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Problems in the writing center.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This article discusses a problem in the writing center: for a variety of reasons, tutors are unable to help students with discipline-specific writing as much as they--and students and professors--would like. After examining the reasons for this problem, this article proposes that professors in the disciplines do the following to address the problem: (1) include tutors as part of the audience for their assignments, and (2) expand their definition of what constitutes an effective assignment.

Background

One of the most important insights spurring the Writing (or Communications) Across the Curriculum movement is this: what is considered to be effective communication varies from discipline to discipline. A professor in the humanities, for instance, might tell a student to avoid the passive voice, while that same student might be urged by her chemistry professor to--by all means--please use the passive voice. Even matters as important as what counts as evidence may vary by discipline. The end result is often, in the best case scenario, confusion on the student's part and, in the worst case scenario, a dispiriting sense that academic standards are arbitrary and that college is just a hoop to jump through--an often hopelessly-inaccessible hoop that the student may not, after all, succeed in squeezing through.

Many students turn to the writing center for guidance in navigating these complex waters. Unfortunately, writing center tutors are often put in a position where they cannot help as much as they would like--or as much as the student or the faculty member would like. Reviewing commonly-accepted knowledge in composition studies and related fields, this article will explain why tutors are frequently unable to provide optimal help, and it will go on to propose two ways to address the problem. It will propose, first, that writing center tutors could better serve students if faculty saw not only students but also tutors as part of the audience for the assignment. Tutors generally begin a writing center conference by asking to see the professor's prompt, so including enough detail for the tutor would help the student-tutor conversation to be even more effective. Second, this article proposes that professors expand their definition of what constitutes an effective assignment, broadening it to include the multiple layers of scaffolding that allow students and the tutors helping them to better meet professors' expectations.

Why Tutors Cannot Always Help as Much as They Would Like

Reviewing commonly-accepted knowledge in composition studies and related fields, this section will explain why tutors cannot always help students as much as they would like. First, of course, it is unrealistic to expect a tutor to be familiar with all the conventions in all the disciplines (not to mention, of course, the subtleties of when to adapt conventions within a discipline). A professor has spent not only years of a graduate career but also post-graduate years developing a nuanced understanding of the conventions of one discipline (along with the assumptions and habits of inquiry that such conventions index); a tutor, unlike a professor, deals not with one but with many disciplines and is thus unlikely to have a nuanced understanding of all--or even most--disciplinary conventions in her usually-far-shorter career. There are, of course, conventions and rhetorical strategies common to most disciplines that tutors can draw on to help students--tutors can, for instance, help students understand the conventions of Standard English and help them learn strategies for sustaining an argument as opposed to making unsupported claims or merely summarizing. It is important for students to learn to avoid such common problems, and if that were all writing center tutors did, then students' time--and a university's money--would still be very Well-spent.

However, it is important that tutors do more than help students learn commonly-applicable conventions and strategies. Teaching only these conventions and strategies is just half the story--just half of what students need to know to succeed in writing across the disciplines. Without knowledge of writing in a particular discipline, students often lose persuasive power, for their language "marks" them as an outsider in the field and thus undermines their credibility. Moreover, without at least a rudimentary command of discipline-specific conventions, students may be less likely to acquire the habits of mind that would allow them to think like an expert in that discipline--they may be less likely, for instance, to be able to identify problems or develop important ideas. We know, for instance, that form can be generative--that "following" a particular form of writing can help us generate ideas that we may not otherwise have generated. Thus, when we are aware of certain disciplinary forms and try to "follow" them, we are more likely to generate ideas considered to be worthy in that discipline. [1]

But there is another reason that tutors should help students become aware of both general and discipline-specific conventions: when we teach only...

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