August 21, 2003
Guest column: Work at campus writing centers is never ending
Editor’s Note: Steven Corbett is a graduate student in English who directed the department’s Writing Center this summer. He offers this account of his experience to University Week readers.
Here it is the end of summer and we at the English Department Writing Center have been here all along. While the campus droned along in sleepy 70 degrees, Steven and Matt and Lyndsey and Bob and Thea and Jen continued to haunt Padelford B-12 in shorts and tees — actually assisting students.
Yes, last year, as the tutor in charge of summer, I would send people home and get ready for a long day of reading. But things were different this summer. When the spring music was over and the lights had been turned off and the smoke had cleared for most of the campus, you could still find the busy bees of the EWC keeping the faith. The cross-curricular composition behemoth rarely sleeps — the needs of student writers keep at least one of her eyes open all the time (although Lyndsey says she slept till noon today).
So here we tutored, capitalizing on the work done by our directors Anis Bawarshi and Teagan Decker (with a little help from their friends like me and Bob and…) that has been so effective in increasing writing-center visits. While other writing centers across campus were closed, we stayed open — helping students one-to-one with whatever aspects of their writing they wished.
We saw freshmen composition essays, Medical School personal statements, and everything in between. We assisted students one-to-one across the disciplines — English, sociology, art, nursing — with brainstorming, thesis development, organization, conclusions and introductions. Sometimes we just listened to whatever the student wanted to talk about, or we helped students negotiate teacher expectations, or offered advice on how to communicate more effectively with teachers.
And this emphasis on talk is why we’re a little different from many writing centers on campus. We are not a laundry service; a student cannot simply drop off his or her paper and come back later when it’s all cleaned up. What we do is sit down and have up to a 45-minute dialogue with students in which we use open-ended questions to nudge peers toward an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as writers.
In other words, we focus on the writer and his or her process, not so much the paper, which is used more as a diagnostic tool. Most of us are undergraduate English majors who have taken a 10-week intensive training course on writing-center theory and practice, in addition to performing observations of experienced tutor sessions, before tutoring.
This training gets put to the test right away and continues throughout our tenure, as we are expected to deal with a variety of pedagogical situations. Tutors work one-to-one with students, but we also visit classrooms to help with peer-facilitation group work, or to talk about our services. I have even been asked by TAs to teach a special writing class from time to time. I also work, in a satellite capacity, for the Dance Program as a writing consultant.
Just because things were quiet around this loose baggy monster of a University doesn’t mean the work, for some, was any less intense. The grunts were still here aiding students and teachers with the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful aspects of writing. While our University currently debates what to do about improving undergraduate writing (in the Undergraduate Writing Curriculum Committee) I urge them to continue examining the crucial role writing centers play in helping students negotiate the writing process across the curriculum. When you passed us by on the outside of the building this summer, we may have appeared quiet and unused. But you were witnessing the “seeming sleep of a spinning top”—inside the building, it’s been busyness as usual. As the beast rarely sleeps, so the top rarely stops.
