In his award-winning book, Around the Texts of Writing Centers, R. Mark Hall (2017) asserts the importance of everyday writing center texts, claiming that these documents “both enact and forward writing center scholarship” (p. 3). It is Hall’s position that such “everyday” documents are essential to understanding the work of writing centers, but that their very ubiquity leads writing center scholars and administrators to ignore them or take their functions for granted. In this study, I take up Hall’s call for more scholarly attention to everyday writing center texts through a thematic rhetorical analysis of nine writing center employee handbooks. I identify three primary rhetorical functions of the genre: orienting (new) tutors to the center, orienting (new) tutors to the work, and establishing expectations. My analysis reveals that although these handbooks are locally specific, they perform several common and important purposes for writing centers and warrant further scholarly examination.

This article explores hospitality as a theoretical framework for valuing emotional engagement and rhetorical listening in writing center consultations, challenging traditional views that prioritize rationality and detachment. Anchored in a university writing center, the study investigates how writing tutors engage with writers, adopting hospitality as a core principle. Semi-structured postconsultation interviews and a focus group allowed tutors to reflect collaboratively on their application of the hospitality framework. Thematic analysis with in vivo coding ensured participants’ voices remained central to the findings. By examining the lived experiences of tutors, the study highlights the dynamic relationship between emotional and rational responses in hospitable tutoring. The results demonstrate the transformative potential of hospitality-based pedagogy in fostering healthier writing relationships, improving writer retention, and enhancing tutors’ academic and emotional skills. The article advocates for the criticality of emotional validation and rhetorical listening as central tenets of effective and hospitable tutoring.

For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, generative AI (GenAI) offers meaningful support for writing in English, while also introducing a new set of challenges. Supporting EAL students in developing AI literacy is crucial to their growth as confident, adaptable writers, and writing center tutors are uniquely positioned to facilitate this development. This case study explores the experiences of undergraduate Brazilian international students at a small liberal arts college who received writing feedback from both peer writing center tutors and ChatGPT. Findings indicate that students valued the human connection, contextual understanding, and rhetorical support offered by peer tutors, while turning to ChatGPT for immediate, nonjudgmental assistance, particularly in navigating multilingual challenges. The study offers insight into how peer writing tutors can thoughtfully leverage GenAI to support multilingual writers.

This article argues for a shift in writing center pedagogy toward prioritizing transnational writing assets as the basis of our work with international multilingual writers specifically and every writer we encounter generally. While writing center scholarship has paid attention to the influences of language, cultural and rhetorical differences among native and non-native English speakers/ tutors in the writing center, much of this discussion has taken the “comparative” route rather than a “trans-d” (transnational) route with potentials to transform our engagements with scholars, students, and writers from other parts of the world. This IRB-approved research reveals that international multilingual writers possess unique knowledge of how writing works, influenced by their linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical competencies. These competencies function as transnational writing assets that participants willingly share with their writing consultants, providing an environment that encourages open dialogue about such transnational writing assets and that positions students as valuable contributors of knowledge about writing. The study concludes with recommendations that advance transnational writing dispositions as a transformative pedagogical approach in writing center work to enrich our interactions with writers from different parts of the world.

A large body of literature on writing center pedagogy suggests that serving multilingual student writers requires approaches different from those developed for native English-speaking students, a difference that may pose unique challenges to tutors. To identify and address these challenges, we elicited tutors’ perspectives on their work with multilingual writers as well as examined how these perspectives change as tutors gain experience and in response to revisions in a training curriculum. Specifically, we analyzed survey responses provided by two consecutive tutor cohorts at three points in their first semester working at the writing center. The overriding theme to emerge from participants’ responses was that working with multilingual writers often meant working at the sentence level to help them expand their linguistic and rhetorical choices, but this tutoring was sometimes challenging. The first tutor cohort even described sentence-level tutoring as transgressive, as they struggled to distinguish it from fixing or editing writers’ prose. In contrast, the second cohort, who went through a revised curriculum, treated sentence-level tutoring as acceptable practice, theorized it in richer ways, and expressed themselves as better prepared to support multilingual writers. In addition to describing revisions to the curriculum, this study also provides pedagogical implications for tutor educators.

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.

A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s major limitations; the invitational model demands significant emotional and interpersonal labor, especially on the part of the initiator, which is only appropriate and productive in certain contexts. When combined with self-reflection, articulated positionality, and study of systems of oppression, writing centers can help facilitate antiracist community building by deploying their one-with- one pedagogical practices to call in accomplices beyond the writing center.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is a growing field of study that provides for holistic understandings of written texts, spoken discourse, rhetorical strategies, and the people who use them. Organized as a discussion of the topics, methods, and their potential applications for writing center research, this essay reviews three edited collections, Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review by Charlotte Taylor and Anne Marchi (Routledge, 2018); The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis by Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy (Routledge, 2020); and Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis by Camilla Vásquez (Bloomsbury, 2022). Each introduces a range of practices, insights, and concerns for combining corpus and discourse analysis, which can be useful for developing writing center research, consultant training, and administrative outcomes.

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), we need to reimagine our workplace identities as separate from the spaces in which labor takes place.

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.

“Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond” blends narrative, mixed methods research, and rhetorical analysis to make a case for the possibilities inherent in homegrown wellness practices that are “communal, political, and rooted in defiance of white supremacy.”

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

This essay examines the learning processes of writing center professionals through the lens of “networks of enterprise” (Wallace & Gruber, 1989), which reflects on the dynamic processes through which creative people, like writing center professionals (WCPs), bring together the diverse and complex tasks undertaken in their everyday work into a cohesive and satisfying career. While there is substantial turnover in the profession, some WCPs stay in writing center positions for decades. Drawing on information gathered through surveys and interviews with ten long-term WCPs (with an average of 28 years of experience), as well as reflecting on his own career, the author attempts to discern what long-term learning WCPs take away from work. This piece shares participants’ responses to the following questions: (1) What do writing center professionals learn from the diversity of their duties and long-term exposure to the ideas of writers from a multitude of disciplines? (2) Are the lessons, processes, or theories, WCPs encounter in the center of use in their own scholarly, administrative, or creative pursuits? (3) To what degree does such learning make WCPs better at their jobs and motivate them to spend years or even an entire career in the writing center? Though not unanimous, the participants’ answers indicate that WCPs do indeed gain and apply to their work —including their own creative and academic writing projects — a deep, broad, and ever-growing network of knowledge gained from tutoring, training tutors, teaching, and performing the many practical, rhetorical, political, and administrative tasks required in these positions. Most, though not all participants, cited the building of such knowledge as a key motivation for spending their career in or around writing centers.

With the large numbers of international students on campuses across the United States seeking help from writing centers, more research is needed on how second language writing skills develop over time. Expanding our previous studies of second language writing, we wanted to learn more about what international students think about the development of their ability to write in English and the role of the writing center in it. To that end, we designed a survey that asked participants about different features of their writing and how these had changed since starting to write at the college level. The results reveal that participants perceived their overall English-writing development positively, and they reported their rhetorical and linguistic areas as almost equal in development. We also found that participants who used our writing center perceived both rhetorical and linguistic features to be more improved than did participants who had not used the writing center. The rhetorical features participants reported as the least improved involve communicating with readers, while the linguistic features they saw as the least developed include word

First-generation college students (FGCS) are a growing student population in the United States. Because of the barriers they face, these students are more likely to drop out or fall behind than are their multigenerational peers. This article presents the results of a case study on FGCS and their use of the writing center conducted at a midsized, southeastern, public university. The study analyzed the WCOnline appointment and consultation report forms of self-identified FGCS and multigeneration college students (MGCS) who used the writing center in order to learn more about the needs, perceptions, and experiences of FGCS as writers. Results indicate FGCS' appointments cover more ground, use more directive approaches, are more likely to include negative language and emotional affect, and focus on global concerns and genre/rhetorical knowledge at more frequent rates than do MGCS' appointments. Based on results, recommendations for improving writing support for FGCS and further research are made.

Listening is often considered essential to the tutoring of writing; however, little attention has been devoted to the study of listening in writing center scholarship. This study takes up the question of how the field defines effective listening and how the field conceptualizes listening as a practice for the tutoring of writing. Based on a qualitative content analysis of eight writing center tutor guidebooks, the study's findings show that although listening is typically considered an effective strategy in addressing interpersonal aspects and writing concerns in the writing conference, it is not well defined in the field. Ultimately, the article suggests that the field may benefit from attention to rhetorical listening as a way to broaden how we define not only effective listening but also roles for tutoring and learning.

Being an African American woman for almost 40 years, a secondary education teacher for three years, and a three-time college student, I am well versed in the micro aggressions that plague students in education, which is why I feel it's important to always be aware of new information meant to combat the systems of oppression found in learning environments. Through my research, I realize what is needed is a way to help individuals see and acknowledge discriminatory practices in the educational field, especially when it comes to writing and the writing process. Culture, nationality, beliefs, biases, and stereotypes are not like layers of clothing that one can check at the door and pick up later. We have all been exposed to the unfair dynamics that form the race relations in society, and we carry those understandings with us everywhere we go, even if we are not completely aware of them. However, awakening this awareness is prevalent to promote a beneficial learning environment for students both in the classroom and in the writing center.

Motivated by increasing international student writing center use to learn more about second language writing development and its assessment, we conducted a case study of an undergraduate writer who submitted drafts to online tutoring over two years. Synthesizing the perspectives and methods of Applied Linguistics with those of First-Language Composition, we assessed the writer's short-and long-term progress in the rhetorical, linguistic, and writing process components of her writing development. We found linguistic improvement in accuracy, especially short-term between drafts and revisions more so than over time, but only modest long-term improvement in both rhetorical and other linguistic components. We attributed these results to the writer's expedient writing process and her narrow conceptions of writing development and of her tutors' role in it. These expedient processes and narrow concep-

Examining 200 word choice errors from Chinese students' drafts submitted to a writing center's online asynchronous tutoring program, the present study demonstrates that second language writers need help with word choice. Word choice problems, a natural part of second language learning, can negatively affect rhetorical effectiveness and readers' comprehension and evaluation. The study showed that 11% of online tutors' marginal comments related to word choice problems, among which 18% were due to translation. (Other error types were Wrong Context, Synform, Idiomaticity, Precision, and Register.) Direct corrections were the most common type of tutor comments -35%. (Other comment types were Explanation, Options, and Questions.) These numbers show that word choice errors are indeed critical, that even experienced writers rely on their first language, and tutors need more knowledge about word choice issues and how to provide instruction and feedback on them.

These researchers examine how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. They analyze the 690 questions generated in these conferences: 81% (562) from tutors and 19% (128) from students. Using a coding scheme developed from prior research on questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, they categorized tutors’ and students’ questions. The researchers found that questions in writing center conferences serve a number of instructional and conversational functions. Questions allow tutors and students to fill in their knowledge deficits and check each other’s understanding. They also allow tutors (and occasionally students) to facilitate the dialogue of writing center conferences and attend to students’ engagement. In addition, tutors use questions to help students clarify what they want to say, identify problems with what they have written, and brainstorm. Based on this analysis, the authors make some recommendations for tutor training. 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 37 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 38 Introduction To resist the role of teacher-surrogate in favor of the role of helpful peer or collaborator, to get students to do the talking, and generally to achieve a student-centered focus, tutors have been advised to use questions as primary tutoring strategies in writing center conferences (Brooks; Harris). In other words, tutors are supposed to use questions to indirectly guide students to improving their writing. In these oftenidealistic conceptions of writing center conferences, questions are “real,” genuinely reflecting an interest in who the students are and what they want to say rather than leading students to a particular point of view. Moreover, students’ satisfaction with writing center conferences has been connected to their perceptions of having their questions answered (Thompson, Whyte, Shannon, Muse, Miller, Chappell, & Whigham; Thonus, “Tutor and Student Assessments”). Tutors are supposed to encourage students to ask questions freely, and it is assumed that students will ask more questions in writing center conferences than in the classroom (Harris). However, beyond encouraging students to talk and beyond directing tutors toward students’ areas of confusion, questions are important prompts for learning and for maintaining students’ engagement in writing center conferences. Research about question asking and answering in the classroom has typically focused on how teachers can pose questions to enhance critical thinking for students. This research has shown that the dialogic Socratic method, with its back-and-forth questions and answers, is a more effective teaching strategy than didactic teacher talk (Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn; see also Kintsch; Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Today questioning is one of the most frequently used classroom teaching techniques, with elementary and high school teachers asking as many as 300 to 400 questions per day (Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Research suggests that if used effectively either in the classroom or in one-to-one tutorials, questions can enhance students’ learning in at least three ways. First, as shown in Socrates’s questioning of his student about the concept of justice, questions can direct students in their efforts to “construct and reconstruct knowledge and understanding” (Smith & Higgins 486). By discussing what they are thinking with a more expert tutor or teacher, students engage in self-explanation, a process shown to deepen their understanding (Chi; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser; Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher; Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn). Second, questions can enhance students’ motivation, stimulate curiosity, and encourage active participation in learning (Lustick; Smith & Higgins). 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 38 3/10/14 2:52 PM The Writing Center Journal 33.2 | Fall/Winter 2014 39 Third, teachers’ and tutors’ questions may become models for selfquestioning, important for students in regulating their own learning processes. Further, in both the classroom and in tutorials such as writing center conferences, learning typically occurs within a conversational context, and along with stimulating understanding, questions are vital linguistic components of an educational conversation. Besides helping tutors identify what students do not know, questions allow tutors to understand students’ goals for coming to the writing center and to politely facilitate the flow of the tutorial conversation. We will consider all of these types of questions in this article. We examined how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. In these eleven conferences, we found a total of 690 questions, mostly asked by tutors but some asked by students as well. Incorporating research about questions in classroom teaching, we adapted a scheme for analyzing questions in tutorials that was developed by the psychologist and linguist Arthur C. Graesser and his associates. This scheme has been used to analyze questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, with a range of students from elementary school to college (Golding, Graesser, & Millis; Graesser, Baggett, & Williams; Graesser, Bowers, Hacker, & Person; Graesser & Franklin; Graesser & McMahen; Graesser & Olde; Graesser & Person; Graesser, Person, & Huber; Graesser, Person, & Magliano; Graesser, Roberts, & Hackett-Renner; Person, Graesser, Magliano, & Kreuz). Through our analysis, we show how questions can function in writing center conferences so that we and our tutors can understand the potential impact of questions on students’ learning and, subsequently, pose questions more consciously. Previous research about questions in writing center conferences has focused on what questions reveal about tutors’ roles and control over conferences. For example, Kevin M. Davis, Nancy Hayward, Kathleen R. Hunter, & David Wallace analyzed four types of “conversational moves” (47) teachers use in classroom discourse—structuring the interaction, soliciting responses, responding, and reacting—to determine the extent to which tutors took on teacher roles. According to Davis, Hayward, Hunter, & Wallace, tutors are usually in control of conferences, but sometimes they do assume less teacher-like and more conversant-like roles (see also Willa Wolcott’s “Talking It Over: A Qualitative Study of Writing Center Conferencing”). Susan R. Blau, John Hall, & Tracy Strauss considered the nature of the collaboration that occurs in writing center conferences by analyzing “three recurring rhetorical strategies” (22) relating to tutors’ directiveness—questioning, echoing, and using qualifiers. They found that in conferences considered satisfactory, tutors 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 39 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 40 demonstrated “informed flexibility” (38) in the strategies they used. Other studies have evaluated tutors’ use of mitigated and unmitigated interrogatives (Thonus, “Dominance in Academic Writing Tutorials”), “question–answer interrogation sequences” (Thonus, “What Are the Differences” 231), and leading versus open questions (Severino). A few studies have included questions in analyzing tutors’ politeness strategies (Bell & Youmans) and self-presentation (Murphy). These studies of writing center conferences tend to analyze questions as signals of assumed role and that role’s concomitant right to control the discourse as opposed to examining all the ways questions can function—including but not restricted to the ways they help construct role and maintain control. We analyzed questions to determine the extent to which experienced tutors ask questions that push students’ thinking, check their understanding, facilitate conversation, and model the types of questions students should ask of themselves in order to assess and develop their own writing. Simultaneously, we speculated on the relationships between questioning and students’ and tutors’ roles. After delineating the question types we found, we examined question-answer patterns according to initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) instructional dialogue (Mehan), a classroom discourse pattern largely unexamined in writing center research (for an exception, see Porter). We examined writing center variations on the IRE pattern, showing how experienced tutors used different types of leading and scaffolding questions in tandem with common-ground questions in a cycle of promoting students’ thinking and engagement and of checking students’ comprehension.

Tiffany Rousculp's Rhetoric of Respect: Recogniz ing Change at a Community Writing Center (2014) is an important book for writing center studies.Not only does Rousculp draw our attention to widely-growing though seldom-recognized community writing centers, but she also helps us see the positioning involved in making these centers sites of social change.This positioning she calls a "rhetoric of respect," or "a different type of relationship, one that is grounded in perception of worth, in esteem for another-as well as for the self" (pp.24-25).Using ecocomposition theory to recognize change, Rousculp contributes to a deeper understanding of micro-changes that emerge and are sustained over time through conditions of flexibility, self-awareness, uncertainty, failure, collaboration, and relationship.These conditions characterize many campus and community writing centers and can be cultivated to greater degrees .when we recognize their purposeful impact for our everyday, local work.Through metaphors of ecocompositionorganism, environment, relationship, place, web-Rousculp identifies and shows the importance of attending to moments of transformation for

Her current research interests are in the areas of the effectiveness of writing center rhetoric and the implications of individualized instruction as a defining writing center principle.

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

research interests include disability rhetoric and the role of exigency in the teaching of writing. Her dissertation explores how information about students' beliefs

Rhetoric and composition, as a new academic field

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

Discusses the importance of listening as a rhetorical activity to help tutors better understand and be sensitive to student needs, specifically those of ESL students.

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.

It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to say that writing centers have long been grounded in -some would say "bounded by" -the conventions of printed text. True, writing centers, like most of the rest of the world, have been influenced by advances in computer technology, most recently through the explosive growth of Online Writing Labs (OWLs) and computer-mediated conferencing with students, but fundamentally, most of the interactions between students and tutors still center on the handwritten or printed texts that are placed on a table between them or, perhaps, shared in a wordprocessed file. These texts are structured linearly and hierarchically, moving along a single path from beginning to end, following well-known and universally taught discourse forms that have emerged from a print -based rhetorical tradition.

what Lerner and Gillespie point out is at the heart of the writing center conference—dialogue—and explains the importance of the Guide for new and continuing writing center workers. We believe that these articles and reviews will present a new line of discussion among those of us in the field. We lament the fact that one of the most important contributors to that discussion is no longer with us. Robert J. Connors, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Director of the Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire, died this summer. For those of us in the field, the loss is tremendous, as Bob had so much more to provide the larger field of rhetoric and composition and the writing center field of which he has worked so hard to be a part. We have many memories of Bob Connors: in all of the major journals, in many texts, at NEWCA conferences, at UNH conferences on rhetoric and composition, at URI summer workshops, and at CCCC. In all of these, we remember his keen insights and helpful suggestions for conducting important research in the field and for practicing effective pedagogy in the classroom or in the writing center. While we will certainly miss Bob Connors, we will continue to value his ideas and to implement his suggestions for placing rhetoric, composition, and writing center work at the heart of the institution. When Hard Questions Are Asked: Evaluating Writing Centers

The cultural informant role as sketched by Judith Powers, in her article “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer,” was warmly received in our writing center when I introduced it shortly after her article appeared in 1993. With ESL students comprising a steady 30% to 40% of our clients, we had had plenty of experience with feeling not only the inadequacy of nondirective tutoring for meeting the needs of non-native writers but also the uneasiness of sessions that strayed from that approach, by then synonymous with effective one-toone work (Brooks 1; Ashton-Jones 31-33; Shamoon and Burns 135-36). The cultural informant role endorsed by Powers gives writing center tutors flexibility for meeting specific needs of ESL students not met by the nondirective writing center ideal. With their many cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic differences, ESL students often lack the knowledge to engage in the question-and-answer approach to problem-solving used in most writing centers (Powers 40-41). And the read-aloud method for discovering sentence-level errors, frequently productive for native speakers, provides little help to ESL students who lack the ear to hear their own errors (Powers 41-42). The value of the cultural informant role, then, is that it validates sharing information about English that these students have no way of knowing on their own. Yet after several semesters of basking in this more flexible approach, many of us on the staff, including graduate assistants in both English and Linguistics as well as practicum students, began to feel that too often this role, at least when sentence-level errors were concerned, tended to translate into the tutor editing and the student observing. Katherine Purcell, in her recent article “Making Sense of Meaning: ESL 6 The Writing Center Journal

Over the past ten years or so, much has been written about whether writing center tutors should be generalists or specialists: when tutors help clients from other disciplines, is it an asset for the tutors to be familiar with discipline-specific discourse conventions? Scholarship attempting to answer this question has been bi-polar: either tutors should be generalists, or they should be specialists. On the specialist side, some scholars argue that tutors’ knowledge of discipline-specific discourse conventions is important to the success of tutoring sessions, since the tutoring should revolve around the rhetoric of the discipline (Kiedaisch and Dinitz; Tinberg and Cupples: Shamoon and Burns). Judith Powers and Jane Nelson, for example, argue that

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.

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.

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.