What do writers do with the feedback they receive? While the answer will vary depending on the writer’s experience and the rhetorical situation, understanding what writers do can provide important information for course redesign and professional development of tutors and instructors. In this first of two manuscripts, the authors examine how first-semester, first-year writing students use responses provided via asynchronous online tutoring (AOT) in revising their assignments. Our primary research question was: What was happening in—and after—those tutorials? We addressed this question by a process of narrowing and refining of data analysis toward increasingly precise inferences as we progressed from automated to coded analysis, which culminated in examining the drafts submitted for tutoring, tutor feedback, and the subsequent assignments submitted for evaluation in the students’ FYW courses. In parallel, we describe the writing analytics–informed methods used to do so in hopes that others will be compelled to replicate or extend this work in their own contexts. We found that students made corresponding revisions at both macro and microstructural levels when provided with directive or declarative feedback, and they made few revisions when tutors provided open-ended questions.

Especially in the wake of the recent pandemic, asynchronous consulting has become increasingly central to writing center work. Yet writing center scholarship has little attended to the significant impact writer input can have on asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges. Drawing on asynchronous consultation data collected before and after our 2019 redesign of our writing center’s asynchronous system, this comparative study examines the specific effect of the writer appointment form on the nature of both writers’ requests for feedback (RFFs) and consultants’ resulting comments. Our findings suggest that differently designed appointments forms can scaffold significantly different kinds of asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges, especially visible in the different emphases writers and consultants put on issues of correctness, clarity, organization, and the writer’s rhetorical situation. We argue that, particularly in the case of asynchronous consulting—which can easily devolve to a “fix-it” model of consulting—it is important for writing center administrators to design asynchronous platforms that encourage both writers and consultants to more explicitly consider how the specific rhetorical features of a writing task can shape revising goals.

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).While these aims of collaborative learning are ones I enthusiastically support, I find myself resisting jumping on the "collaboration bandwagon" (Lunsford 4) if by collaboration we mean only and always peer-group writing and response or conversation with another person.Peer groups can produce discussion, negotiation,

iL Community Identification at the IWCA/NCPTW by Melissa lanetta Here are the ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B , A is "substantially one" with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time, he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.

Our heritage] stretches back... to Athens, where in a bus y marketplace a tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers , no fees charged , offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end. -Stephen North, "The Idea of a Writing Center" Recent explorations of writing center research encapsulate the often -conflicting professional demands we face as administrators. On the one hand, we acknowledge the need for research to improve our understanding of the past narratives, present effects and future possibilities of writing center work. On the other hand, our individual identifications and disciplinary ethos often rely on the notion of a writing center director whose priorities include, as Harvey Kail writes, "teaching, service, service, service, and then research-on our service" (28). Added to this already-overburdened schedule is the privileging of place in writing center studies; if each center is uniquely shaped by its context, as the common argument goes, what kinds of research can speak across these myriad locations, moving beyond what Jeanette Harris has termed the "this -is -what -we -do -at -my-writing-center" genre? ("Review" 663). In other words, both our individual professional lives and the scholarship of our field are marked by our attempts to reconcile our identification as a highly communal professional group with our allegiance to the primacy of individual context.

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).

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.