Writing center people prefer to use words like "teaching" instead of "pedagogy"; "tutoring," not "individualized instructional session"; "what works," rather than "effective educative strategies." This simple diction is one feature of our linguistic practice we have celebrated across the writing center community. However, behind this facade of pragmatism, of action over theory, we have been actively involved in debates concerning the epistemologies to which we as a community should pledge our allegiance and on which we should build our instruction. We have been involved because, as James Berlin reminds us in Rhetoric and Reality, "every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known" (4). While the academy has argued vehemendy about ways of knowing, with factions taking stands under such banners as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, postmodernism, we too have been involved in much the same inquiry.

Despite the advent of computerized spelling checkers, being a poor speller is still asignificant burden for a writer. Spelling errors are stigmatizing, considered a mark of illiteracy both in academia and in business. Occasions for spelling errors are far more frequent than are opportunities for other errors, and misspellings arc more noticeable. Relatively few readers respond to comma splices or dangling participles, but virtually everyone reacts to "dosen't" or "stuped" or "thair." For the poor speller, writing, particularly in impromptu situations, is a gamble; spelling errors always threaten to sabotage the communication. Since spelling instruction is usually not part of the firstyear composition curriculum -even in a basic writing course, only some students will be poor spellers -assistance with spelling problems should become a regular part of a writing center program; it may be the only resource available to students who need help.

In an article entitled "Talking to the Boss," which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1988 Writing Center Journal , Diana George makes a valiant attempt to "mend the damaged path between the English department and the writing center." George rightly sees this damaged path as the result of poor communication between writing centers and English departments -of misunderstandings held by English departments as to what goes on in writing centers, how it goes on, and why. Her method of mending the damaged path is to talk: to tell our colleagues in English departments (and perhaps in colleges and universities at large) what we do. She talks well, isolating two basic inequities that she feels are the cause of the damaged path: inequities of purpose and inequities of staff. To mend the broken path, George implies, is to mend those inequities: first, it is essential that the "writing center's philosophy of composition . . . should reflect [the department's] philosophy of composition" -in other words, the philosophies of teaching writing held by the department should mirror or equal those of the writing center; second, it is essential that the staff of the writing center be perceived by the department and by the college or university at large as equal partners in the teaching of composition.

At best it's hard work, often it's very difficult, and -to a great number of high school students -it's "boring," "stupid," and "impossible."But wait.Look down in the writing room.It's a bird.It's a plane.It's Super WANDAH : HBJ Writer, Faster than a speeding ballpoint, more powerful than a typewriter, able to leap tall essays in a single class period, Super WANDAH helps students produce writing that is clear, precise, and fun to read, writing that is an example of truth, justice, and the American way.Well, perhaps I exaggerate a tad.Maybe WANDAH can't do it all, or even most.But it's possible that we've given her a cape she wasn't supposed to be wearing.Is her real name Clark Kent?Or has Kryptonite robbed WANDAH of all power.Let's go back to the beginning, which occurred not on some distant planet but in some sunny corner of UCLA.WANDAH began life as a rather innocuous writing program to assist incoming freshman with their writing skills.At the same time, the head of Logan High's English Department had completed a course with the Utah Writer's Project.With a missionary's zeal, she sought to bring the entire department into the waters of process writing.Soon we were saved as well.But that didn't stop our department head.Something was needed to help the work along, something that could assist our efforts in converting uninspired writers from the darkest corners of the eleventh and twelth grades into born-again thinkers and writers, capable of heavenly composition."Could not that something be a computer, Time's Man of the Year?" reasoned our department head, and quicker than you can say "floppy disk," Logan High had sixteen computers, four printers, and WANDAH.

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,

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.

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.

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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.