Writing in College Teaching several years ago, Richard Leahy pinpointed a frustration still shared by most writing centers: though the writing center seeks "to attract good writers ... on the majority of campuses it still predominantly serves weak writers, those who are struggling with their composition classes and competency exams, and those who have finished their requirements but still have problems" (45) . Our writing center at Salem State College is no exception to this pattern. In memos to the English department we talk about the center as a community of trained readers available to all students; we explicitly point out that "above average writers" can benefit from going to the center; we even remind

In recent years, compositionists in writing centers and in writing-acrossthe-curriculum and writing-in-the-disciplines

Given their knowledge of the workings of language, few writing center professionals would doubt that material history is always more complex than the discourse that strives to record it. And most would certainly recognize that historical discourse constructs the past at least as much as it records it. Despite this dilemma, writing center scholars recently have given increased attention to writing center history.

Most of us can recall the clients who got away, the ones who needed our help but left the writing center without getting it. Perhaps my own most glaring failure was Byron, a returning student whom I suspect suffered from a number of what we now call learning disabilities. I was a new graduate student when Byron first came to see me with a paper full of starts and stops, logical inconsistencies, and randomly chosen words. He asked if he could record our conversation, explaining that an accident had left him with an impaired short-term memory. The tape recorder sounded like a good idea. But as I commented about particular aspects of his paper, Byron frequently stopped the tape, rewound and replayed my earlier remarks. These unpredictable interruptions were unnerving and derailed my train of thought. I would leave out points I'd intended to mention and lose touch with insights I'd had about his essays. I probably should have seen our fragmented sessions together, which moved with the same jolting starts and stops as his prose, as a window into Byron's thinking and writing processes (and perhaps the key to solving his problems, assuming they could be solved). Instead, Byron's eccentric use of the tape recorder unsettled and frustrated me, as did his perhaps related difficulty with modulating his voice and keeping his balance (sometimes he would literally fall out of his chair). We worked for hours at a time, over most of two academic quarters, and made little detectable progress in his writing. I had no training in helping students cope with learning disabilities, much less with the effects of a severe brain injury. With good reason, I felt incapable of assisting Byron. And so he and I suffered together until one day, after plaintively wondering if he would ever get it,

Since the

At first glance, it might be difficult to find two writing programs that seem to work together more harmoniously than Writing Across the Curriculum and writing centers. WAC engenders more writing in more classes, and writing centers help students to improve their writing skills and produce, presumably, better papers. Administratively, the two programs are often seen as complementary if not conjoined. If more writing is going to be demanded of more students in more classes, then those students will need additional support services as they work to complete their assignments. And though there may, in some cases, be the money and motivation necessary to create intradepartmental tutorial services for the benefit of students within each major, most often the responsibility for writing assistance either falls on (or is specifically delegated to) the campus writing center This approach may appear to have significant merit and may, in fact, be looked on with a good deal of satisfaction by interested parties on all sides.

After years of writing, teaching, and overseeing a writing center, I have become more and more convinced of the importance of paying attention to how writers feel about their writing -the affective dimension -as well as what they think about it. Textbooks deal with writers' feelings pretty incidentally, if at all. The call to study the affective dimension has been made before (McLeod), and it has been studied (see, for instance, Brand), but nearly all the attention has gone to negative feelings. Not much has been written about positive feelings, about times when writers feel good about their writing -and what that has to do with the final product. In this essay I will consider what possibilities there might be for identifying and making use of positive feelings, especially in the writing center.

Nous mourrons de n 'etre pas assez ridicules .

It may have started for me that day in 1989, at the drugstore counter in Austin, Texas. I was there with my one-year-old sons and my three-year-old daughter. The twins were fussing and squirming in their stroller -one of them had an ear infection, and so we were at the drugstore picking up an antibiotic which I hoped would bring more restful nights to all of us. My daughter, her attention drawn to every colorful display near the counter where we stood, was struggling to free her hand from my grasp. One-handed, I attempted to fill out the insurance form that accompanied the prescription. The pharmacist, observing my difficulty, sympathetically offered to help me with what I had learned to consider the "literacy task" of filling out the form. She took the pen and began reading the questions to me. Name? Address? Home phone number? Work number? At this last question she stopped to survey the four of us. I was pushing the stroller back and forth in a rocking motion, attempting to calm the twins whose wails were beginning to attract the notice of strangers. The pharmacist smiled at me in a knowing and sympathetic way. "I guess that's kind of a silly question, isn't it? With all those children, surely you don't have time to work too!" But in fact I was "working." What the pharmacist didn't realize was that mothering was only, as Arlie Hochschild would say, the "second shift" of my work day.

With the explosive growth of writing across the curriculum programs, many institutions are investing in classroom tutoring programs, often called curriculum-based programs to distinguish them from tutoring based in a campus writing center. Curriculum-based tutoring includes attaching tutors to students in courses across the disciplines; assigning tutors to teach adjunct writing workshops; or, in the case of the project I will describe, assigning writing center tutors to work directly with instructors in composition courses.2

Two recent books deal directly with the challenges of global change and the increasing frequency of intercultural encounters in our institutions and in our daily lives. Listeningto the World zn Intercultural Competence address powerful changes occurring in the academic contexts we inhabit; these books can assist us as we teach, direct writing centers, and tutor an increasingly multicultural clientele. Both books intermingle theory with practice and address similar diversity issues; however, the writers' backgrounds and specialties as well as their audiences and primary purposes are dissimilar. These differences make the books nice companion pieces for training graduate and advanced undergraduate writing center tutors and, I would argue, required reading for writing center directors.

I can remember vividly the first time I saw the f-word scrawled on some sidewalk near my grade school. I asked about ten people what it meant until someone told me. Something died that day, and something was born: the idea that words scrawled in public spaces could shock you. Somehow the anonymity of the writers made such acts exciting, and the inscriptions became as concrete to me as the surface of the sidewalk. In junior high, the practice became more sophisticated. I remember the mysterious "slam books" in which anonymous students wrote malicious remarks about all the stuck-ups and hoods -"Fat Mark loves himself," and "Debbie wears blue panties," et cetera, et cetera. In short, for my generation carving our names, scribbling our curses, our pithy poetry, and our political anti/festos on the blackboards of the classroom became a rite of passage, whether you lived in a ghetto or a conventional middle-class suburban neighborhood like I did.

Despite all the time and energy invested in tutor training programs, some tutors seem to have a hard time letting go of ineffective tutoring practices or adapting to particular writing center policies. For instance, Victoria and Pete both work at a

And if we are not properly understood, is it easier to expect our audience to change or is it easier to change ourselves to be more understandable? Is it more effective to complain about being victims or to take positive action to improve our lot? (Simpson 2) At a staff meeting held shortly after beginning operations in the fall of 1 992, the director of our writing center asked the staff to list and then discuss the values and practices we associated with the terms tutor and consultant} Since she had, from the beginning, been using consultant rather than tutor to describe the work done by our undergraduate staff, it seemed to me like a loaded question: were we "with the program" as she envisioned it or not? To me, consultantv/zs pretentious, more appropriate in the business world than in educational settings, and certainly I associated it with well-paid work. At that time, however, we depended on two English education courses to provide us with about sixty unpaid students that we needed to staff the center. Tutor , on the other hand, struck me as a respectable term, rich with meaning, history, and educational significance, despite its obvious associations with prescriptive learning. As I listened to my colleagues convey their associations with the terms, an uneasy feeling swept over me: they were decidedly with the program in a way I was not. Nevertheless, with what I like to think of as a certain amount of courage, when it was my turn to reveal my position, I voiced my reservations about consultant and my liking for tutor. After all, I had been a tutor, had willingly sought out students to tutor, and had done well by them and they by me. To denigrate or reject the term was for me to disparage a part of my past that I remembered fondly.

This past year saw the publication of two new books devoted specifically to the work of writing centers, and, as Jeanette Harris pointed out in these pages in 1992, book-length publications about writing centers are still rare enough that each "must bear the weight of great expectation and close scrutiny" (205). Writing Centers in Context : Twelve Case Studies , edited by Joyce A. Kinkead and Jeanette G. Harris, consists of extended descriptions of twelve different writing centers. These profiles offer clear, vivid descriptions of each program's history, purpose, philosophy, services, staffing, training, and administration. Thus the book emphasizes the big picture, the macro-level of writing centers. As its title promises, The Dynamics of the Writing Conference: Social and Cognitive Interaction^ edited by Thomas Flynn and Mary King, examines the much more intimate setting of writing center conferences, focusing on individual instruction and the interaction between a teacher and a student. As will become clear, these books are so different that they need to be considered separately in order to understand and evaluate

Published on 01/01/94

Published on 01/01/94

Recent scholarship wrestles with the issue of creating a setting within centers that encourages genuine collaboration between those who seek advice (or input) and those who give it. Some scholarship suggests that too often the people who fund, administer, and use centers see the facilities as primarily remedial. Among problems, this attitude promotes the us-and-them mentality that Richard Leahy cautions against (45) • Lex Runciman, too, blames misconceptions about the meaning of tutor and tutoring for assumptions made by students, administrators, and tutors themselves that writing centers serve only bad (Defining 28) and are little more than emergency rooms for critically ill grammar. Both scholars urge us to create an environment which everyone is free to develop his or her own best processes (Leahy 45), where good writers go order to make enlightened decisions about context, organization, idea development, tone, and the (Runciman, Defining 33). To create such a place, Leahy urges us to foster a community of people who love and like to share their with each other (45). As a logical first step, Runciman suggests we abandon terms that carry remedial connotations (e.g. tutor a.nd tutoring and adopt terms that more accurately describe who we are and what we do. Although I agree that we need to encourage an enlightened, collaborative environment in centers, I believe we can achieve this goal (whether or not we rename ourselves and our work) through the intelligent and humane use of humor.

In The Idea of a Writing Center, Stephen M. North takes task his colleagues in university English departments for their unenlightened views: For them, a writing center is illiteracy what a cross between Lourdes and a hospice would be serious illness...(435). In the nineties when multiculturalism is all the rage and American universities attract larger and larger numbers of international students. North and his kind may need take on a different Goliath. Now that we've overcome the idea of writing centers as the proofreading-shop [s]-in-the basement (North 444), we may need battle the idea of writing centers as sentence-scrubbers-for-foreignstudents as my colleague Ray Smith says. But if the writing center does not exist merely to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum (North 440), how is it ever become a place where non-native writers can receive remediation and guidance? What changes will have be made in the philosophy of the writing center and in the job descriptions of tutors? Anyone who has worked in a college writing center for any length of time will know the plight of international students who have demonstrated some level of English proficiency by achieving a requisite score on a discrete-item grammar and vocabulary test such as the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). However, scores (enough get in the door) do not always translate into satisfactory academic writing (enough leave with a diploma in hand). As undergraduates, these students join

It is a pleasant weekday morning, and you are on your way to your office in the writing center. But as you approach the main entrance of the center, you encounter crowds of students congregated in the hallway, all of them attempting to get in. There is a sense of nervous anxiety, even desperation in the air, and students are talking about what number they are. Somehow, you manage to push past the group, and as you enter the writing center, you encounter another crowd of students, equally distraught, clustered around the front desk, some begging and pleading, others looking grim. The phone is ringing off the hook, every available seat is taken, tutors' eyes are glazed, and the receptionist looks as if she is about to freak out. Between phone calls, she manages to mumble that this week the writing center has turned away over one hundred students a day. This is the scene which occurred in the writing center during the midpoint and final weeks of the Fall 1990 semester at the University of Southern California, when the Freshman Writing Program instituted a system of portfolio grading in place of a holistically scored departmental examination. It is a scene which called attention not only to the effect of portfolio grading on the writing center but also to several pedagogical and ethical issues associated with writing center assistance. Before I discuss these issues, however, I would like to establish that, despite the chaotic scene I described, our program is quite enthusiastic about portfolio evaluation, has

Published on 01/01/93

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing-center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise. In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others. In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4). Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).

People who work in writing centers often fall prey to professional insecurity. We feel misunderstood and unappreciated in our own departments (if we even have department) and in the larger academy. Our marginal status makes us feel exploited by those with more institutional power and vulnerable in times of retrenchment. Our insecurity has led, as Thomas Hemmeter observes, to ongoing attempts at self-definition. Since no one else recognizes or understands us, we feel the need to continually announce and invent ourselves. And we do so, says Hemmeter, through "a discourse articulated in dualities," the fundamental one being a "contrast of writing center instruction to classroom instruction" (37). To give ourselves a distinctive identity, we oppose ourselves to something with which everyone is familiar: the classroom.

Talk is central to what we do as writers and as humans. It is the collaborative activity that underlies most, if not all, individual acts of composing. Because of this, the work tutors do every day-talking about writing with writers-is valuable in uncountable ways. Writers compose through inner speech while walking, by speaking aloud at the word processor, when discussing a work-in-progress and drinking coffee with friends, or as they share ideas during conferences in writing centers and classrooms. But this talk is often suppressed, forgotten, or left out of the dominant story of learning. I plan to offer a

The education of composition teachers, tutors, and researchers about culturally influenced rhetorical differences in writing, or contrastive rhetoric, is usually limited, often consisting of brief explanations of Robert Kaplan's 1966 diagrams purporting to represent the rhetorics of five cultural traditions: Oriental, English, Semitic, Russian, and Romance. Frequently reprinted in teacher-training sources, the diagrams are only briefly and unproblematically explained in his own controversial terms (e.g., "the Oriental writer" and "Oriental rhetoric") as if they depicted the Truth about five complex rhetorical traditions. For example, the five drawings discussed in Kaplan's vocabulary appear in a seven-page section entitled "Cultural Differences" in Muriel Harris' Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference, the guidebook for many writing center tutor-training programs. These models have been assumed factual and further disseminated at numerous presentation at writing center conferences (Xia Wang and Liu Yue; James Robinson, et al.). The increasing number of writing center publications and conference sessions on English-as-a-Second-Language issues such as contrastive rhetoric reflects the increasing number of international students using and working in writing centers. It is important that international students be approached by tutors with a stance that acknowledges the complexities of the rhetorics of different languages and cultures.

Published on 01/01/93

Try, if you will, to imagine yourself around a campfire late on a dark night. You are with a group of English literature teachers, and they begin swapping horror stories about their students, some true, others probably

During the past fifteen years, I have also worked closely with writing centers, watching them evolve from places which emphasize skills and drills to places which provide sophisticated and supportive counseling about the range of writing processes.While my education is

Published on 01/01/92

"When our writing lab became a center mean their centers have matured, "come of age" in Muriel Harr Harris; Addison and Wilson). I can't help being a little dist belitding of lab and extolling of centers the better word, when I bland and meaningless the word "center" has become on so campuses. At Boise State University, I can count twenty "cen even looking in the directory, from the Quick Copy Center campus to the Outdoor Rental Center at the other. IVe rece

In our teaching and research in writing centers and classrooms, we need to identify and rhetorically analyze "collaboration" in its multiple forms. When we overuse this catch-all term to mean any kind of mutual help or working together, we not only demonstrate what Frederick Erickson calls our current "crush on collaboration" (43 1 ), but we also confuse people inside and outside the profession. When "collaboration" is bantered about in education, business, and politics, it is unabashedly unmodified, unclassified, demonstrating by its nakedness that it serves too many purposes and has too many referents, not to mention the historical ones such as Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling who "collaborated" with the enemy. As Andrea Lunsford notes, ". . . collaboration is hardly a monolith. Instead, it comes in a dizzying variety of modes about which we know almost nothing" (7).

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.