Source-based writing skills, which include evaluating, synthesizing, and citing sources, are skills that students are expected to acquire as part of college-level writing. Unfortunately, many multilingual writers (MLWs), especially those in advanced degree programs, lack programmatic support and instruction. Thus, writing centers represent a critical site to offer MLWs tutorial-based support. Our study examined whether or not writing centers can help MLWs develop—and transfer—source-based writing skills in a sequence of three tutorials. We recruited five advanced student MLW participants from different cultural backgrounds who were uncomfortable with source use. Through pre-and postwriting samples, interviews, writing process recording videos, and a long-term follow-up, our findings indicate that our three-sequence tutorial significantly improved advanced MLWs’ source-based writing skills and transferred to the next semester. Improvements occurred in the areas of selecting, organizing, and connecting sources as well as in engaging in appropriate source use and avoiding plagiarism, although some areas showed stronger gains than others. This study contributes to the field’s development of replicable, aggregable, and data-supported best practices to explore the efficacy of tutoring for specific populations. We offer suggestions for writing centers to develop, test, and create tutoring-based MLW support programs.

English writing centers at Chinese universities present a fascinating paradox. On one hand, the number of universities with writing centers and the professional interest in writing centers in China have grown steadily over the past two decades. But on the other, the number of centers is still modest and only a few centers have had a significant influence on the culture of writing on their campuses, which is surprising given the vast number of universities in China and the documented need for strengthening and expanding writing instruction in English. This international research study explores the current state of English writing centers in China in a more comprehensive way than previous literature has done. Using data from new in-depth interviews with 17 professionals involved with English writing centers at 15 Chinese universities—professors, tutors, instructors, directors, administrators, and university leaders—as well as data from publicly available websites and WeChat accounts and published literature in Chinese and in English, this study identifies important needs that English writing centers can meet in Chinese universities, offers a typology and descriptions of existing centers, and identifies challenges that writing centers face and possible paths forward, or strategic action fields, for successfully institutionalizing writing centers in China. This study not only offers practical advice to support the promising future of writing centers in China but also introduces English writing centers in China to a larger international audience and reveals powerful insights into the ways models, principles, and practices of writing centers travel and change across continents and educational cultures.

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.

While one-to- one writing tutoring is often viewed as a supportive space for student writers, it can also reproduce racialized linguistic hierarchies that exacerbate anxiety for multilingual students. This article examines second language (L2) anxiety as a structurally induced emotional response to native-speakerism— the ideology that privileges white, Anglophone, native English speakers as the standard for language competence. Drawing from L2 anxiety research in applied linguistics and writing center studies, the article explores how native-speakerism influences multilingual students’ self-perception, interaction, and performance in L2 during one-to- one tutoring. It discusses the sources and dimensions of L2 anxiety across all four language domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—and argues that this anxiety persists even at advanced proficiency levels due to internalized linguistic deficit ideologies. By reframing L2 anxiety as a structural equity issue, the article calls for a more justice-oriented tutoring ecology and offers concrete pedagogical strategies and recommendations to help writing tutors recognize and respond to the often-invisible emotional labor multilingual students carry.

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.

This essay explores writing center theories and collaborative praxis from the perspective of an individual who has experienced long-term isolation and incarceration. This writer reflects on how participation in his college-in- prison community, including his service as a writing tutor and teaching fellow, has led to his immersion in prosocial healing behaviors that come with liberative and collaborative pedagogical processes.

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.

Writing center scholars have long debated whether writers are best served by “generalist” tutors trained in writing center pedagogy or “specialist” tutors with insider knowledge about a course’s content or discipline-specific discourse conventions. A potential compromise that has emerged is training tutors in the purposes and features of specific genres. The writing center literature showcases many different approaches to genre training. However, little empirical research, if any, has explored how tutors’ genre knowledge affects session outcomes. The present study used a mixed-methods approach to compare session outcomes for students who worked with generalist and genre-trained tutors. We analyzed pre-consultation and revised literature review drafts to determine whether students who worked with tutors trained in the genre of literature reviews improved their drafts more or revised their drafts differently than students who worked with generalist tutors. Additionally, we performed a qualitative analysis of student reflections about their writing processes to explore how tutor training impacts students’ impressions of their consultations. Findings indicated that students who worked with genre-trained tutors revised their drafts more substantively than did students who worked with generalist tutors. Moreover, students who worked with genre-trained tutors left with notably better and richer impressions of their consultations.

This article explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience founding the Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (CAPA) at the Universidade Federal do Paraná as a case study. The author provides some historical context about Brazilian education and its traditional “banking model” of education (Paulo Freire) that did not value individual expression—including through writing. This model persisted even as composition studies evolved elsewhere. Academic literacy development in Brazil is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, and the effects of that paucity are felt among scholars in higher education settings. This motivated the author’s research into publication challenges faced by Brazilian faculty and graduate students, which revealed a need for more institutional support. This inspired the idea for CAPA, conceived as a space promoting dialogue around writing, not just language editing. In establishing CAPA, critical considerations were the use of a public call mechanism familiar to Brazilians (“o edital”) to make consultations part of the writing process, offering translation to draw more people from around campus, and conducting outreach that stressed writing over “English.” CAPA’s mission to foster academic identities and combat epistemicide makes it unique, but also gives it a very Brazilian flavor. Unlike some writing centers in other global contexts, CAPA was not an imported idea but emerged from local needs, fully integrated with Brazilian higher education culture, compatible with Brazilian understandings like critical pedagogy. CAPA represents a Brazilian innovation contributing original knowledge to international writing center conversations.

Even small, taken-for- granted words can have a strong influence on the pedagogical effect of a writing conference. In this study, we examined how experienced and trained writing center tutors’ use of the discourse marker so helped them to connect ideas and to manage their conferences with students. We examined the extent to which tutors’ use of six types of so varied according to the English L1 (EL1)/ English L2 (EL2) status of their interlocutor. We studied 26 conferences: 13 involved eight tutors working with 13 EL1 students, and 13 conferences involved eight tutors working with 13 EL2 students. We found that conclusion/ result so occurred most frequently in tutors’ conferences with EL1 and EL2 students and that prompt so was the only type that exhibited a significant difference in frequency of occurrence between the two groups, occurring more frequently in tutors’ talk with EL1 students. We focused our qualitative analysis on prompt so, finding that it served two main purposes. We argue that examining discourse marker so generates implications for tutor training and shows the importance of paying attention to the small, seemingly unimportant words that tutors use.

Writing center professionals’ (WCPs) efforts to integrate transfer of learning theory into writing tutor education have exceeded empirical research on the effects of such curricula. Building on research in this area (Cardinal, 2018; Hill, 2016), we designed and implemented a semester-long, transfer-focused training curriculum for experienced undergraduate writing tutors that sought to build on tutors’ prior knowledge of writing center pedagogy. We tracked these tutors’ understanding of, attitudes toward, and uses of transfer and transfer talk in writing center sessions over the course of a semester. Through analysis of training meeting transcripts and a post-training survey, we found that tutors developed a basic understanding of transfer and demonstrated positive attitudes toward transfer and transfer talk; however, they responded negatively to examples of explicit transfer talk in the curriculum and proposed modifications constrained by the social context of tutoring (Carillo, 2020). We characterize these modifications as instances of tutors contextualizing transfer talk in light of their prior knowledge of writing center pedagogy. We encourage WCPs who are designing or researching transfer-focused tutor education to conduct additional empirical research and to prioritize tutors’ perceptions and experiences in order to develop more dynamic conceptions of transfer in writing center studies (Carillo, 2020).

Writing center scholarship often highlights the ways in which their distinctive, less directive, nongraded, and individualized instruction can make them distinctive social and pedagogical spaces. There is a simultaneous argument, however, that writing centers are often institutionally vulnerable and may be unable to engage in or promote such differences within the larger college or university. Yet, despite their size and possible vulnerability, the daily practices and institutional positioning of writing centers can help change conversations and work toward a different vision, political approach, and institutional presence. Drawing on Victor Friedman’s concept of “enclaves of different practice” and Brian Massumi’s theories of affect, this article explores how writing centers can adopt a theory of institutional change grounded in social fields and relationships. If, as Friedman advocates, institutions can be changed from the “inside out” through attention to empowering relationships and reconfiguring social fields, writing centers can adopt dispositions and practices to create the environments from which futures can emerge that sustain their values. The article provides brief examples of how a writing center can explicitly frame and promote pedagogical and participatory values to work toward larger institutional and political change.

This article examines the pedagogy of Dutch writing centres, comparing and contrasting it with the original interpretation of nondirective coaching and the way that has developed since the 1970s. Based on recent literature and contacts with American colleagues, we have drawn the tentative conclusion that generally, Dutch writing coaching is more strictly nondirective than it currently seems to have become in US settings. We then evaluate this practice in the context of the internationalization of research universities that has taken flight over the past 20 years, leading to many programs now being taught through English, which is the native language neither of the vast majority of our students (whether they are Dutch or international students), nor of their teachers. This has given rise to a shift in the needs and questions being expressed in our writing centres and an effect on our thinking about writing centre pedagogy.

This article describes how an unexpected observation by researchers studying writing support for nonnative speakers of English at German and Australian universities became the central insight of the work and resulted in the development of new literacy support measures. Only when the German researchers encountered Australian models of student literacy support did they realize that the German model of a writing center relied heavily on a US heritage while Australian models of student literacy support could be traced back to language and literacy support models from the United Kingdom. The central difference lay in the role that language was considered to have: while language skills were subsumed under writing in one model, writing skills were subsumed under the umbrella of academic language in another. Applying cultural anthropological approaches to the recognition of these two different perspectives allowed the German writing center

In September 2005, I found myself, in late middle age and more than two decades into my career, feeling like a student upon first studying abroad: general culture shock enhanced by academic culture shock. Coming from a writing center and writing program steeped in decades of US theory and pedagogy, I entered a space that, while partially informed by that theory and pedagogy, necessarily reflected a centuries-old British academic tradition and existed within a highly charged

African Americans and their contributions to our field’s first pedagogical models and operational structures are absent from writing center histories. This archival research invokes their presence by recounting the stories of five African American innovators—Bess Bolden “B. B.” Walcott, Coragreene Johnstone, Anne Cooke, Hugh Gloster, and Percival Bertrand “Bert” Phillips—spanning four decades at three historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Their stories invite an expansive understanding of writing center work, moving beyond a focus on traditional tutoring and strictly alphabetic literacies and into “strategic literacies”—the survival skills needed to stand up for oneself and one’s community in the face of dangerous times and violently racist places. The writing center leaders described here saw writing as a tool to be used in concert with embodied performances for expression and survival to advance struggles for labor equity, legal justice, and civil rights. This conception of writing center work springs from sites of research such as HBCU archives and popular Black press archives that are less often examined by dominant disciplinary histories. From those sites, a timeline of African American writing center administrators emerges that spurs further research of these under-studied figures, who together constitute a remarkable legacy.

In face-to-face writing center tutorials, tutor praise is an action that builds rapport and motivates writers (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2013). Drawing on and extending prior interactional analyses of praise, this article examines writers’ responses to text-based praise across 10 tutorials, with a particular focus on interactional segments in which writers reformulate their previously mentioned concerns in response to tutor praise. Unlike more common responses that signal acceptance of the praise, such as appreciation, overt acceptance, and alignment, this responding action reflects some momentary misunderstanding between tutor and writer in the tutorial interaction. Despite this, these segments also show writers taking a more active role in critically evaluating their own papers and identifying areas for revision. In addition to surveying writers’ varied responses to praise and exploring future research directions, this article also raises pedagogical implications for writing center tutoring and the one-to-one teaching of writing, specifically about how certain ways of designing and delivering praise can contribute to ambiguity and can run the risk of foreclosing or precluding opportunities for writers to articulate the kind of assistance they need with their drafts.

This article describes a semester-long study that used replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) research methods to investigate embedded tutoring efficacy. The research occurred in three sections of an engineering course, one of which had a course-embedded writing tutor. Over the course of a semester, the researcher investigated changes in students' mindsets, namely their beliefs about the malleability of writing skills. Results suggested students who worked with the embedded tutor improved their mindsets significantly more than did nontutored students. Students in the course-embedded section became more growth-minded, seeing themselves as capable of improving. The researcher also blindly rated samples of students' writing and found tutored students improved their literature-review drafts more significantly than did nontutored students. Tutored students' revised literature reviews were significantly better in terms of organization, style, and mechanics. These findings suggest an embedded tutor can not only improve students' writing performance but also influence their mindsets, demonstrating the important role writing centers can play in promoting the growth mindset.

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

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

Writing centers generally espouse tutoring policies for native speakers intended to help students improve their writing skills through minimalist intervention and a reliance on student intuition. At the same time, researchers have recommended somewhat directive tutorials for L2 writers who may lack native-speaker intuitions about culture or language. Yet the literature is unclear about whether L1, L2, and Generation 1.5 writers observe a difference in writing center practices based on their language background. This study examines the reported expectations and experiences of 462 writing center tutees by grouping them according to their language background (L1, L2, and Generation 1.5) and comparing their expectations with their reported writing center experiences on eight measures of tutorial behavior. Results indicate that all writers reported receiving similar and directive tutorials, a finding that differs from discourse-analytic results. The findings further demonstrate differences in what writers expect, with L1 writers expecting reflective tutorials, Generation 1.5 writers expecting negotiation, and L2 writers expecting directiveness. While necessarily abstract, results can nonetheless be useful in pre-or in-service tutor training in centers with high concentrations of Generation 1.5 or L2 writers.

Not only is the book authored by three of the field's most recognized and consequential scholars, but the belief-and the desire to share the belief-that writing is meaningful lies at the heart of writing center identity. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the book only occasionally mentions writing centers; however, this should not suggest its relevance to writing center studies is limited. On the contrary, the authors show that experiencing a writing project as meaningful is "a shared phenomenon, one deeply enmeshed in our experiences of schooling in this country and in our experiences with writing and writing instruction" (p. 22). The Meaningful Writing Project speaks to anyone invested in student writing. For writing centers, it

Reading and writing are widely understood as connected practices, but writing center studies has been slow to join the larger conversation in composition studies about writing's relationship to reading. Despite the field's neglect of reading in its research and scholarship, writing center professionals regularly work with reading because most college writing assignments are accompanied by or draw on reading in some way. Be-

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.

In the wake of research showing failures in transfer of writing skills, the question of how to help students see how their learning goes beyond individual learning experiences has become a pressing concern in composition.In addressing this concern, scholars have primarily focused on improving our classroom pedagogy so that we are teaching for transfer.However, with the finding that transfer often needs to be cued and guided in order to be successful, we need to begin focusing on writing centers as crucial spaces for the facilitation of students' understanding of the transportability of writing-related knowledge.This article presents findings from a study that examines the effects of teaching writing center tutors about transfer theory.Findings suggest that educating writing center tutors about transfer theory can positively affect their ability to facilitate the transfer of writing-related knowledge.

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.

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

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).

We cannot remake the world through schooling , but we can instantiate a vision through pedagogy that creates in microcosm a transformed set of relationships and possibilities for social futures , a vision that is lived in schools.

Published on 01/01/08

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.

The author discusses the reasons why she uses the book "A Short Course in Writing" which is written by Kenneth Bruffee. One of the reasons why she chose the book as a guide in writing and teaching writing is that the book offers students several patterns of organization or structure. Another reason is the emphasis on arrangement and invention which involves making introductions and conclusions. The book also teaches that teachers can restrict the form or the content of student writing. Other reasons of the author's usage are that it helps her grade students fairly and it offers the Descriptive Outline method of writing.

A university employee, Nancy, recently brought to me an idea for a nonfiction book about coping with thyroid cancer.In remission and awaiting word on her latest diagnostic scan, Nancy began our tutorial by excitedly reviewing the many and sometimes amusing lessons about life and family she had learned from her ordeal.As she explained, the book gave her a chance to explore her long-dormant writing skills, work on a project worthy of her time, and pass along what she had learned to other cancer victims.Her personal investment in the project was high, and the intensity with which she listened to my every word of encouragement and advice certainly raised the stakes for me.As we discussed where to begin and the book's potential commercial appeal, I felt edgy and alert -a condition heightened by Nancy's sudden jumps from idea to idea.I wanted to offer support but not build false hope, so I tried to balance any assurance that she had good ideas with a realistic assessment.She asked hard questions about working in a mixed genre -in her case, autobiography combined with elements of a "how-to" manual that might eventually become a sort of humorous Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivors Soul.Some of her questions I simply could not answer, in part because many of her ideas remained half-formed and success would hinge on her persistence and writing ability.But I improvised suggestions based on some experience with creative nonfiction, a slight familiarity with "how-to" books, and secondhand knowledge of cancer-survival stories.Nancy left our ninety-minute brainstorming session with an attitude of eager determination to continue working.As good sessions sometimes do, this one left me feeling used up but exhilarated -an intellectual version of runner's high.

Why should writing centers embrace rather than simply comply with external mandates for assessment? As all of us know, writing center directors are already overwhelmed with duties, and any free time needs to be spent on improving our services and training our tutors, not facing the "math anxiety" brought about by collecting and analyzing assessment data. Even more important, many of us may equate externally mandated assessment with external accountability to conservative institutions not particularly supportive of our process-based pedagogy. My purposes are to argue that writing centers should move beyond mere compliance with externally mandated assessment and to describe a very general plan for beginning to expand our assessment efforts. To fulfill our daily responsibilities, writing center directors spend most of our time being concerned about the services offered in our centers -from tutoring students ourselves, to handling complaints from faculty members or students, to training tutors. Routine assessment allows us to move beyond our daily concerns so that we can consider our services from a more global perspective and better plan improvements or justify what is currently done.

Aer they are admitted, many students find actually joining the university to be disorienting and even daunting, especially those whose socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or educational worlds differ markedly from the academic world they encounter in college. We know that writing centers play a key role in helping students make this transition, serving as crucial conduits of adjustment for otherwise marginalized students. But exactly how we help tutors to help these students is less familiar ground. Tutors are not usually considered when composition scholars characterize the ways in which writing professionals help students belong. Nevertheless, tutors as well as teachers are party to a process seen variously as assimilation, accommodation, separatism, acculturation, translation, or repositioning (Severino; Bruffee-, Lu, ''Writing as Repositioning"), and the students tutors work with must undergo a process that can be positively characterized as "going native" (Bizzell, "Cognition" 386), quizzically understood as invention (Bartholomae), or negatively viewed as conversion 0-Harris io3; Lu, "Conflict") or initiation (T. Fox). Clearly, there is no consensus among these many "camps"; rather, what we have is provocative, useful discussion on the pedagogical processes of belonging. But many a tutor who finds herself on the frontlines with a lost student will not have the benefit of knowing this discussion. As a writing center administrator who has worked in two urban institutions with ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, I have struggled to formulate tutor training that urges tutors to consider the complexities of belonging. I believe the tutor needs to understand the paradoxical ways in which writing and academic literacy more generally are instruments of belonging that can constrain as well as liberate.

Two scenes emerge as I revisit this piece: first, the excitement of the early-eighties Montana State University WAC/WC/FYC collaborations, and, second, the array of WC/WAC configurations that now enrich our campuses. This piece grew out of a "How can we do all that with these paltiy resources?" moment in Bozeman, Montana, a moment that John Bean, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom seized and renamed "an opportunity for conceptual blockbusting." They made us believe, and out of some wonderfully nave questions about writers, texts, instructors, and pedagogies came a revamped FYC program, a WAG program, and a writing center that functioned as the hub for campus writing. This pivotal activity remains for me a model of thoughtful, collaborative risk taking, one that I hope continues to inform the ways we in writing centers work with our present theoretical, political, and pedagogical possibilities.

ESL writers present a common dilemma to writing centers-the desire for sentencelevel interventions from their tutors.Our staff often experience such interventions as contradicting the aim of writing centers, formulated by Stephen North

Discusses general issues related to attitudes towards writing, which may be of interest to those working with English-as-a-second-language students, especially students coming from educational settings where writing is not traditionally taught. Presents the practice of the Writing Center at Central European University, one of the few centers in Eastern Europe, in dealing with students' attitudes towards writing

I use this term [contact zones] to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. (Pratt 34) When Maiy Louise Pratt applied her thorny idea of the contact zone to literacy communities, she raised a complicated challenge for writing centers to move beyond the usual paradigm. Certainly writing center pedagogy is radical, envisioning ( la Bruffee) peers meeting to share writing in process, thus replacing hierarchy with collaborative learning.

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

Like many in our field, I rose up “through the ranks” to my present position as a director of the Writing Center at a small, private college of pharmacy and health sciences. My career path started while I was pursuing an M.A. in English, where I tutored in the university’s Writing Center. Then, when I was back in school to complete a doctorate in education, I once again was given the opportunity to tutor in the university’s Writing Center, and, eventually, to study that Center as the subject of my dissertation. I graduated in the spring of 1996, and by the fall of that year I was hired by my current college to start its Writing Center. Four years later, I am a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences and hold administrative responsibility for the entire writing program, as well as for a new initiative on first-year student experience. What a smooth path that narrative above seems to indicate, a path of increasing professional opportunities, from “novice” to “expert,” from tutor to director, from student to faculty member, a “transformation” of sorts that is easily the script that we would write for many in our field. But here is another way of telling that story: My first writing center job came during my second semester of pursuing an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and a high school teaching credential. I would have preferred to be a TA and teach composition in the classroom, but most of my fellow graduate students were experienced teachers and gained the coveted TA positions. Instead, I tutored in the university’s Writing Center for $7 per hour, a rate that did not change in the three years that I worked there. I worked primarily with basic writing students, who came to the Writing Center as a course requirement and who were made to sift through a grammar/usage workbook, completing exercises on modals and subject/verb agreement and nouns and antecedents (which still happens, though now these exercises are computer Sherwood, Steve. “How to Survive the Hard Times.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 17.10 (1993): 4-8.

In writing centers, technological progress requires collaboration among stakeholders who have varying degrees of expertise with pedagogical applications of instructional technologies. In “Cyberspace and Sofas: Dialogic Spaces and the Making of an Online Writing Lab,” Eric Miraglia and Joel Norris share an impressive list of individuals who collaborated to create and implement Washington State University’s OWL: Bill Condon, Writing Programs Director; Gary Brown, Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning; Lisa Johnson-Shull, Director of the Writing Lab; Norris, Assistant Director of the Writing Lab; Miraglia, Learning Technologies Specialist for the Student Advising and Learning Center; Toby Taylor, an undergraduate student with expertise in graphic design; and Pete Cihak, an undergraduate who focused on North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46 (1984): 433-46.

Writing centers, in the most general terms, provide tutoring to help students develop and organize writing assignments. Certainly, a writing center also encompasses other roles and responsibilities. Students mostly see it as a "safe place," a positive, supportive, and collaborative environment where tutors encourage and work with students on a one-onone basis (see also Murphy; Harris; Fitzgerald). Most writing centers also make sure that tutors don't judge student work and don't put a grade on the paper. While policies differ from center to center, students, in most cases, are also promised that their visits are confidential, and that generally instructors do not have access to the information collected in the writing center.

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

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.

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

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