I can't do anything I want, if I can't write English. " Margarita's desire to improve lights her eyes and makes her soft Ecuadorian accent tremble with emphasis. This strong motivation, possessed by almost all the ESL students at George Mason, will help her achieve relative fluency in writing in a remarkably short time. But, like many of the other 100 of these students who visit George Mason's Writing Place each semester, Margarita is hindered by an impatience to move more quickly than she can through her composition courses. Above average, sometimes brilliant, students in their native countries, they discover that their writing of English -which they may have studied for years in school -keeps them from passing introductory courses. For the Writing Place staff, the task is as much to put this ' 'failure" in the perspective of reasonable expectations as it is to discover strategies for improving the writing. Of course, reasonable expectations vary with the individual, so that when a student declares, as Margarita will later in this session, "I must pass English 101 this semester," I try to learn as much as I can about his or he/ academic goals, as well as about course standing, before either encouraging or trying to mitigate the sense of urgency. Occasionally, a student is under a constraint -a government scholarship for two years of study in the United States, for example-which compels rapid advancement; in these cases, the staff member carefully maps out, with the student's teacher, a program of extra work in the Writing Place to help the student complete the course as efficiently as possible. The reason for Margarita's urgency is the more common: she feels that she must quickly prove her ability to succeed in the American university, and her difficulty in English 101 has given rise to self-doubt. For Margarita, her doubts as an ESL student are compounded by those she feels as a woman in her forties returning to college after a long absence.

ted anybody who had a

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.