cultural information. While we take as a starting premise that writing centers should not be focusing on correcting sentence-level issues or editing, perhaps other institutions may find that addressing these concerns as a primary focus during consultations is necessary in order to best help ELL students; in which case, consultants need to be trained as English language instructors to meet this focus. Despite the limitations of this project, I believe that it addresses Kristen Welch and Susan Revels-Parker’s high expectation that "Assessment embodies the potential for change if used to its fullest advantage" (1). Building on their expectation, this assessment project has the potential for institutions and writing centers to reconsider expectations for ELL students while changing the way we think about ELL students in the writing center.

Notes 1. For more information, please visit the website of the Howe Writing Center at http://muohio.edu/howe.

2. These numbers have changed since the project was completed.

3. “About.” Miami University Howe Writing Center, 7 June 2013. www.miamioh.edu/cas/academics/departments/englis h/academics/resources/writing-centers/index.html.

4. Ibid.

5. The entire survey can be accessed at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HoweWritingCente r.

6. The composition requirements for ELL students and native English speaking students have since changed due to a restructuring of the core writing curriculum.

7. Blau and Hall 28.

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Challenging Perceptions • 31 Works Cited “About.” Miami University Howe Writing Center, 7 June 2013. www.miamioh.edu/cas/academics/departments/e nglish/academics/resources/writingcenters/index.html.

Bailey, Steven K. "Tutoring Handbooks: Heuristic Texts for Negotiating Difference in a Globalized World." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 9, no.

2, 2012, www.praxisuwc.com/bailey92/?rq=Steven%20K.%20Bailey.

Bell, Diana Calhoun, and Alanna Frost. “Critical Inquiry and Writing Centers: A Methodology of Assessment.” The Learning Assistance Review, vol.

17, no. 1, 2012, pp. 15-26.

Blau, Susan, and John Hall. "Guilt Free Tutoring: Rethinking How we Tutor Non-Native-EnglishSpeaking Students." The Writing Center Journal vol.23, no.1, 2002, pp. 23-44.

Bromley, Pam, et. al. "How Important Is the Local, Really? A Cross-Institutional Quantitative Assessment of Frequently Asked Questions in Writing Center Exit Surveys." The Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no.1, 2013, pp. 13-37.

Shanti Bruce, and Ben Rafoth, editors. ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2009.

Gofine, Miriam. “How Are We Doing? A Review of Assessments within Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 32, no.1, 2012, pp. 39-49.

Harris, Muriel, and Tony Silva. "Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options." College Composition and Communication, vol. 44, no. 4, 1993, pp. 525537.

Hawthorne, Joan. "'We Don't Proofread Here': ReVisioning the Writing Center to Better Meet Student Needs." Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 23, no.

8, 1999, pp. 1-7.

Kalikoff, Beth. “From Coercion to Collaboration: A Mosaic Approach to Writing Center Assessment.”

Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 26, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5-7.

Leki, Ilona. "Before the Conversation: A Sketch of Some Possible Backgrounds, Experiences, and Attitudes Among ESL Students Visiting a Writing Center." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2009, pp. 1-17.

Lerner, Neal. “Choosing Beans Wisely.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 26, no.1, 2001, pp. 1-5.

Meyers, Sharon A. "Reassessing the 'Proofreading Trap': ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction." The

Writing Center Journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 2003, pp. 5170.

Paoli, Dennis. "Tutoring in a Remedial/Developmental Learning Context." The Writing Center Director's Resource Book. edited by, Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2006, pp. 165-178.

Rafoth, Ben. Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers.

Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015.

Severino, Carol. "Avoiding Appropriation." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2009, pp. 51-65.

Staben, Jennifer E., and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus.

"Looking at the Whole Text." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2009. 78-90.

Thompson, Isabelle. “Writing Center Assessment: Why and a Little How.” The Writing Center Journal vol. 26, no.1, 2006, pp. 33-61.

Welch, Kristen and Susan Revels-Parker. "Writing Center Assessment: An Argument for Change."

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, 2012, www.praxisuwc.com/welch101/?rq=kristen%20welch.!

Writing Across Borders. Directed by Wayne Robertson, Oregon State University Center for Writing and Learning and Writing Intensive Curriculum Program, 2005.

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LEARNING ABOUT SOMETHING MEANS BECOMING WISER: THE PLATONIC DIALOGUE AS A PARADIGMATIC MODEL FOR WRITING CENTER PRACTICE Kathryn Raign University of North Texas Kathryn.Raign@unt.edu Abstract As our discipline’s scholars, we must recognize that ours is a history “that is best recognized as an always incomplete narrative” and continue to delve into the past as we seek to inform our future (Lerner 25). In this article, I delve into Plato’s use of “elenchus” or cross-questioning for the purpose of achieving “aporia”—the sense of perplexity or confusion that usually accompanies the discovery that language does not have the ability to mean in any stable sense” within Theaetetus (Raign 90). In addition to extending our narrative history, studying the process of elenchus will allow us to share this methodology with our tutors, so that they can develop the ability not to merely engage in conversation with their students, or lead them to a truth not their own, but engage in the type of inquiry about language and its ability to mean that leads students toward the sort of self-discovery present in the Platonic dialogues.

Many students are not taught to think critically, and consequently, they build fragile structures composed of unsubstantiated opinions designed to beguile the reader into accepting as fact what is nothing more than emotion—what for Plato was sophistry. Socrates’s answer to this teaching dilemma, according to Plato, was the use of dialectic. But should today's writing tutors attempt to teach today's students, students characterized by weak critical thinking skills, such a complicated and arcane method of critical analysis? I would answer yes.

I would like to focus on Plato’s use of the heuristic, rather than eristic dialogue—a form of dialogue that employs “elenchus” or cross-questioning for the purpose of achieving “aporia”—the sense of perplexity or confusion that usually accompanies the discovery that language does not have the ability to mean in any stable sense . . . intended not as an end but rather as a beginning” (Raign 90). In the ten years that I directed my university’s writing center, I listened to many tutors and students discussing writing and writing issues. Some of the tutors were able to engage students in in-depth conversations about their topics, while others had difficulty moving beyond questions such as “What is your problem today?” or “Let’s review the rules for writing a thesis statement.” The first empty question is likely to result in an equally empty answer, and the second very specific response will end in a thirty-minute review of a handout on

thesis statements, which the student could easily read him or herself.

Muriel Harris accurately describes the writing center’s primary responsibility: “to work one-to-one with students” (27). Frances Martin argues that this one-to-one, “is at its best … clearer, fuller, more frequent, more timely, more appropriate, and more reassuring than written comment” (7). However, as teachers of writing, we all understand how difficult it can be to engage an unengaged student. The average student comes to a writing center with one expectation—someone fix my paper. Even those students who might want to engage with the tutor on a deeper level often find themselves uncertain how to do so. Students’ attempts to articulate their needs vary, but the content is basically consistent: • • • • •

I need help with grammar.

I need you to read this and find the mistakes.

I’m not sure my paper makes sense.

I don’t know if my paper has a structure.

My teacher said I don’t have an argument.

In summary—fix it. Our students honestly need, and in most cases want more than a quick fix that excludes them from the writing process. They simply do not have the vocabulary or writing experience to articulate their individual needs in a manner that will help a writing center tutor begin a targeted, critical conversation about the student’s writing. To complicate this issue, tutors often share this problem with their students. We hire tutors who have strong writing abilities, but the ability to write does not ensure the ability to critically discuss someone else’s writing.

Consequently, many tutorials sound like this: Tutor: How can I help you today?

Student: I need help on my paper.

Tutor: What kind of help?

Student: You know, just help with the whole thing.

Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 33 Tutor: OK. Let me read the paper, and then we can discuss it.

At this point, the tutor will read the paper aloud (sometimes silently) while the student looks at his or her phone. After several minutes have passed, the tutor will begin again.

Tutor: What are you trying to say in this paper?

Student: My teacher told me to write about a world without something important in it. I wrote about a world without cell phones (while looking at text).

Tutor: OK. That’s an interesting idea. What would a world without cell phones look like?

Student: Well, you know. Not so good. Bad. Like I said in my paper.

Tutor: OK. Let’s look at your paper. Where do you say that not having phones wouldn’t be good? Can you show me?

Student: (Poking paper with pen). Here, here, and here. I said three things because I needed five paragraphs. But my teacher said I didn’t say enough, and I should look at how I support my thesis.

At this point, the tutor is beginning to get frustrated and starts looking for a way to give the tutorial some kind of structure.

Tutor: What is the topic sentence of your first body paragraph?

Student: A world without cell phones would be boring.

Tutor: Excellent. So you do have a topic sentence. Do your other body paragraphs have topic sentences?

Student: Let’s see. A world without cell phones would be unsafe, and a world without cell phones would be lonely.

Tutor: Great. So now we have something to work with. Let’s look at how you support each of those ideas.

The tutorial ends shortly after this, with the student and the tutor agreeing that the student needs to add examples after each topic sentence—making sure each paragraph has at least two examples. Sadly, the tutor and the student never moved beyond their discussion of how the student could produce a five-paragraph theme to discuss the relevance of the student’s thesis, or the quality of the arguments being made. Because the tutor could not discover how to initiate a dialectic

with the student, the tutorial devolved into chat about how to structure a paper devoid of originality or credibility. The student and the tutor didn’t engage in an analysis of the paper’s content; they engaged in a conversation about the structure of the paper sans content—in essence verifying many students’ misconceptions that writing doesn’t need to mean—it simply needs to follow a set of abstract rules.

Unfortunately, the behavior described in this example, while not typical, does occur with disturbing regularity.

The question of how to train tutors to engage in meaningful conversation has haunted me for quite some time, and recently, as I was reading Plato for a graduate course I was teaching, I found my answer.

Plato’s Theaetetus provides a specific model of effective tutor and student behavior, and by using this dialogue as a training tool for our tutors, we can provide them with an example of a structured dialogue that they can use as a road map for their own tutorials. Introducing tutors to this process and the structure in which it occurs will teach tutors to do more than reduce a tutorial to a discussion of a randomly identified grammar issue—though this method can be used to discuss grammar issues, or the application of a set of arbitrary rules (e.g. every essay must have five paragraphs). Tutors will have the skills to engage their students in dialogues that will help them identify the flaws in their arguments or reasoning, that rather than causing the dialogue to disintegrate, lead the conversation to a deeper level. In this paper, I attempt to do several things: • •

•

•

Briefly discuss the relationship between dialect, dialogue, and tutorial.

Analyze the usefulness of Rosemary Desjardins’ discussion of elenchus as a paradigm for teaching students to recognize aporias in the Platonic dialogues, and consequently, in their students’ papers.

Offer an analysis of the Platonic dialogue Theaetetus, which can be used to train tutors.

Suggest how tutors can use this knowledge to engage their students in the valuable heuristic of dialectic by acting as both guide and mentor.

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 34

The Socratic Method, Dialectic, Dialogue, Tutorial Amid heavy course loads, tentative job security, and numbing committee work, we eke out our fifteen minutes of conferencing a semester, apologizing to students that is all we can do. We hope that some students visit the writing center, getting more informed feedback than they’d get from a quick opinion offered by a roommate or younger sister. And we hope that our inability to offer more extensive contact doesn’t push students into seeing writing assignments as little more than rote exercises in giving the teacher what she or she wants, a function easily fulfilled by the wide range of online papers for sale (Lerner 205).

In this quote, Lerner acknowledges the gulf that separates the classroom from the writing center.

Despite their best intentions, composition teachers have limited time in which to provide students with informed, personalized feedback, instead hoping students will fill this need in the writing center. Clearly, the writing center, where students can engage in inquiry based conferences, offers something the classroom cannot—the opportunity to engage one-onone with a mentor who is not restricted by his or her need to give a grade, what Thomas Hemmeter calls Socratic tutoring, and claims is “the traditional site of language instruction” (43-44). This activity, the social process of constructing knowledge, has been identified by multiple scholars, though each gives it a different name. Nancy J. Allen analyzes Plato’s Phaedrus and identifies three tutoring models. The authoritarian tutor believes that he or she holds the truth, and should share it. In other words, the tutor might determine that the student needs to add topic sentences and would then suggest that action as a cure to the paper’s ills (Allen 5). Conversely, the tutor as inquirer uses probing questions to lead the student to a truth about his or her paper—a truth the tutor believes the student already owns. Socrates uses this method when he gives his second speech with his head uncovered. In this speech, and the discussion that follows, Socrates uses questions to lead Phaedrus to a truth that Phaedrus consequently believes is his own.

However, Allen points out that while Phaedrus did discover a truth he felt to be his own, in fact, “it was [Socrates] who determined that truth and then led [Phaedrus] to recognize and articulate it” (6).

Consequently, she cautions that tutors as inquirers

might to some degree appropriate students’ work.

Allen concludes by advising tutors to emulate Socrates the explorer, who investigated the nature of rhetoric with Phaedrus so that they could both understand it more fully (8). She acknowledges that the role of explorer is a difficult one for tutors because it leads them into unchartered waters, void of a firm structure or clear goal (9)—a structure that I argue can be found in Theaetetus.

Gregory Clark, in a similar rhetorical move, also identifies three types of Socratic exchange: “Dialogue … is characterized by its participant’s consciousness of each other, by the conscious efforts to interact cooperatively … Dialectic … enables people to construct together assumptions and agreements they can share … Conversation describes that process through which people enact the essence of compromise” (xvi). So, dialogue describes the shape of the activity; dialectic describes the function, and conversation describes the process (xvi). Clark relies heavily on the work of Chaim Perlman, who subsumes the three—shape, function, and process—into one term: the dialectical method (Clark 164-165).

Within the dialectical method, Clark identifies two types of dialogue: eristic and dialectical. Eristic discourse attempts to force one person’s interpretation (or truth) on another. When a tutor tells a student to “write the sentence this way,” while writing the sentence on the student’s paper, he or she is engaging in eristic dialogue. The purpose of a dialectical exchange, however, is to “present an interpretation to others for them to judge, opening it to their modifying response” (Clark 19). When a tutor uses questions such as “To me your thesis sounds vague, but what do you think?” he or she is engaging in dialectical dialogue and emulating Socrates the explorer (Allen 8-9). Discourse that Plato condemns, such as Lysias’ speech in the Phaedrus, is an example of eristic dialogue, while the later discussion of the meaning of love is dialectical in nature. So we end with multiple metaphors to describe the types of rhetorical inquiry occurring within the Platonic dialogues: Authoritarian/inquirer/explorer Eristic/dialectic Regardless of the terminology each uses, they are all saying the same thing: within the Platonic dialogues, we have models of tutoring behavior—both positive and negative. I would like to continue the conversation by focusing on Socrates the explorer, who engaged in dialectic dialogue—the methodology most effective in a writing center—to provide an antidote to the ills of foolish and empty thinking and writing (Allen 9). I also

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 35 suggest that an exploration of the process of elenchus in Plato’s dialogues, and the aporia that may result, provide us with both a vocabulary and a process for understanding this methodology more clearly.

The Process of Elenchus That Results in Aporia We must deconstruct the methodology of dialectic in order to validate that the Platonic dialogues do, in fact, describe and codify a tutoring methodology that clearly serves as a useful model for 21st century writing centers. Rosemary Desjardins, in “Why Dialogues: Plato’s Serious Play,” provides useful terminology for understanding the use of the dialectic to tutor students by identifying, in terms of actions, the process that takes place within the dialogues. First, elenchus, the process of inquiry or “cross-questioning” occurs and serves the primary purpose of making someone “realize that to come up with even the right words is not enough, that one’s unquestioned assumptions are often really obstacles to true understanding” (Desjardins 115). In Desjardins’ view “…the ambiguous nature of language complicates the ability to communicate in more than a superficial manner by undermining an unshakeable belief in language’s ability to mean … which attempts to open the participant to the process of elenchus” in which one is made to realize that to come up with even the right words is not enough, that one’s unquestioned assumptions are obstacles to understanding (Raign 90; Desjardins 116).

Elenchus, if rigorously used, results in aporia. Aporia, “meaning literally ‘no way out,’ ‘no exit’—is intended, of course, not as an end but rather as a beginning” (Desjardins 116-117).

Theaetetus provides an example of both the process of elenchus and the discovery of aporia, supplemented with Socrates’s commentary on the usefulness of both as a learning strategy. In the analysis that follows, we will look at best practices for tutoring as they occur during the process of a tutorial.

In the Beginning—The Role of the Tutor and the Student Early in the dialogue, Socrates attempts to ensure the success of the tutorial by explaining to Theaetetus both his own role as tutor and Theaetetus’s as student, as well the rewards and risks that are the results of engaging in the process of elenchus. First, Socrates establishes the purpose of their discussion: Socrates: . . . So tell me, in a generous spirit, what you think knowledge is.

Theaetetus: Well, Socrates, I cannot refuse, since you and Theodorus ask me. Anyhow, if I do make a mistake, you will set me right.

Socrates: By all means, if we can (146c, 851).

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Here, Plato provides us with a definition of the roles of the tutor and the student. The student is to respond to the tutor’s questions in “a generous spirit,” with the reassurance that the tutor will “set [him or her] right” if necessary. Socrates is quick to do so, suggesting that Theaetetus’s answers are too circular in nature: Socrates: . . . we are going an interminable way round, when our answer might be quite short and simple (147c, 148).

After Socrates tutors him in the art of the short and specific response, Theaetetus questions his ability to meet Socrates’s expectations: Theaetetus: But I assure you Socrates, I have often set myself to study that problem [what is knowledge], when I heard reports of the questions you ask. But I cannot persuade myself that I can give any satisfactory solution or that anyone has ever stated in my hearing the sort of answer you require (148e, 853).

Socrates refers to his own skill as a tutor in order to establish his own ethos and to reassure his student: Socrates: . . . the highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth. . . I can bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. (150c, 855) Here, Socrates establishes that his ethos lies not in his possession of wisdom, but in his ability to guide others in their search for wisdom—his expertise lies in the process of elenchus. Socrates very effectively empowers his student to explore his ideas while providing a safety net of sorts—his ability to serve as a guide, or mentor if you will. He carefully avoids setting himself up as a rival to Theaetetus by denying his own possession “of any sort of wisdom, nor . . . any discovery of [his] soul,” which prevents him, whether actually or metaphorically, from appropriating Theaetetus’s ideas. He has, in essence, created the persona of the perfect tutor whose job is to help his or her student separate weak ideas (false phantoms and

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 36 wind eggs) from those with potential (instinct with life and truth).

Next, Socrates proves to Theaetetus, the benefits and drawbacks of engaging in the process of elenchus with a skilled tutor: Socrates: Those who frequent my company at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent, but, as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves, although it is clear that they have never learned anything from me. The many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is . . . mine (150d, 855).

In this passage, Socrates might be a tutor sitting in any writing center at any college or university, silently mourning a student’s lack of intelligence, only to find his or her opinion altering as the tutorial unwinds; the student’s confidence grows, and the tutor’s questions are met with thoughtful answers. It is this very experience that keeps those of us who inhabit writing centers returning each day. As Socrates and other wise tutors know, the tutor is only the facilitator in the process. However, Socrates also wants his student to be clear that his intellectual growth is contingent upon the mentorship being provided by the tutor, and the process of elenchus itself: Socrates: The proof of this is that many who have not been conscious of my assistance but have made light of me, thinking it [their intellectual growth] was all their own doing, have left me sooner than they should, whether under others’ influence or of their own motion, and thenceforward suffered miscarriage of their thoughts through falling in bad company, and they have lost the children [ideas] of whom I had delivered them by bringing them up badly, caring more for false phantoms than for the true (150d-e, 855).

So, those students who openly and regularly engage in the process of elenchus with a trained tutor will “make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves,” while those students who believe they do not need a tutor’s aid will fail to deliver true ideas.

Socrates is not unaware of the fact that many students whose ideas he has cast away do not see that

‘[he] is doing them a kindness,” but have “been positively ready to bite [him] for taking away some foolish notion they have conceived” (151c-d, 856).

Again, this description is a startlingly accurate summation of what many tutors experience today.

Many (if not most) students are like Plato’s students— they desperately want instruction, but become defensive when their ideas are questioned. This attitude must be tempered by the reminder that “the many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within” (150d, 855).

As the tutorial continues, Socrates continues to reiterate for his student that the work being done belongs to him and is the result of his labor, not the tutor’s: Socrates: The arguments never come out of me; they always come from the person I am talking with. I am only at a slight advantage in having the skill to get some account of the matter from another person’s wisdom and entertain it with fair treatment (161b, 866).

Socrates is again pausing the tutorial to remind the student that he has the answers in order to alleviate his natural frustration—another important behavior that tutors must emulate. Students need positive reinforcement. Having established how elenchus works, Plato, in the remainder of the dialogue, shares further best practices to be used by those who lead others in the process of elenchus.

Four clear practices are outlined for the tutor: Explain the role of both the tutor and the student.

The tutor will use his or her skills to ask students pertinent questions about their writing, and the students are to participate fully by answering honestly and clearly.

Correct and reassure as needed. The tutor should correct students when they fail to fully engage in the process and should reassure students when they doubt their ability to do so effectively.

Establish a role as mentor, not editor. Tutors should remind students that while they are expert writers, their job is to lead students to a fuller understanding of their own writing, not to fix, correct, or appropriate students’ work.

Provide positive reinforcement about the process.

Tutors must take the time to convince students of the positive effects of the tutoring process, rather than assuming students are already convinced of this fact, or

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 37 losing their patience when students express doubt about the tutor’s knowledge or abilities. In most cases, students, like Theaetetus, speak out of fear and a lack of confidence—not experience.

Stuck in the Middle with You—Empathize, Don’t Criticize The metaphor of illness is commonly used in writing center lore, and in this context, Socrates is suggesting that students are not to be blamed or judged if they do not recognize “good” writing versus bad.1 Socrates: To the sick man his food appears sour and is so; to the healthy man it is and appears the opposite. Now there is no call to represent either of the two as wiser—that cannot be—nor is the sick man to be pronounced unwise because he thinks as he does, or the healthy man wise because he thinks differently. What is wanted is a change to the opposite condition, because the other state is better (166e-167a, 872).

Students do not need to be “fixed,” “healed” or “diagnosed.” Instead, the tutor is to help students reach a better state in which they are able to judge the quality of their writing more wisely. In fact, he sees this as the tutor’s obligation: Socrates: . . . when someone by reason of a depraved condition of mind has thoughts of a like character, one makes him, by reason of a sound condition, think other and sound thoughts (167b, 873).

One method of helping students whose thoughts on writing and the writing process are not sound is to help them make appropriate choices based on audience analysis: Socrates: For I hold that whatever practices seem right and laudable to any particular state are so, for that state, so long as it holds by them. Only, when the practices are, in any particular case, unsound for them, the wise man substitutes others that are and appear sound (167c, 873).

So, the tutor must, through careful inquiry, help the student to determine what the particular state, or writing situation, deems to be the best practice. Clearly, if an instructor requires a student to write in third person, the wise tutor will help a student to understand

the necessity of making that choice if he or she wants to satisfy his or her audiences’ expectations. Again, we are left with clear practices to follow: Physician, heal thyself. Tutors must remember that their students are not broken and waiting to be fixed. If they have “wrong” ideas about the writing process, it is the job of the tutor to discover the source of the belief and then guide them to a healthier belief. Students don’t insert errors into their papers in order to confound the tutor. They do it out of a lack of understanding.

Empathize, empathize, empathize. A tutor must first understand the source of a student’s belief before he or she can help the student replace that belief with a more useful one. A tutor must help the student to understand the rhetorical situation of his or her current writing project so that the student can make sound choices.

None of these best practices are new or surprising.

What is surprising is that the best practices did not develop out of the work of 20th or even 21st century writing centers. In fact, these best practices were bequeathed to us in the works of Plato. Next, we will look at specific examples of the occurrence of aporia, and their effect on the outcome of the tutorial.

Useful Frustation—Elenchus and Aporia Although the entire dialogue Theaetetus is an example of elenchus, it is in the latter half of the dialogue that Socrates overtly states the difference between a debate and a conversation, the latter being his word for the process of elenchus: Socrates: Do not conduct your questioning unfairly. It is very unreasonable that one who professes a concern for virtue should be constantly guilty of unfairness in argument.

Unfairness here consists in not observing the distinction between a debate and conversation. A debate need not be taken seriously, and one may trip up an opponent to the best of one’s power, but a conversation should be taken in earnest; one should help out the other party and bring home to him only those slips and fallacies that are due to himself or to his earlier instructors (167e168a, 873).

Clearly, this is directed at those who would be tutors, reminding them that their role is to engage students in

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 38 rational inquiry—elenchus—not strive to prove their own superiority through debate, which is self-serving.2 The most overt examples of elenchus and aporia occur in the final passages of the dialogue. As Socrates and Theaetetus struggle to understand the meaning of knowledge, their questions lead to multiple aporias, the first being the result of their agreement that, rather than finding out what knowledge is, they have discovered what it is not: Theaetetus: It is now perfectly plain that knowledge is something different from perception.

Socrates: You are right, my friend. Now we begin all over again. Blot out all we have been saying, and see if you can get a clearer view from the position you have now reached (186e187a, 892).

Next, Socrates and Theaetetus must acknowledge that they have been defeated in their search to understand the meaning of knowledge. They have been trapped by their own reasoning, and must seek a new way out; if no way can be found, they must humbly begin again: Socrates: I should feel some shame at our being forced into such admissions. But if we find the way out, then, as soon as we are clear, it will be time to speak to others as caught the ludicrous position we shall have ourselves escaped; though, if we are completely baffled, then I suppose we must be humble and let the argument do with us what it will, like a sailor trampling over seasick passengers. So let me tell you where I still see an avenue open for us to follow. . . We must, in fact, put the case in a different way. Perhaps the barrier will yield somewhere, though it may defy our efforts (191a-b, 897).

Although they do, in fact, begin again, Socrates and Theaetetus are once again stymied. They have “gone a long way round” only find themselves facing another impasse.

Socrates: Maybe, my young friend, we have deserved this rebuke, and the argument shows us that we were wrong . . .

Theaetetus: As things now stand, Socrates, one cannot avoid that conclusion.

Socrates: To start all over again, then, what is one to say that knowledge is? For surely we are not going to give up yet.

Theaetetus: Not unless you do (200c-d, 907).

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Despite their many attempts, Socrates and Theaetetus never answer their initial question. Yet, as I stated earlier, the purpose of aporia is not to find answers, an end, but to create a conversation, a beginning—a fact that Socrates both acknowledges and praises at the close of Theaetetus: Socrates: Are we in labor with any further child my friend, or have we brought to birth all we have to say about knowledge?

Theaetetus: Indeed we have, and for my part I have already, thanks to you, given utterance to more than I thought I had in me (210b, 918).

Although Socrates and his student agree that all of their ideas have been “wind eggs” not worth raising, they are likely to give birth to future thoughts worthy of development. Theaetetus acknowledges that the process helped him to discover more ideas than he thought he had in him, and such is the true purpose of elenchus: Socrates: Your embryo thoughts will be better as a consequence of today’s scrutiny, and if you remain barren, you will be gentler and more agreeable to your companions, having the good sense not to fancy you know what you do not know (210b-c, 919).

So we again see the dichotomy of debate versus conversation, or answer versus inquiry. If we honestly believe that writing and learning to write are processes, then we must naturally engage not in debate but in conversation, and where is that activity most likely to occur? The writing center.

Applications for the Writing Center Writing center staff has intuitively been modeling the Platonic paradigm for centuries; however, we have never formally acknowledged our debt to Plato, or fully utilized the tools with which he provided us. Yes, writing tutors typically engage in dialectic when working with students, and much has been published on the tutorial, but we should make our instruction in the Platonic method more intrinsic. While it is not necessary to require your tutors to read Plato, though it might make for an interesting conversation, you can provide them with an overview of the Platonic method, and explain the relevant terminology. You might also do some modeling with your tutors, and have them do the same. Consciously using the terminology provided here can help writing center

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 39 directors to more effectively train their tutors in several ways: The Platonic dialogues provide evidence of the richness of our history, and offer tangible examples that writing center directors and staff can analyze and emulate.

New writing center tutors are often stymied by their lack of an understandable, replicable method for conducting effective conversations—dialectic—with their clients. Writing center directors, myself included, often attempt to remedy this problem by having tutors engage in mock tutorials, or observe experienced tutors as they work with students. While these methods have their benefits, why not reinforce them by first introducing our tutors to the Platonic dialogues?

Providing an overview of dialogues such as Theaetetus for our tutors will provide them with a model to follow, while also introducing them to our discipline’s rich history.

The terms “elenchus” and “aporia” offer tutors a specific vocabulary to use when working with students—one that will help tutors to demystify the process for students so they can effectively identify their own discoveries.

It is often their faith in the ability of language, particularly their own unique use of language to mean, that prevents students from being able to distance themselves sufficiently from their own writing to engage in the process of elenchus for the purpose of seeking aporia. Simply put, their unwillingness to question language renders them unable to engage in dialectic. For example, a student who chooses to write on the topic of abortion must question that word's ability to signify a unified meaning by confronting the term's multiplicity of meanings. However, such a process requires that students risk shaking the very roots of their own beliefs in language's power—a process that not only frightens students, but one in which they are totally unprepared to engage. By taking students through a process of inquiry inspired by that in Theaetetus, and explaining to students what happens when aporia occurs, tutors can help students take their first tentative steps into a deeper level of meaning beyond their own preconceived beliefs.

As we train each new generation of writing center directors and their staff, we need to ensure that we have given them access to their rich heritage, so that they can learn from the works of Plato, and strive to implement the process of dialectic as they seek to empower students. Perhaps we will not work with our students to define knowledge, or truth, but that does not mean the conversations in which we help students

to understand truths about writing and the writing process (e.g. what is a good thesis? Do I have one?

Have I fairly defined my terms in my argument?) are less important or less useful to our students. Let’s reimagine that tutorial we began with: Tutor: How can I help you today?

Student: I need help on my paper.

Tutor: Great. So the topic of your paper is imagine life without cell phones, right?

Student: Yeah.

Tutor: OK. Let me read the paper, and then we can discuss it.

At this point, the tutor asks the student to read his paper out loud.

Tutor: (Pointing at thesis). So, you are arguing that life without cell phones would be bad, right?

Student: Yeah.

Tutor: How would you define bad?

Student: You know, not good.

Tutor: I agree that good is the opposite of bad, but you still haven’t told me what “bad” means. Do you define bad in your paper?

Student: (Poking paper with pen). Here, here, and here. I said three things because I needed five paragraphs. But my teachers said I didn’t say enough.

Tutor: You do have three paragraphs, but you still haven’t told me how you define bad in your paper. Show me one place in your paper where you define bad.

Student: (Pointing at a paragraph) A world without cell phones would be boring.

Tutor: Excellent. So you define bad as boring?

Student: Well, I would say it is bad to be bored.

Tutor: Let’s think about this. First, boring is how we describe something, right? Give me an example of something that is boring.

Student: (Laughing) This tutoring thing is boring.

Tutor: (Laughing) Fair enough. But is it bad?

Student: No, it’s good because I’m learning how to make my paper better.

Tutor: So? Student: So I guess bad and boring aren’t always the same thing.

Tutor: I agree. So what does that do to your argument that life without cell phones is bad?

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Learning About Something Means Becoming Wiser • 40 Student: Messes it up. I guess I need another word besides bad.

Tutor: I agree. How would you describe life without cell phones?

This time, the tutor was able to help the student realize that many of his ideas were “wind eggs,” not worthy of development. This was discovered through the process of elenchus, which led the student to realize he could not adequately to define the terms of his own argument. This type of transformation is possible if we give tutors and students the tools they need. As Plato so eloquently states, the intellectual site of the writing center, the psychological space where inquiry occurs, is the home of the “free man [or woman] who has time . . . to converse in peace . . . He [or she] will pass, as we are doing now, from one argument to another . . . Like us, he will leave the old for a fresh one . . . and he [or she] does not care how long or short the discussion may be, if only it attains the truth” (172d-e, 878). As writing center directors and consultants, we are free: free to embrace our history, free to use that history to validate our practices, free to use that history to build the future.

Notes 1.

See Boquet, Elizabeth, “Our Little Secret: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-open Admissions. College, Composition, and Communication, 50 (3): 463-482; Carino, Peter, “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab, and Center.” Writing Center Journal 13:1 (1992): 31-43; Hairston, Maxine, “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” College, Composition, and Communication 33.1 (1982): 76-88; Lerner, Neal, “Searching for Robert Moore.” The Writing Center Journal 22(1): 9-32; North, Stephen, “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46(5): 170-189; Moore, Robert H. “The Writing Clinic and Writing Laboratory.” College English, 11.7 (1959): 388-393. Print.

2.

Socrates alludes to the often contentious relationship between writing center tutors and writing instructors, a topic he returns to later in the dialogue when he compares the freeman who “always has time at his disposal to converse in peace” to a slave who is “always talking against time, hurried on by the clock; there is not space to enlarge upon any topic” (172d-e, 878). We can easily substitute “teacher” for “slave” but that is a topic for another paper.

Works Cited Allen, Nancy J. “Who Owns Truth in the Writing Lab?” The Writing Center Journal. 6.2 (1986): 3-9.

Boquet, Elizabeth H. “Our Little Secret: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions.”

College Composition and Communication 50.1 (1999): 463-482.

Cairns, H. “Theaetetus.” Plato: The Collected Dialogues.

Ed. Edith Hamilton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 845-919. Print.

Carino, Peter. “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab, and Center.” The Writing Center Journal 13.1 (1992): 31-43.

Clark, Gregory. Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective of the Function of Writing. Carbondale: SIUP, 1990. Print.

Desjardins, Rosemary. “Why Dialogues? Plato’s Serious Play.” Platonic Readings, Platonic Writings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Rutledge, 1989, 110-125. Print.

Griswold, Charles L., ed. Platonic Readings, Platonic Writings. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.

Hairston, Maxine. “‘The Winds of Change’: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, 33.1 (1982): 76-88. Print.

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors.” College English, 57.1 (1995): 27-42. Print.

Hemmeter, Thomas. “The ‘Smack of Difference’: The Language of Writing Center Discourse. The Writing Center Journal 11.1 (1990): 35-49. Print.

Lerner, Neil. ” Searching for Robert Moore.” The Writing Center Journal 22.1 (2001): 9-32. Print.

---. “The Teacher-Student Writing Conference and the Desire for Intimacy.” College English 68.2 (2005): 186-208. Print.

Martin, Frances. “Close Encounters of an Ancient Kind: Readings of the Tutorial Classroom and the Writing Conference.” The Writing Center Journal 2.2 (1982): 7-18. Print.

Moore, Robert H. “The Writing Clinic and Writing Laboratory.” College English, 11.7 (1959): 388-393.

Print.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English, 46.5 (1984): 443-446. Print.

Raign, Kathryn. (1994). “Teaching Stones to Talk: Using Stasis Theory to Teach Students the Art of Dialectic.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 24.3/4 (1994): 88-95. Print. !

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SHIFTING SUPPORTS FOR SHIFTING IDENTITIES: MEETING THE NEEDS OF MULTILINGUAL GRADUATE WRITERS Talinn Phillips Ohio University tiller@ohio.edu Abstract Drawing on the experiences of two case study participants who were international multilingual graduate students, I argue that multilingual graduate writers’ budding identities as disciplinary experts sometimes hampered them from recognizing the kind of writing support they needed. As their identities shifted between expert and novice, disciplinary outsider and disciplinary insider, their perceived needs from writing centers changed as well. I suggest ways that writing centers may consider shifting their practices in order to meet multilingual graduate writers’ needs, wherever they are in their writing development.

While the academy at large typically views undergraduates as novice academic writers who need writing instruction and support, it has often viewed graduate students as having completed that process.

Marilee Brooks-Gillies et al., in Across the Discipline’s special issue on graduate writing, also note this state of affairs, commenting that “graduate students […] are often expected to be expert academic writers of a variety of specialized genres.” Unfortunately, the academy still often understands graduate students as having mastered academic writing. Our own experiences as writing center professionals frequently—even often—suggest a more complex picture as students engage in the long-term process of becoming disciplinary scholars and professionals.

Graduate students have rarely received instruction in or experience with crafting specialized genres and many still struggle with fundamental writing issues such as structure, organization, and development. This is most likely to be true for multilingual graduate writers (hereafter MGWs) who are often still learning American English and have usually had less exposure and instruction in U.S. academic writing and rhetoric.

Recognizing the writing challenges that graduate students face, there has been recent growth in writing centers’ work with graduate populations. Scholars like Paula Gillespie, Helen Snively, Steve Simpson, and Elizabeth Boquet et al. all describe new programs developed to work with graduate writers. However, my 2013 study revealed that many writing centers haven’t trained tutors to work with graduate students but instead seem to assume that the practices and strategies that are effective with undergraduates will be effective with graduate students as well. Further, writing centers still have minimal research available to inform this growing support for graduate students. We have much !

to learn about graduate students’ actual writing center experiences and even more about the experiences of MGWs. A special issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship may be the most substantive treatment of graduate students and writing centers to date, yet WLN’s articles are brief and the special issue editors note that “Absent from these themes [in the issue] is that of writing center support for multilingual graduate students” (Lawrence and Zawacki 1).1 In order to make continued progress in designing effective services for MGWs, research on their writing center experiences and needs is important.

Here, I offer case studies of two international MGWs’ writing center experiences and consider their implications for writing center practice. The findings revealed these MGWs operating as both experts and novices, with their developing identities as scholars and disciplinary experts sometimes seeming to hamper them from recognizing the kind of writing support they seemed to need most.2 They were often academic outsiders who needed support with vocabulary, stance, register, and basic genre knowledge; however, they were also becoming disciplinary insiders and developing particular areas of expertise. One participant was already recognized as a domain knowledge expert who was contributing to his field through original research. These case studies showed MGWs who moved quickly from identifying themselves as novices to experts, as disciplinary outsiders to insiders, as students to scholars; thus, what they needed from the writing center also shifted— sometimes quickly—in order to support that development. These shifting needs then suggest potential changes on the part of writing centers that seek to serve MGWs. These changes include making discipline-informed feedback available in any way possible and supporting writers’ language growth and development of academic style.

Method In these IRB-approved case studies, I followed five new students throughout the first year of their master’s programs at a large, Midwestern research institution in order to better understand the resources international MGWs used (including but not limited to the writing center) as they developed as writers.3 The writing

Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 42 center at this institution served both undergraduate and graduate students; however, approximately 50% of the sessions each year were with multilingual graduate students. There were few multilingual undergraduates on campus. The tutors were undergraduate students, graduate students, and M.A. holders from a variety of different fields. Due to space limitations, I focus here on two students, Iris and Chozin, who I continued to follow until the completion of their graduate programs.

Participants were recruited via fliers and emails to relevant university organizations and student groups.

Wendy Bishop argued that qualitative research like the case study “gains power [and validity] to the degree that the researcher spends time in the field … collects multiple sources of data … [and] lets the context and participants help guide research questions” (39). For two years I interviewed participants biweekly and asked them to submit intermediate and final drafts of all papers. The interviews examined their confidence and self-perceptions about writing and how they managed writing projects. The interviews also asked about their writing center use—how often they visited, the tutors they chose (and why), the session’s placement in the writing process, the work of the session, their feelings about the session and its value, and the revisions they made after tutoring. Each term I interviewed available teachers as well as tutors that the writers worked with regularly. I also collected tutors’ reports from each visit in order to triangulate data among the writers themselves, their teachers, and tutors. I recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed the interviews for themes.

Chozin: The Writing Center as “The Last Chance” Chozin began his master’s in Southeast Asian Studies after taking intensive English courses the previous spring.4 He was quiet, very social, and passionate about his studies. He had recently been involved in tsunami relief work and planned to return to work with non-governmental organizations after graduation.

Chozin, whose home languages were Javanese and Bahasa, clearly struggled with English. It was sometimes difficult to understand him, especially early in his career, and he often struggled to express himself.

In my assessment, his writing reflected a real need for support, especially for help with organization and development. Yet Chozin used the writing center only twice, despite regularly seeking writing support from others. His lack of writing center use thus offers a valuable window into potential barriers that keep MGWs away from writing centers. During an early

research interview I had personally shown Chozin the writing center and how to make an appointment; we often met there for interviews and the free service was open 50 hours per week. The tutors were well trained for working with writers from different fields. Tutors often worked with others in his program, and many were graduate students themselves. According to one interview, he’d even had one successful session. He took his writing development very seriously, seeking out pre-submission feedback (usually from peers in his program) on nearly every paper.

Yet for the most part Chozin ignored the writing center. Initially, this was because he felt his English abilities were too weak for tutoring. In a first-term interview he considered a writing center session but the prospect of negotiating his writing in English for nearly an hour was overwhelming. He reported, “Yeah, if I start to—to—sometime I show [my paper] to writing center or if I show to my American friends, then sometime I don’t understand what they’re talking about, yeah. So it easier to show my paper to Indonesian friends because we discuss [my paper] in Indonesian.” In addition to explaining why Chozin initially avoided the writing center, this encounter was the first of many that revealed his belief that an important part of his scholarly development was developing professional relationships with colleagues.

This belief served Chozin, if not his writing, remarkably well. He never mentioned language as a barrier to receiving writing feedback again and, a few months later, engaged in lengthy English-language conversations daily. Chozin seemed to have already “solved” the problem of writing support, though, and that solution was imbricated in the development of his scholarly, disciplinary identity. This first tutoring experience with a peer from his department became Chozin’s default form of writing support; he never seemed to give the writing center strong consideration again.

When Chozin and I discussed the roles that people had played in his writing development, he actually described the writing center as “the last chance,” by which he meant “the last resort,” revealing a belief that students who used the writing center were driven to do so because they were relationally impoverished and lacked other supports that might help them improve their writing: For me, I think writing center is the last chance for me if I didn’t get anyone to work with me. […] I’m thinking I’m lucky because I have close relationship with teacher; I have friend who, like, believe in me to assist me and I think some students don’t have it so they still go to writing center.

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Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 43 Chozin, however, was neither unlucky nor friendless and wasn’t forced to rely on “the last resort” for support, which he seemed to understand as mechanical correctness. Unfortunately, the disciplinary peers he preferred to work with rarely made anything more than sentence-level corrections and Chozin’s writing didn’t reflect substantive revisions (although Chozin seemed satisfied). These disciplinary peers may have been engaging deeply with Chozin’s ideas, which is why Chozin said he preferred them to writing tutors, but they were either unable to critique his written expression or else Chozin was unable to implement their suggestions.5 Even at the beginning of his program, Chozin had a strong sense of himself as a content-area expert. This strong disciplinary identity seemed to encourage him to seek writing conversations with disciplinary peers so that they could discuss both his ideas and his writing.

When asked why he chose to work with Monica, one of these peers, Chozin responded that in addition to the comfort level made possible by working with a friend, she shared his program of study and they had mutual classes. He was also able to reciprocate by helping her with her Bahasa classes; this element of reciprocity was very important to him. Chozin reported that Monica had been a significant source of writing support during the previous term. He said, “I feel comfort when I have something to do, I need her advice and check my grammar, check my everything.

Yes, she help me a lot for everything.” I attempted to clarify, “So she was helping you with most of your work last quarter—with your writing?” He replied, “I think, with the writing, maybe not most maybe half, but for other things like the discussion about my topic.” I clarified again: “You were talking about ideas with her?” He responded with “Yeah, ideas.”

Chozin preferred being able to discuss his ideas with peers who shared his domain knowledge, but he was still a novice academic writer in many ways.

Having read his work, I felt he could have benefited from fairly routine writing support that any strong tutor could have provided. Unfortunately, Chozin’s disciplinary peers could not or did not typically provide effective writing support. What Chozin perceived as their positive feedback meant that he didn’t take advantage of the writing center’s generalist tutors, or tutors who didn’t have any particular expertise in his field. As a result, the writing center never had an opportunity to change Chozin’s understanding of how it might support him as a writer and the barriers he identified—language and a lack of disciplinary feedback—remained.

Iris: “We Really Need Some Help in the Language” Iris had just arrived from China to enter a MA TESOL program. Disillusioned with options in China, she hoped a master’s degree would open doors to better schools and better students. Iris, whose home language was Mandarin, commanded fairly strong English skills, but she had little confidence in them and she had difficulty reading the academic texts needed to produce strong, interesting papers. Thus while she took a highly analytical approach to writing and was competent at organizing texts with minimal errors, she agonized over her writing, routinely describing it as “not academic enough.”

Iris was a regular writing center user, visiting 16 times during her first year. Tutoring reports and interviews revealed she initially used the center for support across her writing process. She visited for brainstorming help, organization, development, basic academic genre knowledge (e.g. article critique assignments), academic register/vocabulary development, and error correction. However, as Iris’s sense of herself as a scholar developed, her respect for the writing tutors’ expertise shrank considerably and her perceived needs for support changed. Long before graduation she, too, deemed the tutors inadequate for her specialized, disciplinary work.

Iris continued to value tutors for teaching her academic vocabulary, syntax, and mechanics, though.

As she developed as a scholar, language learning overtook global concerns as her primary tutoring need.

She recognized that language issues were a reflection of her scholarly ethos and was often concerned that her language use was inadequate. She discussed this in an interview late in her first year. Various forms of sentence-level help were prominent in her response, but Iris also commented on the value of the help with organization and development some tutors had provided.

It’s very—very useful, especially for the grammar, vocabulary, punctuations, the details, small things. … [S]ometimes there are some very good tutors who can also help me with organizations, with the coherence of the paper—how to link paragraphs and how to organize ideas and also how to present or how to write your paper to make it clear—make it much easier to understand. It is useful […] for citations, too. When I write a paper I would definitely come here for help with the above things I have said. I will not hand in a paper which is eight or ten pages long without coming here. It’s a necessary thing to do

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Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 44 before I hand in a paper because I’m not very confident with the language. First it’s not my native language. I don’t know if it’s nativelike, if the words are good, if the vocabulary is expresses my opinions well, or if the punctuations are all right, the citations are OK. For international students, especially, because we really need some help in the language—in revising the language. We may not need help in the subjects we are writing, but we need help with the language itself and [the writing center is] helpful and valuable.

Iris clearly valued the work of the writing center and felt it met multiple needs for her, but those specific needs shifted quite quickly during her first year as she began to see herself as a junior scholar. She seemed to feel she had gained sufficient mastery over global issues and that her remaining global problems stemmed from her lack of disciplinary knowledge, which only professors or peers could address. My own assessment of Iris’s writing did not fully bear this out, but regardless, in Iris’s mind, the tutors’ expertise became limited to helping her at the sentence level.

Although she often sought such help (e.g. syntax, spelling, word choice/register) for her writing development, she never became a problem user who seemed dependent on tutors for editing. However, her changing needs, expressed by requests for sentencelevel help, may have put her in conflict with a different writing center that was less willing to provide this kind of language support for students (see, e.g. Williams 173).

Exploring Tensions Between Common Writing Center Practice & MGWs’ Needs Both Chozin and Iris underwent an important developmental transition during their master’s programs: They went from primarily seeing themselves as students and novices toward identifying as scholars and budding experts. This transition had major impacts on their perceived needs for writing support, even though their experiences were different in many ways.

These impacts point to important tensions in the common practices of many writing centers that may affect other international and resident MGWs.6 They also suggest possibilities for adapting to better serve MGWs in the midst of their rapidly changing perceptions of their needs.

The first site of tension that these case studies point to is whether writing centers should aim to provide disciplinary or generalist tutors—to encourage writers to get feedback from an outsider’s perspective such as peers or experts who share their disciplinary

background.7 Chozin and Iris’s experiences suggest that the answer to this question may be both. Chozin and Iris needed support with core writing issues that any well-trained tutor should be able to provide, regardless of disciplinary background. These issues included organization, development, knowledge of basic U.S. academic genres (e.g. lit review, abstract), and appropriate U.S. academic discourse. The challenge for writing centers is that both Chozin and Iris stopped identifying primarily as academic outsiders and began identifying as members of their disciplines with expert knowledge. Perhaps they had never recognized the extent of their challenges with those core writing issues, perhaps they had greatly increased their confidence, or perhaps they had developed an increased awareness of disciplinary writing conventions, but the outcome was the same: they gave less authority to the generalist tutors at the writing center and sought discipline-informed feedback instead.

Chozin seemed to feel that a generalist reader was inadequate, and he had a clear preference for working with disciplinary peers because he wanted to discuss his ideas and not just his writing. He didn’t believe that a generalist tutor would be able to discuss his ideas in a meaningful way. Disciplinary expertise and the chance to develop scholarly relationships were so important to him that they became his primary criteria in choosing writing support. The result was that he didn’t use the writing center.

Iris was initially willing to work with generalist tutors, but as her scholarly identity developed, so did her desire for discipline-informed feedback. She found generalist tutors helpful when she was learning fundamental genre and rhetorical conventions of U.S. academic writing, but once she felt she’d mastered those competencies, she only viewed generalist tutors as able to provide the sentence-level support that helped her be seen as a credible scholar. Thus Iris’s growing disciplinary expertise actually seemed to hamper her writing development as a whole. In contrast, other writers in the study were able to work with tutors from similar disciplines and they used the writing center frequently. Without this option, Chozin and Iris seemed to see limited value in the writing center. Having read their writing, I believe generalist tutors could have helped both Iris and Chozin throughout their programs. My assessment was irrelevant, though, because the writers didn’t believe the generalist tutors could help them and so didn’t seek that help.

Furthermore, the fact that generalist tutors could have helped them doesn’t exclude the possibility that disciplinary tutors could have also helped or that they

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Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 45 could have provided more appropriate help. Within the writing center community, we often market ourselves as able to help “any writer with any paper for any course.” While we can certainly always offer some help, tutoring graduate writers quickly makes me confront the limits of my own knowledge, both in content and in disciplinary conventions. Elizabeth Boquet et al. acknowledge this limitation while designing resources for the first graduate program on their campus, writing, “we find ourselves taking on new roles and identities, becoming teacher/learners, expert/novices, in short, co-learners with our students.” Boquet et al. acknowledge that while their outsider status does have value, it also has limitations. As writing specialists, we develop skills to counter those limitations in various ways—framing critique in terms of disciplinary norms, focusing on structure, encouraging writers to clarify with advisors, etc.—but there are nevertheless moments when our limitations matter. And while a generalist reader can provide fresh insight by approaching a text as an outsider, we have certainly all experienced the benefits of a disciplinary reader. My point here is not that one kind of reader is superior to the other, but that when the stakes are so high, a graduate writer may well privilege a disciplinary reading over a generalist one and that this privileging may actually be a valuable part of their scholarly development.

The desire for some level of disciplinary/scholarly affinity is not unique to Chozin and Iris. Snively, who directed a writing center designed for graduate students and staffed primarily by doctoral students, conducted research that also suggested the value of tutors sharing a graduate student’s disciplinary background. She argues that Students knew we often had enough domain knowledge to engage deeply in the conversation about a topic as a very informed audience. […] Though tutors in every writing center will engage deeply in conversations with a peer, few undergraduates, or even beginning doctoral students, can also bring to that conversation a deep knowledge of the field…. (92-93) For Snively’s graduate students, providing that “deep knowledge of the field” was an important part of the tutors’ work and ethos with their clients, something that this writing center was unable to provide for these writers.

The second site of tension is language support, a perceived need expressed by many MGWs (if the literature is any indication) and one that may take a variety of forms.8 For instance, Chozin’s anxiety about negotiating an English-language tutoring session meant

that he sought help elsewhere so that he could speak in his home language. While all writing centers work with limited resources, his experiences suggest that writing centers might consider seeking out multilingual tutors or treating multilingualism as an additional tutor qualification, especially potential tutors who speak a campus population’s most common home languages like Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. When available, multilingual tutors could potentially alleviate many frustrations for MGWs. They could work with writers in home languages when needed, especially at the beginning of the academic year when students’ language abilities are likely at their lowest and anxiety levels at their highest. Tutors could also use home languages to bridge communication breakdowns and make home-language rhetorical comparisons to help explain important conventions of U.S. academic writing. Finally, multilingual tutors, even if they don’t share a writer’s language background, would offer “peer-ness” and models of academic success that monolingual English-speaking tutors can never provide.

Another facet of language support is providing sentence-level tutoring for writers like Iris as they work to improve their use of scholarly discourse and strengthen their ethe. While Iris felt that she mastered genre conventions quickly, she recognized that some problems with syntax, general academic vocabulary, and word choice/register persisted in her writing and that generalist tutors could help her improve. In the past, writing centers have positioned themselves rhetorically as places for working with students’ global concerns, not as “fix-it shops” for students needing sentence-level assistance. This historic strategy of deemphasizing the sentence may make sense for undergraduate writers, particularly if they are native English speakers who can be made aware of errors indirectly and who are not under pressure to sound like professionals, much less publish. Avoiding or ignoring the sentence is a far less successful strategy for supporting MGWs. Error gravity studies, which reveal the kinds of errors that most impede meaning, reveal that while article or preposition problems are not usually penalized by readers, they may react quite negatively to problems like word choice and verb tense (Matsuda and Cox 47). Williams and Severino also note that “‘grammar’ problems […] can be of such magnitude as to affect comprehensibility,” which can make it difficult for tutors to establish priorities between important, global concerns and minor grammatical issues (168).

In consequence, scholars in applied linguistics and second language writing encourage tutors to engage in sentence-level tutoring for multilingual writers and thus

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Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 46 to support writers’ language development. Sharon Myers argues that “the greatest problem many ESL writers have is in controlling the syntax and lexis of the English language” (56) while Ben Rafoth, drawing on research in applied linguistics, notes that the value of a tutoring session is two-fold: “the back and forth of conversation is not merely an opportunity to practice using the language but is itself a source of learning” (48). Moreover, research by Dana Ferris and other second language writing researchers suggests that providing writers with feedback on their errors can help them revise their texts more effectively and improve their accuracy over time (Ferris 12-13).9 Iris often used the writing center to support sentence-level writing and language learning without becoming dependent on line editing. She described this language learning in one of our interviews: [The tutor and I] talked about vocabulary. I think I repeat verbs like “show” and “indicate” too often and sometimes I don’t want to use aspects, like cultural perspectives aspects and I don’t know if it’s native-like or not, but he said it’s fine. I didn’t know how to ask if the word can be changed or if it’s native-like. […] Like, the main aim of this article is to blah blah blah and I said ‘through a study.” I don't know if ‘through a study’ is fine. I don’t know if it’s native-like to say ‘through a study” and I don’t know if it’s Chinglish or not.

Iris’s experience suggests that writing centers can provide MGWs with such help without being overwhelmed by fears of appropriating writers’ papers or encouraging dependence.

From Tensions to Possibilities Ultimately, when an MGW experiences unmet needs at the writing center, the real issue may be a tension between the perceived needs of MGWs and the field’s historic practices with (predominantly monolingual) undergraduate writers. The use of perceived needs is vital here. Writers come to the writing center with their own assessments of their needs, both in a global sense and for a specific paper. The validity of those initial self-perceptions is perhaps irrelevant.

Even if we begin from the (admittedly problematic) premise that we always make better assessments of writers’ challenges than the writers themselves, we cannot help them change and improve those selfassessments if they won’t cross the writing center’s threshold first. Thus if we want to support writers, they must see us as being able and willing to address their

perceived needs or, like Chozin, they will find other sources of writing support or seek no support at all.

Further, even though writing centers’ historic clients were predominantly monolingual undergraduates, that’s no longer the case for most writing centers. Now our challenge is to continue responding to changing demographics by developing different practices that honor the different needs that MGWs experience during their graduate programs.

Acknowledging these tensions between the needs of our traditional work with undergraduates and those of new student populations—including multilingual graduate writers—is an important step toward ensuring all writers’ needs are respected and met wherever possible.

Chozin and Iris point towards two broad possibilities for doing this. First, provide language support in as many ways as feasible. We can attempt to hire tutors from diverse language backgrounds. We can also train tutors to provide better language support and/or give them explicit permission to employ what they already know about vocabulary, grammar, etc. without instilling undue fears about being “too directive.” By providing that language support, writing centers position themselves as resources early in MGWs’ graduate writing careers.

Second, we can work to improve the disciplinary support we offer to writers. We can attempt to hire tutors from a variety of disciplines by actively recruiting across campus. When that isn’t possible, we can give additional attention to disciplinarity during tutor training. Again, this positions writing centers as valuable and familiar resources in the future when writers still need support but also feel that their expertise has increased (and thus they may be less likely to pursue help that is viewed as remedial).

Recruiting a diverse tutoring staff can sometimes feel like an impossible task; we can only hire those who apply, after all. We do have complete control over tutor training, however, and can increase the expertise of the tutors we do have. Regardless of our resource gaps, we can all endeavor to establish a culture that values the needs of MGWs, both those surfaced by these writers’ experiences and others. Even when resources are limited, we can acknowledge MGWs’ needs, recognize how they diverge from those of our majority student populations, and then provide the support we can with our available means.

Notes 1. The fall 2016 special issue of Praxis (14.1) also focused on graduate writers, but it was not yet available at the time of this writing.

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Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 47 2. Based on personal experience, I find many native English-speaking graduate students share these same struggles; however, the participants of this study are MGWs. I leave it to readers to determine when the findings here might also apply to native-Englishspeaking graduate students.

3. I had been a tutor at this writing center for several years but was not affiliated with it during the first year of this study. In the second year of the study I was interim director of the writing center but did not tutor either writer, nor were they discussed in staff meetings, receive special treatment, etc.

4. Chozin (koh-ZEEN), when giving consent to participate in the study, preferred to have his real name used. All other names are pseudonyms.

5. In two years of interviews, Chozin never expressed dissatisfaction with his peers’ feedback, confusion about its meaning, or an inability to implement it. On at least one paper, a peer wrote questions on Chozin’s paper that would have triggered substantive revision but Chozin did not address those questions in his revised paper.

6. Case studies are still commonly criticized for not being generalizable. However, Thomas Newkirk challenges this, arguing that while there is no internal mechanism for generalization (such as a large, representative sample size), qualitative methodologies like case studies instead allow the readers to perform the act of generalization: Readers determine whether case study participants look like their own students or situations and therefore if and how those participants’ experiences should be catalysts to change their own work (130). I argue that case studies create contingent generalizabilities—they operate as heuristics that offer up new explanations and possibilities. Thus while case studies should never be treated as prescriptive, they certainly are suggestive and ask readers to consider whether a participant’s experience is likely to be representative of the students in our own contexts. In this spirit, I offer implications from the experiences of Chozin and Iris.

7. This is closely connected to the important question of whether tutors of graduate writers should themselves be undergraduates, graduates, or professionals. This issue did not feature prominently in the experiences of Iris and Chozin and so is beyond the scope of this particular project.

8. See Blau and Hall; Bruce and Rafoth; Myers.

9. For research-based pedagogies on error feedback, see Dana Ferris’s Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing or Language Power.

Works Cited Bishop, Wendy. Ethnographic Writing Research: Writing it Down, Writing it Up, and Reading It, Boynton/Cook, 1999.

Blau, Susan, and John Hall. “Guilt-Free Tutoring: Rethinking How We Tutor Non-Native-EnglishSpeaking Students.” The Writing Center Journal, vol.

23, no 1, 2002, pp. 23-44.

Boquet, Elizabeth, Meredith Kazer, Nancy Manister, Owen Lucas, Michael Shaw, Valerie Madaffari, and Cinthia Gannett. “Just Care: Learning From and With Graduate Students in a Doctor of Nursing Practice Program.” Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing, vol. 12, 2015, https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/graduate_wac/boq uetetal2015.cfm.

Brooks-Gillies, Marilee, Elena G. Garcia, Soo Hyon Kim, Katie Manthey, and Trixie G. Smith.

“Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines: An Introduction.” Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing, vol. 12, 2015, https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/graduate_wac/intro .cfm.

Bruce, Shanti, and Ben Rafoth, eds. ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, Boynton/CookHeinemann, 2004.

Ferris, Dana R. Language Power: Tutorials for Writers.

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014.

---. Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing, 2nd ed. U of Michigan P, 2011.

Gillespie, Paula. “Graduate Writing Consultants for PhD Programs Part 1: Using What We Know: Networking and Planning.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 32, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1-6.

Lawrence, Susan, and Terry Myers Zawacki, eds.

Writing Center Support for Graduate Thesis and Dissertation Writers. Spec. issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 40, no. 5-6, 2016, pp. 1-32.

Matsuda, Paul Kei and Michelle Cox. “Reading an ESL Writer’s Text.” ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, Edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, pp. 43-50.

Myers, Sharon A. “Reassessing the ‘Proofreading Trap’: ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 2003, pp. 5167.

Newkirk, Thomas “The Politics of Composition Research: The Conspiracy Against Experience.”

The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary.

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Shifting Supports for Shifting Identities • 48 Edited by Richard Bullock and John Trimbur, Boynton/Cook, 1991, pp. 119-35.

Phillips, Talinn. “Tutor Training and Services for Multilingual Graduate Writers: A Reconsideration.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol.10, no. 2, 2013, http://www.praxisuwc.com/phillips-102.

Rafoth, Ben. Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers, Utah State UP, 2015.

Simpson, Steve. Building for Sustainability: Dissertation Boot Camp as a Nexus of Graduate Writing Support. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol.10, no. 2, http://www.praxisuwc.com/simpson-102.

Snively, Helen. “A Writing Center in a Graduate School of Education: Teachers as Tutors, and Still in the Middle.” (E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center. Ed. Melissa Nicolas, Fountainhead P, 2008, pp. 89-102.

Williams, Jessica. “Tutoring and Revision: Second Language Writers in the Writing Center.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 13, 2004, pp. 173-201.

Williams, Jessica, and Carol Severino. “The Writing Center and Second Language Writers.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 13, 2004, pp.165-72.

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INCLUSION FOR THE “ISOLATED”: AN EXPLORATION OF WRITING TUTORING STRATEGIES FOR STUDENTS WITH ASD Kristeen Cherney Georgia State University kcherney1@gsu.edu Abstract Across the country, colleges and universities are reporting an increased enrollment of students on the autism spectrum. This is in part thanks to increased efforts in early detection during childhood, where students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are then enrolled in services outside and within public schools to help integrate them into mainstream classrooms. Yet such integrative services, by and large, fall short in higher education, and many students find themselves without the support they once received in their primary school years. Writing demands are indeed challenging for many—without securing basic college-level composition skills, the likelihood of student success is placed in jeopardy. Writing centers can be regarded as gatekeepers for autistic students, since their assistance can greatly impact student success. Yet problems remain with access and inclusion based on rhetorical situations, as well as a lack of tutor education. This paper provides suggestions based on April Mann’s methods of inclusion for writing center tutees with ASD, including spatial awareness and tutor education. I also outline other possible methods, including outreach to students with ASD to prevent further isolation among the university population.

A student makes an appointment with you at the writing center. When she comes in, she appears apprehensive. She takes a quick glance around at the bright lights, and then takes a seat in a spot furthest away from all of the other tutors and tutees. She may appear “antsy” and uncomfortable in her seat. When your session begins, the tutee appears disengaged: she will not make eye contact, and she appears to have difficulty verbalizing her thoughts. As you attempt to discuss her paper with her, she looks down. She seems like she does not want to be there. You assume, based on the lack of engagement, that the student is just there for mere proofreading, and you take offense to this— you want to actually help tutees become better writers, not line-edit their work before submission. To your relief, the session is over earlier than the designated time. The tutee also appears relieved. She is unlikely to return to the writing center. Unfortunately, she may struggle with writing throughout the rest of her college experience. She may never regard the writing center as a place that promotes inclusiveness. She may not regard the center as a place where she may grow as a writer or converse about her writing.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is complex, and symptoms can vary between students. A “highfunctioning” student might not “seem autistic,” and therefore may be overlooked as an outsider in the

broader mainstream student community. The above scenario is not meant to stereotype or profile autistic students, but is designed to serve as just one example of what a tutoring session with an autistic student might entail, as well as some of the misunderstandings and errors in communication that could occur.

Across the country, colleges and universities are reporting an increased enrollment in students on the autism spectrum. This is in part due to increased efforts in early detection, during childhood, where students with ASD are then enrolled in services outside and within public schools to help integrate them into mainstream classrooms. Yet such integrative services, by and large, fall short in higher education, and many students find themselves without the support they once received in their primary school years. Writing demands are indeed challenging for many—without securing basic college-level composition skills, the likelihood of student success is placed in jeopardy.

Writing centers can be regarded as gatekeepers for autistic students, since their assistance can greatly impact student success. Yet problems remain with access as well as inclusion based on rhetorical situations. A lack of tutor education compounds these issues even further. Assumptions about ASD may stem from ableist notions, especially those about what a “normal” tutoring session ought to look like.

This paper explores the possible methods of inclusion for writing center tutees with ASD, including spatial awareness and tutor education. Concurrently, these inclusive methods also challenge the stereotype that autistic students naturally prefer isolation. I also outline possible methods for conducting outreach to these groups of students to prevent further isolation among the university population.

Within this context, I aim to find answers for the following crucial questions at hand for writing center professionals aiming to foster inclusivity for autistic students: • What is the current state of college enrollment among students with ASD? • How might writing center staff approach disability disclosure and accommodations or lack thereof?

Inclusion for the “Isolated” • 50 •

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What tutoring strategies might be implemented to increase tutor confidence in working with students with ASD? What are some of the ways tutors can help students with ASD increase their writing skills?

How can technological innovations help create a more inclusive, accommodating environment?

How can a writing center be made more accessible based on universal design principles?

How can we reach out to students with ASD who might seek our services?

What issues might arise during online tutoring sessions?

Can peer mentoring within a writing center be implemented to promote inclusivity?

Background on ASD and College Enrollment ASD is certainly not a new phenomenon. The public is bombarded with constant reminders of the seemingly grim statistics. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network still contends, as of April 2015, that 1 in 68 children are identified as having ASD (“Autism Spectrum Disorder: Data and Statistics”). Due to mass attention, parents are increasingly on the lookout for possible signs of the disorder in their children, and pediatricians have followed suit by offering earlier diagnostic testing. In early 2017, research published in Nature on the correlation between increased brain volume in infancy and later ASD diagnoses suggests that autism could be detected even sooner (Hazlett et al. 348).

Aside from possibly receiving physical, behavioral, occupational, and psychological therapies, many diagnosed children are placed in special programs in primary school—this is just one method of early intervention. Here, students are offered support services directly from their schools. For example, students might be taken in groups for on-site speech therapy. Not only do such measures increase the likelihood of placement in a general classroom, but these school programs also make college more of a possibility than ever before for autistic students.

Yet one must wonder what happens to such individuals after primary school. It is perhaps no surprise that many students with ASD go on to study at universities; in fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 2014 that nearly 70 percent of recent high

school graduates had enrolled in some form of higher education (1). While certainly not all students with ASD will go on to college, there is a higher likelihood of their enrollment as increased accessibility aims to include students with a range of abilities. April Mann highlights these changes with students under the autism spectrum (AS), writing that “students with AS are being given an unprecedented level of academic and social support in the primary grades. Because of this improved academic and social support, colleges and universities can expect to enroll increasing numbers of students who have been diagnosed somewhere on the highfunctioning end of the spectrum.” (45) The increased enrollment of students with ASD not only provides opportunities for such students—it can also pose challenges for professionals across higher education who may not have the awareness or training to handle such an influx.

Despite an overwhelming lack of preparation, evidence shows that college instructors are at least recognizing an increased prevalence of ASD in their classrooms. Lynda Walsh, co-editor of the collection Autism Spectrum Disorders in the College Composition Classroom: Making Writing Instruction More Accessible for All Students, points out, “college instructors are starting to recognize more students with ASD in their classrooms” (7). As writing center professionals, then, we might assume that increased enrollment in college must certainly mean that these same students will end up using such tutoring services at some point.

However, due to the nature of ASD, this might not necessarily be the case. Just some of the barriers include communication difficulties, social awkwardness, a perceived preference for isolation, and sensory differences; certainly, all of these challenges vary in severity and frequency between individuals on the spectrum.

Disclosure and Accommodations General awareness of ASD is on the rise, and colleges are no exception. The trouble is that, unlike at the primary school level, universities do not require disclosure. Indeed, “some of these students disclose their needs, while others navigate college with little or no support” (Brizee, Sousa, and Driscoll 341). So instructors and tutors will not necessarily know that a student has ASD unless he or she discloses this information through an institution’s disabilities services program (which can vary between institutions). Still, even if a student has disclosed accommodations with the disabilities office, “the deeper commitment to understanding the disability and working creatively to

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Inclusion for the “Isolated” • 51 provide the best learning experience is staffdependent” (Masterson and Meeks 50). Even if an instructor suspects a student might be on the spectrum, there is really no way of knowing for sure without formal documentation. What further compounds the problem is that an instructor is at risk of stereotyping potential autistic students. A lack of awareness certainly creates numerous challenges, with obstacles and miscommunication even extending into writing centers. The fact is that many students may not get one-on-one writing help regardless of ability; obstacles may range from problems with accessibility to a lack of awareness. For someone with ASD, a lack of writing help can perhaps be more difficult to ameliorate than that for the average “neurotypical” student because writing center staff may not know about his or her accommodation needs. Perhaps even more challenging is the fact that some students with ASD might not even enter the center in the first place due to fear of stigmatization or because of sensory challenges.

While the argument is often that “it is the student’s responsibility to request special accommodations if desired,” the question of accommodations and disclosure is at times unfairly placed solely on students with disabilities, since there are not always institutionally-regulated opportunities for such disclosure (Burgstahler 2). At the same time, the context may not be appropriate for students to disclose that they have ASD. Given the rampant stigma that still exists around disabilities, it is easy to understand why a student with ASD may not be forthright about his or her disability. In fact, a student should not be expected to disclose disability details with a writing center simply in order to gain tutoring services.

The challenge here is to instead implement a universal design within the writing center environment to accommodate all students of all abilities, while also training tutors to recognize that a tutee often cannot be categorized as a single type. In this context, “universal design means that rather than designing your facility and services for the average user, you design them for people with a broad range of abilities, disabilities, and other characteristics” (Burgstahler 1). Veteran writing center directors Jean Kiedaisch and Sue Dinitz describe universal design as not merely “taking a ‘one-size-fitsall’ approach to instruction,” but as instead an approach that helps develop “design principles for conducting all sessions that make them accessible to the widest audience possible, reducing the need to treat any writer as having ‘special needs’” (51). Such principles can help serve tutees with ASD in two ways.

For one, it eliminates any pressure for a student to disclose any disability; and two, universal design can help prevent writing center staff from making errors

when accommodating students with a variety of disabilities and learning needs.

Tutoring Techniques It may also be helpful for writing center staff to increase awareness about ASD so tutors may be better prepared during tutoring sessions. In recent years, there has been more of an effort to explore not just what ASD is, but how it might also be recognized by someone who does not have ASD. This recognition is slowly turning into more scholarship about ASD and writing, as well as how students with ASD adapt to the composition classroom. Scholarship—particularly from education professionals—has also explored and debunked myths about the writing skill levels of students with ASD. For example, “on the sentence level, where writing center readers often notice signs of learning disabilities, students with autism are likely to demonstrate at least as much proficiency as any of the students in the center or studio” (Mann 49). Such a revelation can enlighten tutors and other writing professionals who once thought that having autism also meant dysfunction in being able to cohesively and coherently put thoughts on paper.

Once students book one-on-one sessions, it is common to experience miscommunications. Challenges in communication and interpersonal skills are perhaps among the most common obstacles between tutor and tutee. Some research exists concerning the challenges that traditional tutoring sessions could pose for tutees with ASD. Just some of these challenges include “the close proximity of the student and the tutor; the physical intensity of eye contact; the stress of conversational give-and-take; and the dangers of misinterpreting social cues—all are anxiety triggers for many people with AS, and anxiety is no small issue” (Mann 58). While a tutor might interpret these cues as mere differences in personality and not think twice about them, a student with ASD could very well dwell on these. “Often the very idea of sharing a problem with a tutor proves so anxiety-provoking that students would hesitate to come to the center asking for help” (Mann 57). The anxiety could then blossom, ultimately becoming an obstacle for future tutoring sessions.

Another issue can arise when a tutor fails to stay engaged with the paper at hand—especially if it is more of a technical paper. There is the assumption that “many students’ paper topics might be considered boring in general conversation, but part of the tutors’ job is to pay attention to other people’s paper topics, no matter how boring that topic might be to any individual tutor” (Mann 59). This mantra could certainly apply to any tutoring session: most writing

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Inclusion for the “Isolated” • 52 center professionals would encourage the utmost interest and enthusiasm in any project. One might assume that a student with ASD might not notice nonverbal cues that express boredom or general lack of interest in the tutee’s work. This underestimation could very well be damaging. For example, a perceived lack of interest in a student’s work could translate to the student feeling like his or her writing is not worthwhile, and that the tutoring session itself is a waste of time.

Focusing on some specific strategies and techniques tutors can utilize to help ASD tutees will promote more successful tutoring sessions. Mann offers the following advice: • Do not press for eye contact if you suspect the tutee is uncomfortable sustaining or returning it.

• Suggest moving to another location if the current tutoring spot seems overwhelming.

• Repeat questions if a tutee appears distracted.

• Avoid areas within the center with excessive light or noise.

• Show, but don’t tell: keep scrap paper or a notebook handy to demonstrate examples in sentence structure, etc.

• Avoid socially-derived humor and non-verbal cues people with autism might not get. (60)

Technological Accommodations Aside from writing skill sets, research has also been conducted into the physical challenges students with disabilities face in writing centers, such as technology-, vision-, and hearing-related difficulties.

Due to the vast nature of the spectrum, many students with ASD can experience challenges to some degree within any of these categories. One study was conducted through empirical research about writing centers’ technological offerings for disabled students, as reported in a 2012 edition of Computers and Composition. Here Allen Brizee, Morgan Sousa, and Dana Driscoll share their findings from empirical research conducted on the accessibility of the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). Specifically, their surveys uncover the extensive use of assistive technologies, such as screen readers and adapted keyboards. Their findings also reveal that the OWL—which is a resource used in many writing centers—posed some accessibility issues. The authors call for both computers with assistive technologies in the center, as well as accessible online platforms for a more inclusive tutoring experience.

While the Brizee, Sousa, and Driscoll study was not ASD-specific, the concepts can certainly be applied for students on the spectrum who could benefit from

these services. For example, a writing center might offer the use of computers and assistive technologies for tutees as either a part of their tutoring session with a live tutor or as a separate form of accommodation.

Writing center administration and staff can also “adhere to accessibility guidelines or standards” when considering websites and software for widespread use in the center (Burgstahler 3). Allowing for these types of accommodations creates more options and a more diverse learning environment. Furthermore, offering a variety of options can help take pressure off of students who perhaps need to acclimate to the interpersonal one-on-one environment that is typical of a traditional writing center tutoring session. Letting students use technologies within the center can help them to get comfortable in the writing center so that they may gradually work their way up to an in-person tutoring session.

Applying Universal Design Principals to Create an ASD-Friendly Writing Center Within writing center scholarship, authors have discussed a few tips for making writing centers more ASD-friendly. “The welcoming, collaborative space of the writing center might not appear as welcoming to students who find personal interaction more difficult than organic chemistry or differential equations” (Mann 57). It may be hard to fathom that our friendly and welcoming writing centers could really be a turnoff for students with ASD. Yet “some people find a directive to make choices oppressive, not liberating. For writing centers, this variance may seem to challenge our philosophy of being non-directive with writers who come to us for one-on-one help, both because of our own pedagogies and because of our roles within our institutions.” (Mann 53) Thus, a sole adherence to universal design or to more normative writing center atmospheres may not accommodate tutees with ASD because it assumes that a ubiquitous plan for traditional tutees works for everyone while ignoring some of the possible needs of students with ASD (such as dimmer lights and noise reduction).

Another method of attracting and retaining tutees with ASD is to make writing centers more ASDfriendly and more physically accessible for students with all forms of disability. Writing centers—like any other student spaces—are often designed with the able-bodied in mind. Many of the “friendly” elements we might consider aesthetically pleasing or welcoming could actually increase anxiety in those with ASD. For

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Inclusion for the “Isolated” • 53 example, “writing centers which contain fluorescent lighting, open spaces, and/or multiple conversations happening simultaneously around the room, can be very difficult spaces for those with a tendency towards sensory overload” (Mann 63). On the flipside, not having these elements could cause anxiety in neurotypical students, so simply creating a quiet, closed, and dark space may not be a viable solution. In considering the writing center, it may be helpful to create multiple spaces as a method of fostering numerous access points in which all tutees can feel comfortable.

Taking a step back and really looking and feeling the space of the writing center is important in this assessment. For example, are there opportunities for students to experience less noise from outside influences during a tutoring session? Are there areas within the center that have dimmer lights for students who might be overwhelmed by bright fluorescents?

Are there a variety of seating options that offer different heights, firmness, and fabrics? All of these considerations can help make a first step towards a universal design that offers options and accommodations for all students within the space of the writing center.

Striking the right balance to increase overall access is a complex matter, but one that is essential in making sure students with ASD are comfortable (and willing) to seek tutoring services. Universal design principles are a step in the right direction towards creating an accessible space that accommodates all students, including those with ASD. However, much more research is needed to assess which design strategies work when it comes to helping students with ASD. Longitudinal studies in writing centers may be needed to assess such factors.

Outreach and Training Opportunities Despite calls for increased access, there is little indication of widespread efforts to accommodate students with ASD in writing centers. Even if such outreach has taken place, no documentation of these efforts exists. Partnering with university disability services is just one step in increasing these efforts.

Tutor education to increase awareness of disabilities like ASD can also prove immensely helpful in retaining tutees with ASD. “Discussions of autism and autism spectrum disorders often read more like discussions about diversity than discussions of disability” (Mann 51). Furthermore, writing centers not only “struggle to provide assistance for the large number of students coming through their doors—they also struggle to provide adequate training for tutors

who work with students with disabilities, especially as funding decreases and campus populations increase” (Brizee, Sousa, and Driscoll 342). Integrating universal design principles—particularly as they pertain to disabilities—during regular training sessions is key to increasing awareness about potential tutees with ASD. Guiding questions for training sessions can include: Do all staff members know how to respond to requests for disability-related accommodations?

Are all staff members aware of issues related to communicating with students who have disabilities? Are staff members aware of the benefits of universal design of instructions and accommodations for students with different types of disabilities? (Burgstahler 3).

It may also be helpful to allow the use of note takers and extended sessions, as well as recommending that tutors “offer directions or instructions both orally and in writing” (Burgstahler 3, 6). When such information is integrated as a part of mandatory staff training, tutors will likely gain the essential tools and skills needed to foster more inclusive tutoring sessions.

Yet hosting a one-time training session (or even an annual session) might not be enough for tutors to grasp the right tutoring methods. Kiedaisch and Dinitz even admit that despite the fact they are well versed in including “an emphasis on differences students may bring to a session,” they were shocked to find evidence from tutoring session reports that tutors were still unsure of how to help tutees with learning disabilities (39). In one such case, they write of one tutor report: “Why didn’t she connect this possibility with Seth’s staring, lack of social skills, spelling difficulties, and inability to grasp punctuation rules?” (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 41). While Kiedaisch and Dinitz refer specifically to learning disabilities here, some of the challenges students with learning disabilities face may be similar to or the same as those some students with ASD deal with regularly. It is not necessarily important to “connect” a tutee’s behavior to ASD since it is not our job to diagnose; however, simply being aware of the fact that all tutees bring different personalities to the table can prevent the idealized notion of the “typical” tutee.

Indeed, “rather than focusing on those who bring ‘differences’ to the tutoring session, we would explore how all of us, directors, tutors, and tutees alike, bring aspects of our identity to tutoring and how these various aspects might shape a session” (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 44). Universal design principles may help conquer such a focus on identifying differences in tutees because it “suggests tutees aren’t the only ones bringing ‘differences’ to a session” (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 49). Fostering a mindset and the expectation

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Inclusion for the “Isolated” • 54 that all tutees have varying challenges, needs, and modes of learning can go a long way in accommodating tutees with ASD. Gaining administrative support can also translate to increased outreach by partnering with disability services centers, school administrations, and instructors. In general, as a strategy to reduce stress when transitioning to college, it may be helpful to provide students with opportunities to navigate “the campus at their own pace during a safe and less frenetic time,” perhaps during the summer before classes start (Masterson and Meeks 48). We might even apply these same concepts to writing centers: some options could include an open house, partnerships with disability services to get the word out, and perhaps even one-on-one appointments for a tour of the center. Teachers can also play a role by taking their students on a “field trip” to the center so that all potential tutees may gain some awareness of the writing services available to them. The key here is to ensure that there are as many options available as possible, for “there is little research to suggest what type of support is required and valued by these students” (Masterson and Meeks 47). Since not all institutions extend disability-related accommodations to writing center tutoring sessions, directors and staff ought to make it clear in their mission statements that they provide inclusive atmospheres to help all tutees.

The Problem with Relying on Online Tutoring Sessions Outreach efforts can be challenging for students who might not be enthusiastic about seeking in-person tutoring assistance. A writing center professional’s first response, then, could be the promotion of online tutoring sessions for students who are not comfortable with coming into the center in person. Here arises another ableist notion: the assumption that ASD tutees would rather seek an online session in order to avoid gaining writing feedback in person. This also takes the responsibility away from the writing center and inadvertently places it back onto the tutees. In fact, “on-line tutorials may not be able to address the issues most likely to be problematic for students with AS, such as breaking down an assignment into manageable bits, understanding the assignment, or intercepting a professor’s comments for revision” (Mann 65). Such situations could very well increase tutee anxiety—that is, if the tutee decides to even partake in an online tutoring session in the first place.

In order to break through common misconceptions like the preference for online tutoring sessions, writing centers may decide to create surveys to better

understand what both current and prospective tutees need. Such methods could allow for a non-mandatory after-session survey to get an idea of how inclusive and accessible the writing center is perceived by tutees.

Writing centers might also (carefully) allow for the disclosure of disabilities prior to sessions. In such a scenario, students with ASD could have the option of informing the writing center about their disability, just as some centers allow tutees to disclose physical disabilities. A questionnaire system could be helpful here, where tutors would have the opportunity for “engaging in conversations with a broad range of writing center users” that could also “help administrators and tutors ‘listen’ to a population that is normally underrepresented in staff meetings” (Brizee, Sousa, and Driscoll 357). In this sense, having quantitative data might also make it easier to obtain more administrative support. Again, it is important to keep any survey methods optional, as well as any resulting data anonymous. Surveys also present the added benefit of measuring how well a writing center adheres to any universal design principles they claim to follow.

Peer Mentoring Opportunities Peer mentoring could play a pivotal role in the overall success of students with ASD in college in general, as such methods offer some educational continuity while also helping to foster social skills (Masterson and Meeks 49). We can also apply these ideas at writing centers, where tutors might offer mentoring to first-year students. For example, the University of Louisville uses “disability-related academic advising and planning that is supplemental to academic advising” (1). This presents an opportunity for writing center professionals to partner with disability academic advisors to offer help and services in a proactive manner. While we might make these connections, the University of Louisville still has a general disclaimer about their writing center on their “Services for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder” page, as follows: University Writing Center supports writers and the teaching of writing. The center provides a comfortable place to write, to collaborate with other writers, and to use writing resources. In serving the university community, the center complements and supplements classroom instruction at all levels to promote attitudes and abilities essential to writing well, including confidence, skill, knowledge, creativity, and comfort.

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Inclusion for the “Isolated” • 55 In this sense, the writing center is promoted as a space for everyone. However, the statement does not elaborate on precisely how the writing center accommodates ASD, but is merely a generalized statement that could be applicable for all students.

Indeed, Burgstahler calls for websites to have “a statement about your commitment to universal access and procedures for requesting disability-related accommodations” (3). More study is needed in the area of peer mentoring within writing centers, as well as the efficacy of partnerships between writing centers and university disability offices. Communication among all of these entities, though, is a first step towards an openness that can filter down to more inclusivity in the writing center itself.

Implementing Inclusive Writing Centers for All Students Inclusivity is a relevant issue for all writing center visitors. Yet sometimes we can do more harm than good when our efforts to include students with ASD results in staff unintentionally regarding a tutee with ASD as being “neurologically other” (Mann 46). The way we might become more inclusive without unintentionally isolating tutees with ASD even further is by recognizing that they have certain sets of needs, just like all other students. It is important to remember that “writing center tutors are uniquely positioned to help all students—on and off the spectrum—to see how they can share their unique interests through their written expression” (Mann 56). Rather than being fearful of not being able to accommodate students with ASD, tutors and writing center directors can take ownership of the concept of inclusivity and make strides towards accessibility. Such efforts can take time and are often measured from a trial-and-error standpoint, but they will not go unnoticed—especially by students with ASD, who are often inadvertently excluded from our writing centers.

Works Cited “Autism Spectrum Disorder: Data and Statistics.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11 July 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html.

Accessed 10 July 2017.

Brizee, Allen, Morgan Sousa, and Dana Lynn Driscoll.

“Writing Centers and Students with Disabilities: The User-centered Approach, Participatory Design, and Empirical Research as Collaborative Methodologies.”

Computers and Composition, vol. 29, no. 1,

2012, pp. 341-366.

Burgstahler, Sheryl. “Equal Access: Universal Design of Tutoring and Learning Centers.” University of Washington, 2012, http://www.washington.edu/doit/equal-accessuniversal-design-tutoring-and-learning-centers.

Accessed 10 July 2017.

“College Enrollment and Work Activity of 2014 High School Graduates.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 15 April 2015, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/hsgec _04162015.pdf. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Gerstle, Val, and Lynda Walsh. Autism Spectrum Disorders in the College Composition Classroom: Making Writing Instruction More Accessible for All Students.

Marquette University Press, 2011.

Hazlett, Heather Cody, et al. “Early brain development in infants at high risk for autism spectrum disorder.” Nature, vol. 542, 2017, pp. 348-351.

Kiedaisch, Jean, and Sue Dinitz. “Changing Notions of Difference in the Writing Center: The Possibilities of Universal Design.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 2012, pp. 39-59.

Mann, April. “Structure and Accommodation: Autism and the Writing Center.” Autism Spectrum Disorders in the Composition Classroom: Making Writing Instruction More Accessible for all Students. Ed. Val Gerstle and Lynda Walsh. Marquette University Press, 2011.

Masterson, Tracy L., and Lisa M. Meeks. “What Support Might Help Students with Autism at University?” Good Autism Practice vol. 15, no. 1, 2014, pp. 47-53.

Meeks, Lisa and Elise Geither. “Writing and the Autism Spectrum: Helping Students Through the Process.” Good Autism Practice vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 79-83.

Pacton, Adam M. “Book Review: Autism Spectrum Disorders in the College Composition Classroom.” Composition Studies, vol. 41, no.1, 2013, pp.149-152.

“Services for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder.” University of Louisville, n.d., https://louisville.edu/disability/students/servicesfor-students-with-autism-spectrum-disorder.

Accessed 4 September 2016.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 14, No 3 (2017)

STYLE MAKES THE WRITER: EXPANDING CONSIDERATIONS OF STYLE IN THE WRITING CENTER Edward Santos Garza St. Edward’s University edwardsantosgarza@gmail.com Abstract As a pedagogical tool, “style” in writing center lore has been cast as a lower-order concern. This marginalization stems not only from the difficulty of defining the word itself, but also from a persistent belief that “style” exists in a vacuum separate from “content,” “development,” and grammar, thus being of secondary importance to tutors and administrators. In this article, Edward Santos Garza challenges this clinical framework, arguing that style, a vital, permeating force, has much to offer those in writing center work. He positions style as a tool to help WC visitors more fully discuss, assess, and strengthen themselves as writers. Asserting that style is equally valuable for thinking about writing with regard to identity, Garza envisions how WC staff could productively foreground it in sessions and training.

[Style] pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economises his material; the artisan with a sense for style prefers good work. Style is the ultimate morality of mind. (12) — Alfred North Whitehead “The Aims of Education”

1. Style as Binding The first writing center I worked at, on the campus of a 36,000-student public university, had a strong reputation for its Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID) partnerships. As a program coordinator, I got to work closely on the WC’s partnership with the campus’s Law Center, an experience that has become more instructive with time. The Law Center enlisted the WC to create, administer, and score a writing assessment taken by its incoming students. The assessment, a humanities-esque essay focused on a law-related issue—“Should lawyers be required to work pro-bono hours every year?”—was meant to help the Law Center gauge its students’ skills in expository prose and their abilities to synthesize sources. Along the way, it was also meant to identify which of the 150-plus students needed additional assistance with their writing. Each of those who required additional assistance that year, about fifteen in all, was required to review their essay with a WC tutor, receive feedback for improvement, and write a second essay on how they would implement that feedback in their legal studies.

As the program’s coordinator and one of its two scorers, I appreciated how it was already a well-oiled machine. The assessment had an established rubric, the prompt had been vetted, and the calendar of deadlines had been agreed upon. Today, though, I see how the program could have been modernized, especially in terms of its rubric. Whereas now, as a composition instructor, I prefer holistic assessment, I then bought into the rubric’s neat dissection of the “parts” of a text: (see “Rubric Used to Evaluate the Writing Samples” in appendix).

Revisiting the rubric, I know there is just too much going on with it—and at the same time, not enough. It is a rubric like those Chris M. Anson et al. critique in “Big Rubrics and Weird Genres,” ones cloaked in “the guise of local application, fooling us into believing that they will improve teaching, learning, and both classroom and larger-scale assessment.”

Moreover, it lacks a unifying force, something to describe not only how well the writer “answered” the prompt, but also what makes one successful writer different from other successful writers. This rubric suggests that, if I were to collate five excellent samples, they would all be characterized by a single formula of thought, as opposed to an array of voices working within the same conventions while displaying their own personalities. As the second-to-bottom row declares, “good” samples exhibited writing that was “powerful” and emphatic. As useful as these traits are for future lawyers, there could have been more consideration of other effective styles.

I reflect on this experience because it shows the value of reading holistically, of seeing writing as a creation unique to each person who practices it. If I still coordinated that partnership, I would focus on what unifying force could anchor my reading of the samples. At the time, my fellow scorer would tell me that, within a sample’s first few paragraphs, he simply knew whether it would be “good” or not. As nonpresumptuous as I tried to be, I agreed with him, though I was not sure why.

That effect on a reader, that unifying force, is the product of style, I argue today. An effective writing style heightens the quality of everything else in a text.

For one, it can announce a writer’s purpose especially clearly. A style with more elaborative qualities—e.g.,

Style Makes the Writer • 57 well-used subordinate clauses, qualifying words, a variety of sentence lengths—covers what rubrics such as the one above might call “development.” Moreover, whereas many rubrics treat grammar as something that is either “correct” or not, an effective style reflects how grammar can be rhetorical, how it can be manipulated to emphasize whatever the writer chooses. When properly attended to, style is both the result of and canvas for clear thought.

Though the rubric was for just one WAC/WID program, it illustrates a framework my fellow staff members and I were trained to use in all of our consultations. It was a framework not only for reading texts, but also for discussing them, and I suspect many WCs have constructed something similar for themselves. Here, then, I argue for why considerations of style should command a greater role in WC work. I suggest that a focus on style enhances how prose at the WC is read, evaluated, and discussed, and how it helps tutors respond to challenging texts, an example of which I tackle. Moreover, I assert that style serves as an effective touchstone for unpacking issues of privilege, power, and identity, issues forever in the purview of writing centers.

2. Getting into Style First, what is style, really? The conversation has been going on for a while in English studies. In his 1967 article “Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary Style,” Richard Ohmann defines style as “a way of writing” (qtd. in Butler 2). Aged as it is, his definition is an accurate, if safe, take on the concept. It rightfully conveys that style reflects both a product and process, a notion that speaks to the work WC tutors already do. Interestingly, though, Ohmann does not take a stance on whether style is deliberate.

Moreover, he quietly separates style—i.e., “writing”— from “content.” Ohmann’s concept of style does not account for a writer’s thought process, their organization of ideas. Rather, the concept is just about the “way” someone writes.

On the other end of the spectrum lies a definition stretching back to antiquity. Usually attributed to Aristotle, it focuses on style’s inseparability from content, an “organic” relationship (Butler 3). This take is echoed by English folks in, say, creative writing, folks who might draw a more direct line between the formation of style and the nature (i.e., personality) of that style’s author. This definition is touched on elsewhere in English studies, too, starting as early as 1971 (Milic 77).

Considering various definitions and my purposes here, I subscribe to a scholar who has both

successfully historicized style and developed his own synthetic definition of it. That scholar is Paul Butler, who, in his 2008 book Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric, defines style as “the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning,” a deployment that involves both “habitual patterns” and “conscious choices at the sentence and word level” (3). I favor his conception for a few reasons. First, it situates style as something to be deployed, capturing the fact that someone can, depending on the rhetorical moment, “use” one style or another; the Writer is not beholden to the one style that is most “organic” to them. (Whenever I write the word “deployed,” I think of paratroopers leaping from a plane, probably an appropriate image here.) Second, Butler embraces how style is essential to both the expression and creation of meaning. As Joseph Williams writes in his essential Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, “It is easy to think that style is just the polish that makes a sentence more appealing, but more than appeal is at stake” (123). Put another way, style is not some sort of linguistic cosmetics; it is part of a text’s own DNA. (In the end, arguments of style and deliberateness mean only so much to me. The likely reality is that we sometimes communicate in our own “organic” styles, while at other times we contrive separate styles for other audiences. To a Latinx such as me, it is no surprise that a lack of thoughtfulness on this point has coincided with a lack of non-white, non-male scholars in stylistic studies, thinkers who have plenty of experience constructing styles for audiences different than themselves.)

3. Stylizing the Writing Center By itself, Butler’s definition has much to offer WC folks. For one, it suggests that while style can originate within the writer (Write from your heart.) or without the writer (What are the conventions of this genre?), it is always of the writer, fostering a symbiotic relationship between author and text. If, for example, a writer at the WC feels no personal connection to what they have been assigned, then their tutor could emphasize Butler’s assertion that style is something to be deployed, that the writer need focus only on the conventions of their genre. In addition, if the tutor comes to see style beyond the binary of deliberateness and non-deliberateness, then they could more effectively help a writer harness their “habitual [i.e., personal] patterns,” avoiding repetitiveness.

Indeed, if given the chance to unsettle how writing at the WC is read, evaluated, and discussed, style can have a liberating effect on tutors and writers

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Style Makes the Writer • 58 alike. It could help enact what many WCs only pay lip service to, that those who visit their spaces truly are Writers, not just students fulfilling the guidelines of their assignments. Style can enrich tutors’ jobs by keying them in to their own habits when responding to texts, habits that can be prescriptive and mechanical. As Jesse Kavadlo puts it in “Tutoring Taboo: A Reconsideration of Style in the Writing Center,” Tutors should not be placed in the awkward position of telling students what they “should” do. Instead, they can remind them of rhetorical considerations, possibilities, and consequences concomitant with various and variable modes of expression. Further, style, unlike prescriptive grammar, involves a series of choices that demonstrate many layers of meaning simultaneously: the writer’s style demonstrates what he or she thinks, but also the relationships between those ideas, the relative importance of weighted ideas, the writer’s attitude toward those ideas, and the writer’s ability to present those ideas effectively and persuasively. The tutor, then, must use questions to make the writer aware that what he or she says is a series of rational and discrete options, not blind adherence to a set of rules. (220–1) Kavadlo’s vision probably means more “work” for the tutor, but that work is less mechanized, less prescribed; the whole job sounds more fun, honestly.

In addition, the tutor-writer discourse he maps echoes a productive instructor-student discourse, a helpful concept for tutors planning to teach and/or enter grad school.

And while, generally speaking, writing centers today are not dismissive of foregrounding style, they can do more to fully integrate it into the pantheon of Higher-Order Concerns™ (HOCs) that still holds sway over the field (McKinney 64). In his dated yet insightful article “Assessing Attitudes toward the Writing Center,” Malcolm Hayward surveys WC tutors about their conceptual priorities during consultations, and “style” finishes unceremoniously behind “organization,” “paraphrasing,” and “grammar” (qtd. in North 47). Worse yet, as has been true from Hayward’s time to ours, students are too often sent to writing centers purely for grammar and punctuation.

So, style has been marginalized from two directions, one of which—the tribe of faculty members who still view WCs as fix-it shops—has budged only so much in the past few decades.

This is not to mention the subtle ways in which WC-ers themselves have subtly forgotten about or glossed over style. In his influential, oft-read article “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work,” Jeff Brooks summarizes the tutor’s task as follows: “We can discuss [with students] strategies for effective writing and principles of structure, we can draw students’ attention to features in their writing, and we can give them support and encouragement” (129). To “draw students’ attention to features in their writing” sounds noble—it is—but how about to draw their attention to a single pervading, distinct feature in the prose itself? Accurate as Brooks’ rundown is, it feels simply like a more prosaic version of that Law Center rubric. It is a menu lacking a core, one that, while not essential, would help. Stylistic matters can do more than simply draw students’ attention to a few characteristics of their work; they can effect change within and without it.

What are the stakes if WCs continue to let style fall by the wayside, if only partially? Well, they risk reproducing an antiquated idea of writing. If WCs continue to separate things such as “organization,” “purpose,” and “clarity” from style, then they will foster texts that lack personality, buildings that lack architecture. With even greater frequency, young writers would fall back on a bland, inefficient, and above all safe style of writing, a style a former professor of mine likens to that of Wikipedia (Mikics).

Though this bland style lacks a codified name in writing center studies, every experienced tutor is familiar with it, as well as anyone who has taught firstyear composition. One of Butler’s forebears, style scholar Richard A. Lanham, calls it The School Style.

In his essential Revising Prose, he lays out its characteristics: [The School Style] is compounded, in equal parts, of deference to a teacher of supposedly traditional tastes, at despair of filling up the required number of pages before tomorrow morning, and of the mindlessness born of knowing that what you write may not be read with real attention. Above all, The School Style avoids unqualified assertion. It always leaves the back door open. If the teacher doesn’t agree, you can sneak out through an “it seems” for “is,” “may indeed have something in common with” for “results from,” “it could possibly be argued that” for “I think,” and so on. (80–1) Those who write in The School Style are usually the same people who compose their essays according to what their instructors “want to read,” as opposed to their own convictions. Yes, there will forever be

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Style Makes the Writer • 59 instructors who do not want to read their students’ convictions, but I think their influence is exaggerated.

As a tutor and compositionist, I now further understand that instructors ultimately want work that is compelling or at least interesting to read, not twenty versions of the same essay on the same topic. Far beyond improving the quality of teachers’ grading sessions, though, considerations of style would help writers synthesize academic conventions with their own ways of writing, a rich takeaway for any college graduate.

As always, though, style in the WC must still take into account who—the writer or tutor—gets to set a consultation’s agenda. “What good is a style-centric pedagogy,” someone might say, “if writers rarely visit to talk about style?” To this I argue that writers do in fact come to the WC to talk about their writing styles, their deployment of rhetorical resources; they just express this interest via other terms. Tutors are accustomed to writers coming in to discuss how well their essays “flow,” whether they “sound good.” These writers are really talking about style.

Because what in a text creates “flow”? What makes it sound “good”? It is not just one well-crafted sentence, nor is it several. For a composition of a few hundred words or more, “flow” results from countless, effective choices at the sentence- and wordlevel, the “habitual patterns” Butler mentions (2). (I am fondly reminded of how, when I was a boy, my paternal abuelito would tell me, “If you take care of the pennies, then the dollars take care of themselves.”)

Yes, “flow” is about choices at the paragraph- and section-level, too, but not at the expense of what WC folks have traditionally labeled lower-order concerns.

At the end of the day, “flow” and style are bound up with the same rhetorical resources: grammar, syntax, punctuation, usage, spelling. To those outside Rhet./Comp., these elements are simply “rules,” things to be obeyed rather than deployed, but that assumption is precisely where a tutor can open up a conversation about style, one that still honors what the writer came in for.

Still, if style is a vehicle for approaching challenges WCs are already approaching, what is the need for it in particular? Put concisely, just because other concepts get tutors and writers to the same discussion-points does not mean those concepts are necessarily better at addressing those discussion-points. As I have sought to illustrate, style is a “better” vehicle because it positions the writer as an architect of their work, not just someone fulfilling instructions. Such a position is humanizing, if not just sobering, to someone writing an academic paper, an activity that for most students is “dull and unrewarding” (Brooks 129). Style, especially

when assessed by an authority such as a tutor, is an effective way of encouraging ownership of one’s ideas.

4. Style and Resistant Writers Likewise, style can serve as an entry-point for tutors confronted with a text that clashes with the otherwise progressive values of WCs. In 2014, for instance, I came across a popular essay by a freshman at Princeton, Tal Fortgang. Entitled “Check Your Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege,” it dismisses the notion that skin color and gender strongly impact one’s opportunities, instead arguing, as conservative texts are wont to do, that hard work is the only determinant of “success” in America.

Fortgang, whose essay first appeared in his campus’s conservative newspaper and was later republished under a different title in TIME, became a galvanizing figure. Unsurprisingly, he was embraced by right-wing outlets, earning himself an interview with Fox News.

Also unsurprisingly, his worldview was quickly challenged by those on the left. TIME soon published a response piece by another Princeton freshman, Briana Payton, titled “Dear Privileged-at-Princeton: You. Are. Privileged. And Meritocracy Is a Myth.”

My disagreement with Fortgang was immediate, of course. I still wondered, though, about what in his text was so effective for his audience. Fortgang’s beliefs are shared by countless others in blogs, social media pages, and cable programs, so why did his version of the same argument gain so much traction? Besides the fact that he was an Ivy-League teenager who was nonetheless conservative, it was likely his writing style that made his work so memorable. Warped as its conclusions are, his essay exhibits a command of pace and a sense of organization, both bound by a brash, memorable style. “I have checked my privilege,” he writes in his conclusion. “And I apologize for nothing.” The avoidance of “unqualified assertion” that Lanham associates with The School Style (80)?

None of that here.

As I brainstormed my argument for this article, I thought, What if someone like Fortgang brought a text like “Check Your Privilege” to a writing center? Where would the tutor start? How could the tutor challenge Fortgang to think more critically while still centering the conversation on his “writing”? Once again, I concluded, style would be an avenue. For while Fortgang’s prose is a strength of his text (Tutors must always pay a compliment, right?) it also betrays his gaps in thought, his lack of nuance.

Consider his second paragraph: I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I

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Style Makes the Writer • 60 belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies.

Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real. (emphases mine) As the bolded text shows, Fortgang’s style possesses more confidence than subtlety. It suffers from his insistence on using extreme language to summarize the claims of others, quickly resulting in a straw-man argument. No one is disregarding all the work of men of his background. Rather, Fortgang’s opponents— including yet more of his peers via the Tumblr page I, Too, Am Princeton—are claiming that because of his gender and race, he has been given an upper hand, a higher starting point. A tutor could spend a good portion of a thirty-minute session facilitating dialogue on this point alone, encouraging Fortgang to use more nuanced syntax, a style of prose that considers opposing viewpoints.

That would be style’s primary use in contentious sessions: a catalyst for discussion. Some folks might read the paragraph above and say, “Why even give Fortgang constructive feedback? He wouldn’t listen.”

Well, as always, whether one writer internalizes a tutor’s feedback is beyond an entire WC’s control. Our job as WC people is to give the most forward-thinking feedback we can, to give our visitors the benefit of the doubt that they actually want to push themselves as writers, as thinkers. And style, as personal as we know it is, can actually serve as a kind of neutral space for challenging a writer’s convictions; it has the veneer of being more about the text than the person who produced it. Talking about style might be the only way to get writers such as Fortgang to open up, to revise their minds.

5. Stylizing the Writing Center, Part 2 What would a more style-centric writing center look like, then? For one, stylistic study could be integrated into training. I think of a lesson plan I

enacted with my composition students. I took a text most of them were familiar with, The Great Gatsby, and showed them two differently styled video summaries of its plot. The first was produced by SparkNotes, whereas the second was produced by a series entitled Thug Notes. As one would imagine, the SparkNotes video relied more on a “traditional” mode of communication, sporting an English somewhere between The School Style and a New York Times book review. It lasted eight minutes.

By contrast, the Thug Notes summary conveyed the same plot while using African-American English (AAE). Impressively, the speaker, Sparky Sweets, covers the whole plot within four minutes, even including some details that SparkNotes did not. By deploying AAE, Sweets draws a funny contrast between the world of Gatsby and that of gangsta culture. At the same time, his style invites the viewer to observe similarities between the two spheres, how they both expose flaws in the American Dream.

“America may have started as the land where homies got each other’s backs,” Sweets says in his analysis, “but Fitzgerald’s America is full of back-stabbin’ crackas that make Gatsby’s romantic dream ridiculous” (2:19–29).

Comparing the styles of videos such as these, tutors might start resisting the myth that there is some standard, uber-style out there, capital-W Writing. They might see that a style is effective only insofar as it is crafted for its audience, whether that audience is composed of English instructors or undergrads who love gangsta rap. Moreover, an exercise such as this one would demonstrate how style is almost always racialized, how even the SparkNotes video, benign as it is, was casually crafted for a “mainstream” (i.e., white) audience. In short, the exercise would demonstrate how “good” style, like “good” rhetors, should be versatile and shape-shifting, qualities that new tutors would do well to develop.

Another exercise would have tutors examine their styles themselves. Bringing in essays of their own, tutors would be tasked with reading them via different eyes. What are their styles’ dominant characteristics, and where do those characteristics come from? How much do they stem from their field of study, their place of birth, their gender, their race? Examining such contexts, tutors would be encouraged to adopt a more postmodern, less hierarchical view of language, making them more open-minded pedagogues.

6. Style’s Exigency In October of 2015, I had the pleasure of seeing Andrea Lunsford deliver the keynote address at a

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Style Makes the Writer • 61 conference in north Texas, Trends in Teaching College Composition. As scholars of her caliber sometimes do, she focused on a book she recently became taken with. That book was Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Communication, published in 2007. Excitedly, thoroughly, she shared with us one of the text’s major arguments, which she endorsed: In our age of booming, new media for reading and writing, style is more essential than ever. Like Lanham, Lunsford held that, shallow as the practice is, audiences today and tomorrow will ignore or dismiss you if your style is not effective (much like my students came to ignore the SparkNotes summary of Gatsby). Audiences have always been this way, of course, but now style and content, which were inseparable in the first place, need each other more than ever; erudition is not enough. If anything, as Lunsford suggested, “content” needs style more than vice-versa.

I do not want writing centers to lag in this regard.

By expanding their considerations of style, WCs can revivify their conception of students as Writers, chefs as opposed to short-order cooks. Such an expansion would provide a rich avenue for addressing challenges WCs have always faced: helping writers navigate genre, helping writers take ownership of their work, and helping writers find themselves amid the ocean of academic discourse. After all, as Brooks reminds us, the chief value of the writing center tutor “is as a living human body who is willing to sit patiently and help the student spend time with her paper” (129). In short, by embracing the individuality of writing, expanding style would breathe life into the work of tutors, administrators, and the writers they serve, making the WC an even more human place to be.

Works Cited Anson, Chris M., et al. “Big Rubrics and Weird Genres: The Futility of Using Generic Assessment Tools Across Diverse Instructional Contexts.” The Journal of Writing Assessment, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, www.journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?a rticle=57. Accessed 13 May 2017.

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 4th ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 128–32.

Butler, Paul. Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2008.

Fortgang, Tal. “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege.” The Princeton Tory. 2 Apr. 2014, www.theprincetontory.com/main/checkingmy-privilege-character-as-the-basis-of-privilege/.

Accessed 13 May 2017.

Kavadlo, Jesse. “Tutoring Taboo: A Reconsideration of Style in the Writing Center.” Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy. Ed. T.R. Johnson and Tom Page. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2005, pp. 215–26.

Lanham, Richard A. Revising Prose. New York: Scribner, 1979.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Keynote Speech.” Trends in Teaching College Composition. Collin Higher Education Center, McKinney, TX. 23 Oct. 2015.

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2013.

Mikics, David. “The rise of Wikipedia, the decline of student writing.” The Daily Dot. 2 Oct. 2013, www.dailydot.com/via/wikipedia-student-writingscholarship-decline/. Accessed 13 May 2017.

Milic, Louis T. “Rhetorical Choice and Stylistic Option: The Conscious and Unconscious Poles.” Literary Style: A Symposium. Ed. and Trans.

Seymour Chatman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971, pp.

77–88.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 4th ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 44–57.

“Rubric Used to Evaluate the Writing Samples.”

University of Houston Writing Center. University of Houston, 2016, www.drive.google.com/file/d/0B7HK1a1v4KM WOU0zajZudFhwNms/view?pref=2&pli=1.

Accessed 13 May 2017.

Sweets, Sparky. “The Great Gatsby - Thug Notes Summary and Analysis.” YouTube. Wisecrack, 11 Jun. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VEQRPm_HyA. Accessed 13 May 2017.

Whitehead, Alfred North. “The Aims of Education.” The Aims of Education and Other Essays.

New York: The Free Press, 1957, pp. 1–14.

Williams, Joseph M. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace.

2nd ed. Boston, MA: Longman, 2006.

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Economy and Clarity: Use fewer words in more-effective sentences. Cut repeated words and obvious implications; prefer the affirmative.

Choose well-suited and precise words.

Shape, Power, and Emphasis: Use position in sentences and paragraphs to help readers understand what’s important. Signal relationships and transitions.

Get to main verbs quickly.

Place old before new information.

Elaboration: (“explain how you reached that conclusion”) Explain the reasoning behind the conclusion (make clear connections): Body paragraphs support topic sentences with details from sources and personal experience.

Purpose: (“Provide your informed opinion”) Answer both parts of the question; state and support a thesis (informed opinion).

THOUGHTS AND IDEAS

PROJECT 1 Rating Scale !

HOLISTIC The general experience of the composition.

FORMING, FRAMING, PRESENTING

Touches upon but doesn’t fully address both parts of the question.

Stance/opinion not made fully clear, or difficult to locate.

Stance clear but not fully developed.

Thesis doesn’t clearly or fully predict the support.

3 4 C Average B Doesn’t fully state and support a clear claim.

Score based upon how many of these MINOR PROBLEMS are evident, and how seriously.

Too many wasted words and empty phrases; wordy or mechanical.

Abstract, general words chosen for important passages.

Inappropriate or wrong words chosen.

Confusing arrangements of subjects/topics.

Some words and phrases could have worked harder; some waste.

Mixture of abstract/concrete, specific/general word choices.

Inconsistent order of subjects/topics.

Seeks to explain connections but results not always fully clear.

Lacking reasons or support in a few places; reader left wondering “how” or “why” in places.

Not all paragraphs introduced by clear predictive topic sentences.

CRAFTING, EDITING, PROOFING WRITTEN PROSE Sentences generally easy to understand, Sentences overly simple or needlessly but not always high impact. complicated.

Sentences occasionally hard to Sentences poorly constructed/edited understand. (long introductions, interrupted subjectOrganization only partially signaled. verb connections, etc.).

Organizational logic not clear or signaled. □ Frequent Editing Errors □ Occasional Editing Errors

Highly unbalanced (or separate) responses to the two parts of the question.

Fails to address one of the two parts.

Lacking opinion.

Claim very unclear or difficult to locate, and/or thesis fails to synthesize two parts of question.

Little or no supporting details from sources; Seemingly-random selection of details from sources.

Lacking topic sentences that predict paragraphs; Lacking a sense of how details connect to opinion(s).

Score based upon how many of these MAJOR PROBLEMS are evident, and how seriously.

1 2 F At-Risk/Poor D Hard to read and understand.

Few Editing Errors Virtually every word and phrase counts.

Easy to follow and tangibly imagine.

[Concrete, specific nouns; strong, active verbs; consistent order of subjects/topics]

□

Sentences achieve their effects with little effort from the reader.

[Parallelism, active voice, simple tense] [Coordination, subordination] [Transitions—easy to follow organization]

Reason/support connections clear and convincing.

[Topic sentences easy to locate, clearly written, predict support] [Points and particulars both present in most or all paragraphs]

5 6 A- Outstanding A A strong, clear, supported opinion that’s easy to read and understand.

Score based upon how WELL these STANDARDS are achieved.

[Likely to be indicated by these features] Clear and well-developed stance.

[Thesis statement in a predictable location, clearly stated, touching on both subtopics] [Two parts of the answer easy to distinguish]

Style Makes the Writer • 62

Appendix: “Rubric Used to Evaluate the Writing Samples”

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EAVESDROPPING TWITTER: WHAT STUDENTS REALLY THINK ABOUT WRITING CENTERS Chris Leary Queensborough Community College cleary@qcc.cuny.edu Abstract In recent decades, writing centers have moved from the margins of campus power toward the center (Essid 2014). Because our connections to professors and administrators have increased, students may be less likely to speak freely during consultations, on surveys, and in focus groups. Where, then, might we hear students’ “real talk” about writing centers? In the latter half of July 2015 and the beginning of August, I aimed to find out. My hypothesis was that Twitter might be a space to find “voices that are often left out of our surveys of satisfaction” (Lerner 4). Therefore, I spent a month surveilling Twitter, trying to listen in and access what students say about us when we aren’t likely to be listening. I found Twitter to be a public space in which students feel comfortable talking frankly about school matters, including writing center matters.

One of the early rationales for peer-to-peer writing centers was that they might be spaces where students could speak freely to one another about writing assignments. In such spaces, students could articulate ideas that aren’t exactly “wholesome”: how to exploit loopholes in a professor’s syllabus, how to take smart shortcuts when multiple deadlines are approaching, how to subvert assignments that are offensive or clueless, etc. However, in recent decades, this type of collaboration has become less feasible.

According to Harry Denny, many writing center practictioners “fear real material consequences if [they] fail to conform or adapt to conventions of pedagogy and performance” (55). Therefore, to secure funding for operations in universities that are focused on “measurable outcomes and fiscal solvency,” writing centers increasingly assimilate into the established institution (Essid 1).

As writing centers migrate from the margins of campus power toward the center, their connections to professors and administrators grow. In exchange for associated perks and benefits, writing centers sacrifice some of the freedoms and possibilities they had in the margins. Peter Carino asks if the changing status of writing centers compels them to “speak politely” now (108). In some cases, yes. In the conference reports that tutors send to professors, are they really going to discuss the shortcuts they found and the loopholes they exploited?

Because students also feel the pressure to speak politely, writing center scholars have rightfully

questioned whether we get “real talk” from them on surveys, during appointments, and in focus groups about their experiences in the writing center. For example, a group of Fairfield University tutors, led by Beth Bocquet, articulated this concern in a 2005 article about focus groups.

We also thought that students might be more likely to speak freely to fellow students, rather than to a professor. Using tutors as moderators, however, does not come without its problems. For example, participants might feel uncomfortable talking to someone who might have tutored them in the past or could potentially tutor them in the future. We briefly considered asking someone outside the Writing Center to facilitate the groups (Cushman 4-5).

Cindy Johanek recommends using a mixed bag of quantitative and qualitative assessment techniques in order to triangulate the data and thereby counter possible biases in collection methods. However, given that some assessments are undertaken in order “to prove the effectiveness of our writing centers to get funding or just to stay in business,” one might argue that we aren’t always looking for straight answers (Mohr 8).

For students, if there is even a tiny chance that one’s answer on a writing center survey will “come back to haunt” them, why take the risk? School spirit?

I suppose, but frankly, the smart play is to offer bland, uncontroversial answers. It makes sense to stick to the script. That is often what we get.

If students give bland, uncontroversial answers when approached by assessors of writing centers, that doesn’t mean they have no outlet whatsoever for gripes and uncouth statements about writing centers.

James Scott has shown that, when a space comes under surveillance, thereby forcing inhabitants to utter prescribed beliefs, those inhabitants always (yes, always) find a new space for unscripted comments.

In the digital age, one of the obvious spaces for unscripted commentary is the Internet. It’s a relatively safe space because users can take on pseudonyms and because there are so many dark corners of the Web that the chances are slim that a comment will “come

Eavesdropping Twitter • 64 back to haunt you.” Older authority figures often don’t even know how to access the apps that youngsters use to communicate. To the degree that it is risky, uncouth commentary online is worth the risk, especially if rewards include boosted credibility among peers.

So, what the heck are these youngsters saying about writing centers in the unsupervised spaces of the Web? In the latter half of July 2015 and the beginning of August, I aimed to find out. My method was simple. Within Twitter, I searched for “writing center” and transcribed all peer-to-peer commentary on university writing centers. Because I was looking only for peer-to-peer commentary, I ignored all of the tweets by administrators advertising writing center services and all of the tweets by students reaching out to professors (“@ProfessorGilbride how many times do we have to go 2 writing center?”).

My hypothesis was that Twitter might be a space to find “voices that are often left out of our surveys of satisfaction” and, in fact, I found Twitter to be a public space in which students feel comfortable talking frankly about school matters, including writing center matters (Lerner 4). Therefore, I spent a month surveilling Twitter, trying to listen in and access what students say about us when we aren’t likely to be listening. At the end of this essay, I offer brief recommendations for writing center recruitment practices, based on what I learned from my month of surveillance.

They Like Us. They Really Like Us. One of the first things you notice while eavesdropping on Twitter is that many students love the writing center. We already know this from the students who rush into our writing centers after getting a great grade and from impromptu conversations with regulars. But since the rest of this essay portrays some negativity, let me begin with a few nice comments. These do a decent job of representing the positive vibes on Twitter:

• •

Every time I leave the writing center I feel so much more motivated with my papers1 Writing center is actually helpful So thankful that ELAC has a writing center or else I'll be struggling with my essay.

• •

This writing center is so helpful So I went to the writing center and actually had my mind blown. My thesis

•

and purpose is so much clearer now. #english2010 Cool. But what do students say when things don’t go so swimmingly? Here are a few examples: •

•

PROTIP for kids at poverty tier colleges (and colleges in general) The writing center is a load of shit. Don't bother they won't help you. when will professors realize the writing center is a pointless waste of time

In general, the negative tweets were not as angry as these and usually more interesting too.

Furthermore, they often hovered around topics that writing center professionals care about, like originality, collaboration, and credit.

Of Diss Tracks & Ghostwriters The month I tracked Twitter comments about writing centers happened to be the month in which some beef played out between hip-hop stars Drake and Meek Mill. I wouldn’t normally expect hip-hop concerns to intersect with writing center concerns, but this was a feud that hovered, from the start, around writing, originality, collaboration, and credit—all issues that writing centers deal with on a daily basis. And to my great surprise, several tweeters directly referenced writing centers as they weighed in on Meek/Drake.

To give a little background, the drama between Meek and Drake likely stems from competition for the affection of Nicki Minaj, but it really surfaced online when Meek Mill got tired of people comparing his music to Drake’s music. On July 21st, in the tweet that sparked everything, Meek referenced rumors that Drake hires ghostwriters to generate his rhymes. “Stop comparing drake to me,” Meek wrote. “He don't write his own raps! That's why he ain't tweet my album because we found out!” (Ramirez). Meek elaborated on July 26th, saying, “If you gonna be the motherfuckin' greatest of this shit just make sure you're doing your motherfuckin' pen game, and keep it all the way a motherfuckin' hundred” (Ramirez). Meek piled on the ridicule by releasing an image of Drake’s face hastily photoshopped onto the body of Milli Vanilli (Ramirez).

Meek’s words and images inspired legions of Drake haters online, but one Drake supporter rose to his defense on Twitter, noting the hypocrisy of several critics:

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Eavesdropping Twitter • 65 Yall mad at drake for ghostwriting. But begging the writing center at your college campus for input to pass a test...stop me if im crazy Overall, the feud was short-lived and mild compared to other celebrity feuds. According to Erika Ramirez of Billboard, it played out like this: •

•

•

•

On July 28th, Drake responded to Meek’s ridicule by issuing a very well received diss track called “Back to Back.” In it, Drake mocks Meek for taking a subordinate role in Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint Tour. Drake raps, “Is that a world tour, or your girl’s tour?” By the time the track reaches wide circulation, Drake has easily taken the lead in this feud.

Everyone waits for Meek Mill to respond with a diss track of his own. And he does on July 30th. But it’s widely viewed to be a dud. According to the gossip site Jezebel.com, “the song has been heretofore rejected on account of mediocrity.” One Twitter critic writes, “Meek should've let nicki proofread. You never turn in an essay without a proofread.”

Finally, Drake takes his victory lap, issuing some Instagram photos that go viral. The July 30th photos depict Drake looking at his phone and cracking up, as if to say, “THAT’S all you got, Meek?!”

In the immediate aftermath of Drake’s “victory,” I came across a flurry of tweets aiming to diss Meek Mill through reference to writing centers: • • • •

•

Meek shudve took that song 2 the Writing Center first Writing Center can help Meek Mill Meek Mill went to the writing center to have diss song proof read!

Took them to the writing center RT @TheRealSchitty: Meek Mills writing his bars and checking them twice. he should have went to the Writing Center. he needed a little more help

These tweets purporting to send Meek Mill to the writing center rely upon a powerful myth that writing center personnel have spent decades fighting—that

writing centers are for weak writers and weak writing.

To whomever will listen, we insist that good writers go to the writing center because 1) they understand that smart peers can provoke new possibilities and 2) they understand that “getting stuck” is not a sign of failure but rather a sign of high standards. But the flippant tweets about Meek indicate that students on Twitter continue to perceive writing center visits as a sign of weakness.

Lupe Fiasco on Writing and Rapping Drake’s diss track polled much better than Meek Mill’s diss track, but he lost me when he ridiculed Meek for getting financial and intellectual support from a woman. I agree with Michael Arceneaux, who explained that “Meek being comfortable dating someone more successful than him” is a sign of strength not weakness.

The only rapper who came out looking good during this whole feud, in my humble opinion, was Lupe Fiasco, who released a two-part message that began by saying, “I enjoy both these brothers music and find inspiration and appreciation from both of them” (Bacle). Lupe then summarized the feud by saying, “Meek Mill struck a nerve accusing Drake of having a ghostwriter and the entire rap world reacted on all sides of the fence because rap is alive” (Bacle).

Lupe turned the feud into a “teachable moment,” offering a series of points about writing that align him with the “social constructionist” wing of composition studies.

•

•

•

At the end of the day, for better or worse, rap is alive even if some of its greatest moments are written by ghosts. (Bacle) The art form is kept alive and progressive in the activities of the tens of thousands of rappers around the world who are everyday trying to think of that next witty bar. (Bacle) To rappers from a rapper...simply write your own rhymes as much as you can if you are able. Ghostwriting, or borrowing lines, or taking suggestions from the room has always been in rap and will always be in rap. It is nothing to go crazy over or be offended about unless you are someone who postures him or herself on the importance of authenticity and tries to portray that quality to your fans or the public at large. Then we might have a problem. Some of the most pivotal moments in rap have been ghostwritten

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Eavesdropping Twitter • 66 verses. This leads to a bigger point.

Rapping is not an easy thing to do. It's takes years of work and trial and error to master some of its finer points. (Bacle) Lupe’s words encapsulate what I learned during fifteen years of working in writing centers: 1) good writers acknowledge that writing is hard and therefore they look to their peers for aid in writing and 2) even writers who insist on flying solo are boosted up by the efforts of past and present others.

If Lupe’s writing philosophy gained more traction, then “You oughtta go to the writing center” could no longer function as a diss. Unfortunately, though, I encountered the “remedial” understanding of writing centers many times in the month that I surveilled Twitter.

For example, in his list of #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter, one student listed “Try tutoring at the writing center.” After learning of a class requirement to visit his school’s writing center, a different student tweeted, “The worst part is I don't even want help. Prof. Made it a requirement to have our final essays approved by the writing center.”

Another student wore it as a badge of honor that he’s “never even been in the writing center” and “didn't know we had one.” Yet another student felt bittersweet about his frequent visits to the Writing Center: “I go to the writing center so much they know me by name and get excited by my presence. It's sad and flattering at the same time.”

Conclusion Although Meek and Drake were on different sides of the feud, they both operated from the same premise that getting help with writing is a sign of weakness. It is a premise that seems to dominate the discursive spaces (like Twitter) where teachers and administrators are not present. Lupe Fiasco’s opposing belief, that getting help with writing is not only wise but inevitable, appears to be much less influential. Writing center practitioners can relate: we have insisted for decades that writing centers are not a “penalty box” for weak writers with middling success (Grimm 1996; Harris 2000; Sewell 2016).

How might these insights from Twitter affect writing center practices? More study is clearly needed, but my brief surveillance of Twitter has inspired me to rethink writing center hiring practices. If we really subscribe to Lupe’s belief that good writers seek out help, we should insist on recruiting predominantly from the pool of students who frequent the writing center, those with a proven history of seeking help.

Geller et al. offer a similar perspective on hiring and

recruitment in The Everyday Writing Center. One way to build a diverse and inclusive staff, they argue, is by paying attention “to our dedicated writing center users who have already proven through their actions that they are committed to the mission of the writing center” (Geller et al. 110).

To put it in the terms of the feud I summarized earlier, writing centers should avoid hiring those like Drake (who see getting help, especially from a woman, as a sign of weakness), even when they possess deft verbal powers and outstanding charisma. Instead, recruit those like Lupe Fiasco, who sincerely enjoy getting help as much as they enjoy giving it. And once our staffs are composed primarily of students who seek help, we can advertise this state of affairs to students, faculty, administrators, and whoever else will listen.

In fact, many writing centers already hire students who initially come seeking help. One USC student expressed confusion about this on Twitter: •

If I had to go to the writing center to get help why would USC think I'd be a good writing tutor

As this tweet indicates, writing centers are already recruiting their staff members from the students who come for consultation. At my previous institution, our writing center recruited about half of its staff in this manner. However, if we are determined to end the diss-power of “You oughtta go to the writing center,” half the staff might not be enough.

Notes 1. I prefer not to cite the authors of these Tweets.

Even though these students published their comments in a public space, I don’t think they intended to have these comments circulated in a forum where professors and administrators gather. Ethically speaking, I think it is better to withhold students’ pseudonyms.

Works Cited Arceneaux, Michael. "Queen Takes King(s)."

Complex. 6 Aug. 2015. Web. 13 June 2017.

Bacle, Ariana. "Lupe Fiasco Pens Open Letter about Ghostwriting after Meek Mill Accuses Drake of Not Writing His Own Raps." Entertainment Weekly 23 July 2015. Web. 10 Aug. 2015.

Carino, Peter. “Reading Our Own Words: Rhetorical Analysis and the Institutional Discourse of

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Eavesdropping Twitter • 67 Writing Centers.” Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation. Eds. Paula Gillespie, Alice Gillam, Lady Falls Brown, and Byron Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. 91-110. Print.

Cushman, Tara et al. "Using Focus Groups to Assess Writing Center Effectiveness." Writing Lab Newsletter 29.7 (2005): 1-5. Print.

Denny, Harry. "Queering the Writing Center." The Writing Center Journal 25.2 (2005): 39-62.

Essid, Joe. "Extending An Alternative: Writing Centers and Curricular Change." The Writing Lab Newsletter 38.7-8 (2014): 1.

Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Caroll, and Elizabeth H. Boquet. “Everyday Racism: Anti-Racism Work and Writing Center Practice.” The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2007. 87109. Print.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. "Rearticulating the Work of the Writing Center." College Composition and Communication 47.4 (1996): 523-548.

Harris, Muriel. "Preparing to Sit at the Head Table: Maintaining Writing Center Viability in the Twenty-First Century." The Writing Center Journal 20.2 (2000): 13-22.

Lerner, Neil. “Choosing beans wisely.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 26.1 (2001): 1-5. Print.

Johanek, Cindy. Composing Research. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2000. Print.

Mohr, Ellen. “Researching the Effectiveness of a Writing Center.” 1998. Print.

Ramirez, Erika. "Meek Mill vs. Drake: A Full Timeline of the Rap Beef & Who Weighed In." Billboard 31 July 2015. Print.

Sewell, Madison. "Tutors' Column: ‘The First Step: Students' Initial Encounters with the Writing Center"." WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship 40.9-10 (2016): 27-31.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Print.

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