Writing center tutors know that improving writing skills requires sustained effort over a long period of time. They also know that motivation - the drive to actively invest in sustained effort toward a goal- is essential for writing improvement. However, a tutor may not work with the same student more than once, so tutorials often need to focus on what can be done in a single 30- to 60-minute conference. Further, although tutors are likely to attempt to motivate students to invest time and effort in improving their writing, when writers leave the writing center, tutors' influence might end with the conference. Therefore, tutors must work to develop and maintain students' motivation to participate actively during the brief time they are collaborating in writing center conferences.

I showed up for work on my first day of work and they didn 't even have an office for me. The writing center was just an empty classroom filled with just dirt and boxes and ladybugs. Ladybugs, which is actually an omen of good fortune , which is kind of interesting. And so I sat down at a computer I found in the library and I started typing and I typed a philosophy

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In my experience as a writing consultant, the writing center atmosphere Denny describes, and the collaboration it cultivates, results in a close community of consultants, staff, and students.Within this community, consultants and students alike collaborate and share their diverse knowledge, personalities, and words with each other, yet each individual student is looking for something a little different when she comes to us, and each has a different way of learning.This belief in the power of individuals and one-on-one learning suggests the importance of flexibility within collaboration.With a student re-organizing her paper, I might have her draw me a flow chart to visualize her ideas, or I might demonstrate how to do a reverse outline.During brainstorming sessions, I might write down the student's stream of consciousness responses to my questions, or we might search for Youtube videos related to her topic.We can read aloud, or I can watch as a student writes.The strategies are endless,

Writing centers offer support and feedback to student writers who bring in specific concerns about papers and writing. The writing center of our home institution offers walk-in sessions with peer tutors who have taken an extensive preparatory course, which, according to the official course description, helps the tutor to become a “successful reader, listener and responder in peer-tutoring situations.” This training emphasizes our center’s goal of facilitating students’ long-term development as writers. Therefore, tutors in our center are trained to shift the impetus and focus of the session to the writer—over issues just focused on the paper—in order to enhance the writer’s control over his/her own writing processes and writing. The writing center where we were trained and currently work thus emphasizes the model of non-directive, writer-based peer tutoring in which, as Jeff Brooks puts it, tutors “make the student the What a Writer Wants: Assessing Fulfillment of Student Goals in Writing Center Tutoring Sessions

Because writing centers have long been viewed as fix-it shops, mentioning the word "grammar" can spark a heated debate over the writing center's role. Stephen North faulted the English department for perpetuating this misconception. Richard Leahy blamed the writing center's history and "peculiar status" for confusing faculty and students alike (43). Elizabeth Boquet explored tensions caused by shifts between the writing center's identity as both method and space (465). All are valid points, but there is a greater issue affecting both academic writing and the writing center-grammar

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In fleeting "spare" moments, she pens "Married on a Monday -7 Vi Years Later -

research, he has interests in writing pedagogy with a focus on technology's fundamental role in cultivating ethos and precipitating varied revision processes. This is a story of a failed study. In 2007, we set out to demonstrate that Kurzweil 3000, an adaptive text-to-speech software program, would help any student revise with its read-aloud function and numerous writing tools. During the course of the study, we confronted our misconceptions about students' technology use and realized

In its 2011 report, the CCCC Committee on Best Practice in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) states that it "takes no position on the oft-asked question of whether OWI should be used and practiced in postsecondary settings because it accepts the reality that currently OWI is used and practiced in such settings" (Hewett et al. 2). The committee claims that teachers and administrators, including those in writing centers, "typically are simply migrating traditional faceto-face writing pedagogies to the online setting-both fully online and hybrid. Theory and practice specific to OWI has yet to be fully developed" (7). Hewets recent book on OWI echoes these concerns, and she claims that without a theory of OWI, it is "disturbingly easy" to assume that face-to-face pedagogy is better than computer-mediated instruction (i Online 32).

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all the organizing committee for inviting Lisa and me to participate in the 2010 IWCA-NCPTW Conference here in Baltimore.Lisa was, unfortunately, unable to be with us today, but this talk is very much a collaborative effort, one that grows out of a larger project which we have just completed.

in Ecuador, she wrote about that cross-cultural experience in an essay called "Falsos Amigos, Primos Hermanos, and Humitas con Caf,"

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such activity, that is, "to legitimate writing center work through the production of scholarship and research, to understand and improve writing center practice, and to prove the writing center's value to local institutions" (Gillam 6

But theorizing also helps me break through frustration and inarticulateness and turn the chip on my shoulder into an instrument of analysis.

since 1987, believes in the power of narrative, the wisdom of peer tutors, and the value of a well-placed hug. He also knows

Published on 01/01/11