PeerCentered

In On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft , Stephen King writes, “In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.” The Village Voice and Eulah-Beulah’s of the world are not models for good tutors. A tutor is not a babysitter or a critic, not an editor and chiefly not the writer. Sometimes looking at what something is not, helps to clarify what it is. A tutor is a reader and needs to avoid becoming the writer. Writing is a form of thinking—on paper—and the tutor’s role is to help writers to think about their writing. It’s the physical evidence of critical thinking. Understanding how writers organize information and helping them to rethink that information and organization is part of the tutor’s job. One task needed to accomplish this is distinguishing higher-order from later-order issues and prioritizing higher-order issues first. Focus on the 3-4 most i...

From what I have read in the class textbook and from experience, I agree with much of what is said in the book. I think that the tutor is more of a guideline for the student or writer. The writer knows his/her writing better than anyone else. I don't think that the tutor has the authority or knowledge to tell the tutor what is best, but the tutor does play a role in demonstrating to the writer what types of resources are available. In the process of writing a paper, no method is best for all. For certain writers, the process of brainstorming is effective, for others, the process of talking about an idea before writing is effective, but for others, neither of these processes work. I think it is important to make this known to the writer. The tutor should help the student articulate these ideas and ensure that the writer understands the assignment. I don't think a tutor should solely be an "editor," editing and justifying the use of certain words. .

For me the role of a tutor is one who helps the student with what they are having trouble with. The student is coming to the tutor for help. The tutor should know more than the student, that’s why they are a tutor. The tutor should be able to recognize the problems within the problem, if it’s math, or in the case of English the tutor should be able to see where the piece needs work; whether its grammar errors, punctuation or they should just be able to answer the student’s questions. If the student feels that their piece is too wordy the tutor should give suggestion as to where the piece could use some cutting back. The tutor can show the student what they might not be able to see. This can help the student learn about how they write. If they struggle with grammar errors the tutor can show them the errors and how to fix them. It should be a learning experience for the student and the tutor. It should not be more work for the tutor by the tutor doing it themselves. It can be easier t...

This is exciting new territory for me, as I’ve spent my adult life as an editor, which is very different from being a tutor. As an editor, my work was not really in service of the writer, but in service of the publication that employed us both. As a tutor, my work will be entirely in service of the writer and his learning process (and my own learning process, too). A tutor’s first role is to help the student writer feel at ease in the tutoring session and feel comfortable with the idea of writing and seeing herself as a writer. Next, the tutor can help the writer clarify her purpose and her audience. If the writer has an assignment with detailed instructions, the tutor can help the writer be sure she understands the instructions and knows how to meet the requirements of the assignment. If the writing assignment is less prescriptive, the tutor can chat with the writer about possibilities for topic, genre and tone. Either way, the tutor can ask friendly, open-ended questions to help the ...

            “Grammar.”   The classic response to the question we ask every writer who comes to the Writing Center:   “So what would you like to work on today?”   Sure, grammar may be a perfectly acceptable response, but how often is it really what the student needs to work on?   Do they even know what they need to work on?   Would they still say grammar if they did?   Such is the dilemma faced by writing tutors, as frequently the issues identified by students are not what they need to work on to improve their writing, and are only what they think they need.   Consequently, how can we as writing tutors be of good service and focus on what the student wants, while actually doing our job of focusing on what the student needs?   Easy – just practice what I consider to be the ‘car salesmen’ approach:   allow the student to tell you what they want to buy, and then convince them to happily...

Piqued by a passing thought as to if our training in the writing center can overcome our impulses, I set out to study if gender played a role in how OWLs were answered at Texas A&M’s University Writing Center. In the field of linguistics, it has been argued that males are more apt to use directive speech and females more apt to use nondirectives; this is largely related to women’s propensity to more polite speech. But, here we have training that being directive is largely not our first instinct as tutors. How did this interact with gender impulses?   I gathered 30 male and 30 female OWL responses submitted over a five-year period and constructed the following study to answer three research questions: 1.       Does gender affect the use of directives and nondirectives? 2.       Does gender affect the delivery technique of suggestions (politeness, evaluation, explanation, and options)? 3.     ...

There’s this collation tool online called Juxta . It allows you to compare two documents, and it highlights the differences between them in at least two ways. First, it shows both documents side by side, highlighting differences and drawing diagonal lines showing how pieces of the text have shifted. Second, it creates a heat map on just a single document, showing by lighter and darker shades of highlighting how different this document is from the other(s). Now, a tool like this is meant for scholars in literary and textual studies; for example, one who is interested in determining whether the edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass available through Google Books matches the copy in her local library. (Whitman was a compulsive reviser, and digital reproductions of pre-1900 texts are notoriously mismanaged. So this scholar could find some interesting results!) But I propose another use for collation software like Juxta: it can be used to learn about revision. Instead of comparing ...

           As mentioned in my previous blog, I teamed up with a fellow creative writer and tutor to explore ways to help fellow tutors consult on creative writing. We began the project this spring and presented our training session to our fellow tutors in October. In this blog, I will detail our presentation and results. In “Is There a Creative Writer in the House?” Wendy Bishop discusses the benefit of working with different types of writing. “By analyzing the styles of writing you encounter in the world you’ll become a more proficient brainstormer and adviser to your clients on the options available to them…. Then, put all these bits of advice in service of helping the writers you work with interrogate convention and experimentation as tandem parts of the writing process.” Essentially, we need all different types of writing and we can take many of the lessons we learn from one field to another. Our presentation focused on one main...

Writing Centers strive to excel at consulting with every type of writing from business and scientific writing to English papers. However, many writing tutors struggle with consulting on creative writing. Many fear the creative writers and have dozens of questions and worries about a creative session. “How can I critique a piece like this?” “This has no rules or standard templates to work from. How can I give advice on what’s right or wrong?” “This isn’t my field and I have no knowledge of literary devices or how to critique creative writing.” “My fallback is always grammar and obviously the creative writer doesn’t need help with that area because they write all the time. They know this stuff.” “Who am I to judge their piece?” Hans Ostrom discusses the uneasiness with creative writing in his article “Tutoring Creative Writers: Working One-to-One on Prose and Poetry.” He discusses how peer tutors are not alone in this uneasiness. He says, “… there are all sorts of literary experts i...