Beginning in 1999, City University of New York (CUNY), significantly increased its commitment to Writing-Across-theCurriculum (WAC) by funding faculty development, Writing Fellows, and Writing Intensive courses on the majority of its 18 campuses. With this renewed interest in WAC, administrators and faculty across the disciplines are increasingly taking responsibility for using writing processes to foster learning and thinking as well as teaching writing in the disciplines. As teachers use writing more as a communicative tool in the content areas, how they respond to students’ writing becomes increasingly important. As a WAC Coordinator at Bronx Community College (BCC), I have had the opportunity to work with faculty in professional development seminars. A common concern teachers often raise is how best to respond to students’ writing. In turn, I, too, have often wondered how students in my classes react to my feedback on their written texts. Careful consideration of what we say and how we say it is an important part of good teaching practice. Teachers typically invest much time and effort in responding to students’ texts with the assumption that their feedback will help improve students’ writing. Teacher feedback takes on greater significance when students are revising their writing through multiple drafts. But what do students really think about our comments? Do our words help students move their thinking and writing forward on subsequent drafts?

Writing Across the Curriculum places considerable demands not only upon the students in writing intensive courses, but also on the writing center staff to whom they go for help. This paper looks at some of the problems raised by tutors in this situation, and presents a case study in which such problems are negotiated in the course of a consultation between a student and a tutor. The kinds of revision resulting from this process are explored for the light they can throw on the relationship between language and content, as well as the relationships among discipline teachers, tutors, students, and the students’ texts. One aim of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that every teacher should be a writing teacher. However, while WAC assignments provide opportunities to write, the work of helping students to do it often falls to tutors in writing centers; and both tutors and teachers have expressed uneasiness about such consultations for a number of reasons. First, WAC assignments can challenge the tutors’ priority of respecting students’ ownership of their texts. What does it mean to own your text if you are writing on a topic set by somebody else, drawing on other people’s ideas, and conforming to conventions of structure and voice imposed by a discipline? Conventions of one sort or another have always surrounded writing, and even students’ “personal” writing is often largely a matter of reproducing commonplaces (see, e.g., Bartholemae). However, it is in the context of writing for unfamiliar disciplines that students and tutors are forced to confront these issues, identify the constraints and opportunities peculiar to writing in each discipline, and work within them. This brings