Although tutors are usually excellent students, they seldom have previous tutoring experience.For this reason, tutor training is an important aspect of any writing center program.A general training program -which includes two to three hours of orientation focusing on procedures, tutoring roles, responsibilities, and policies -is usually required of all new tutors.During their first semester of employment, additional training in study skills, communications, critical thinking skills, and interpersonal skills may also be required.In addition to this general training, tutors also need specific training in the tutoring of writing.Most tutors learned to write using the product method -a formal, grammatical approach with instruction beginning at the sentence level, moving to the paragraph, and finally culminating

Although generally optimistic about the effect of writing center instruction, writing center staff commonly remain frustrated with the "fix-it shop" role that writing centers so frequently must assume, a role that presses staff to spend disproportionate time with the cosmetics of writing and to neglect the thinking/ writing skills that build confident, competent writers. Drop-in, last-minute service will always be necessary and important. However, both writing-across-the-curriculum research and the projects to be reported here suggest that writing center instructors can better solve fundamental writing problems if they spend some of their time outside of the writing center,

Our advanced degrees in English did not train us for all these roles, and many of us enroll in courses and seminars in everything from grant writing to computer literacy in an attempt to make up for what we have missed.But there is one important

Though the tutoring of students is an ancient tradition, the tutoring of student writers in writing centers is a fairly recent phenomenon. Though certain teachers have always used their offices as informal writing labs, a place where students could come for help with a paper or a writing problem, the formal writing center began in the 1960's when English

Among a number of scholarly interests, he is exploring further uses of ethnographic techniques

The classic rhetoricians divided the art of rhetoric into at least three main stages: invention, disposition , and elocution (also memoryand delivery for oratory). Today, we continue to recognize this tripartite division of the composing process but prefer to substitute a more modern taxonomy for the latinate terms: pre-writing , arrangement, and style. The advancements in rhetorical theory in the past decade and a half are impressive; however, despite this growing insight into the writing process, many of us who teach composition still seem to disregard observations made centuries ago by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. We are speaking specifically of the inattention paid to the first stage of the tripartite writing process: invention. It is a fad currently to attend conferences in order to discuss heuristics and the invention process, but it seems that most of us fail to do anything about prewriting in the classroom or writing center. Although we were encouraged by Tom Nash's description of invention-oriented methods used in several writing centers ("Hamlet, Polonius and the Writing Center," Writing Center Journal , vol. I, No. 1, 80), we sensed that these experiments with pre-writing were probably the exception not the rule.

Muriel Harris suggests that writing laboratories have an "image problem":

Initially I considered composing my own essay in order to describe how peer tutoring in writing at New York University came about, the roles played by the peer tutor in the already established Writing Center, and the techniques I used to train the tutors. But then the tutors wrote their own essays on some of these topics. They said what I'd wanted to say and more. So together we chose three of their essays which we thought best represented our collective feelings, the approaches we shared, and above all, our common enthusiasms for peer tutoring.

Peer tutoring can be a viable part of the writing lab or the classroom in both high school and college. Ideally, once tutors are selected, they should be able to enroll in a course, but in reality most high schools and colleges do not have such a course. An alternative is to offer a workshop of several short sessions to prepare them for tutoring. Training tutors in skills will obviously vary with the types of tutoring they are expected to do and the services the writing lab provides. How students are acquainted with the resources and trained to teach composing skills are problems that English teachers or writing lab directors are easily able to handle. However, we, as teachers, may sometimes forget the obvious. If tutors have not had courses in education or psychology, for example, they may lack knowledge of some principles of learning and of strategies that would enhance their ability to tutor. Training tutors in areas other than cognitive skills becomes a prerequisite to a successful program.

Today's writing center director is surely an anomaly, a curious intruder into an academic drama. Like a character in Pirandello's famous play, the laboratory specialist is unsure of his role, insecure about his lines. His persona' s mask is Janus-faced, looking both to the aims of the professor and the student. In this respect, the writing center director is an intermediator, thrust into the agon between protagonist and antagonist only after the initial bloody scenes have been played. As a participant in this academic drama, I find it useful to give literary tags to the characters, borrowing from Shakespeare's best-known play.

Though most freshmen may not believe it, there is life after freshman comp -and even some writing to be done. Although the first mission of a new writing lab is usually to supplement or to be integrated into the freshman writing course, labs have begun to respond as well to the needs of writers throughout their years at college. Labs have and should expand to meet these needs because they are uniquely capable of doing so.