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

It’s a cloudy Thursday morning in November, and the university writing center is humming. A peer tutor sits at a table near the center of the room, listening to a sophomore explain her essay assignment for a recreational therapy class while a second tutor helps a freshman fine tune his thesis statement for a research paper. In the far corner, a third tutor works at a computer, responding to an on-line submission from a student in a local high school’s creative writing class. The director is conferring with a member of the mathematics department on ways to include meaningful writing activities in an advanced calculus class. It’s a typical day at a college-level writing center, but it raises a question for educators. Are similar scenes occurring in our public secondary schools? As an awareness of the importance of writing as a means of learning has grown, the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement has gained momentum on college campuses. One response to this increased focus on the importance of writing in the learning process has been the establishment of writing centers at hundreds of colleges and universities. These centers are designed to serve the needs of both students and faculty and aim to support learning in all fields. While these programs have flourished in many post-secondary settings, formal WAC programs in general and writing centers in particular still seem to be something of an exception in secondary public schools; however, interest in these practices appears to be growing there as well. A number of publications show an increasing integration of WAC philosophy and strategies into secondary public school settings. Pamela Farrell’s The High School Writing Center: Establishing and Maintaining One not only provides practical information on designing and running writing labs in secondary schools, but also illustrates the variety of forms