What makes the Writing Center interesting

Every year or so Word Works publishes an article to inform people about its parent, the BSU Writing Center. It's not just that we want clients (we're always looking for clients). It's that the center is so often misunderstood in what it does (and doesn't do), how it helps writers. And the misunderstanding is, well, understandable. There are built-in contraries, tensions, about writing-center work - - tensions somewhat akin to those in teaching and writing. They are part of what make my job as a writing-center director endlessly interesting.

By "interesting" I'm not thinking of the old saying about the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Well, I guess I am, since I just wrote it -- another example of tension. But mostly I'm thinking of "interesting" in a positive way, a way that forces us into constant renewal. I want to share with you some of the tensions that keep our work interesting -- and renewing.

Tensions of mission

What does the Writing Center do? What's it here for? Not an easy question. I'm not comfortable giving an answer in less than five minutes. It's hard to answer because there are tensions of at least two kinds: one, between the way many faculty and students see the Writing Center and how the Writing Center sees itself, and two, inside the latter, conflicting ways the Writing Center does see itself.

Examples of the first tension: A teacher sends over a writing assignment for one of her classes, and we find at the bottom: "Proofread your paper well. Better yet, take it to the Writing Center and have them proofread it for you." Or a student from a literary survey class brings in his textbook and says, "I have to write an analysis of this poem. Would you look at it and tell me what it means?" No; we are neither a proofreading service nor a literary- interpretation service. We decline to do these things for clients as politely as we can, and we offer to show them how to proofread for themselves, how to look for clues to meaning in a poem.

Or a teacher comes to me with a concerned, slightly apologetic expression. "My student brought this paper to the Writing Center, and when he handed it in it was full of errors. Aren't your people responsible for seeing this doesn't happen?" No; the student is responsible for the quality and correctness of the finished paper. Any Writing Assistant who goes through a draft, points out every error, and shows the writer how to correct everything is going too far. "How do I know when I'm doing too much of the work?" WA's ask. The answer is, if you have to ask, you're probably doing too much.

The central axiom of writing centers, coined in a landmark article on writing centers by Stephen North, is: Change the writer, not the piece of writing. The reasoning behind this makes sense. A paper that's changed is then graded and forgotten. But a writer who's changed will go on to write more papers, better ones.

If only it were always that simple. There's sometimes a clash between the short-term goals of improving this paper, and the long-term goals of improving this writer. The commanding presence in a tutoring session is this draft, demanding to be improved. Besides, how can you change a writer except through this piece of writing, and the next piece, and the next? We still recite North's axiom as our rule of thumb, but we have to take things one client, one paper at a time, asking over again where the boundaries lie.

The second, internal tension involves the question of who we are here to serve and why. For instance, I found this statement in a Writing Lab Newsletter article: "Our job is to do ourselves out of a job." In other words, we take writers who need a lot of help with their writing and tutor them until they don't need us any more. They can write on their own; they have become independent writers and learners. We do ourselves out of a job, but not really. There are always more writers in need of help.

The other side of the tension was expressed in a brochure I picked up in a writing center in Oregon. The front flap asks, "What did Shakespeare have that you don't have? What did Henry James have that you don't have?" Open it up, and the inside answers, "An audience." It goes on to say that all writers need an audience to give feedback on writing in progress. Everyone needs the writing center, even the so-called independent writers.

It would be a mistake to assume that we are here for one or the other group and not for both. Perhaps the most challenging kind of client is the person who brings in a really strong draft. WA's want to say the paper is fine and why did you bring it in? But they can't; the client signed up for the whole fifty minutes and expects to get it.

Tensions of mission. Knowing they're there keeps us alert, makes us rethink what we should be doing and not doing.

Tensions of expectation

Now let's narrow in on the actual tutoring session. This is where some of the most interesting tensions lie.

There's the tension of agenda. Many clients come in with a strong sense of ownership of their writing and don't want anyone feeding them ideas or advice. When they revise they want to be in control. No problem; that fits in with the WA's expectation exactly. But plenty of clients come to us with tougher agendas: they want their writing "fixed" for them, or they want someone to tell them what to write about or how to develop it. The WA needs skill to gently nudge these clients into agendas where they will be doing the fixing, finding their own ideas and examples, asking themselves questions like "What would happen if I organized the paper this other way?"

Clients who expect the WA to fix the draft's problems and supply ideas take special handling. And special self-discipline. WA's have to fight their own natural inclinations to be "little teachers," in Ken Bruffee's phrase. We all feel this urge; it's only human. If someone asks us a question, the natural thing is to answer it. If someone has a problem, the natural thing is to provide a solution. But rather than do this, the WA has to use questioning techniques to prompt the client to find his own answers, his own solutions.

Agendas can be pretty subtle. What is the client really there for? The answer is sometimes hidden. The client may not know how to talk about writing and will ask for help with punctuation, because that's concrete and easy to think about, when she really means she's not sure about the organization or the logic or the voice. Or the client may not like the draft because it didn't come out as she hoped, or because the assignment didn't give her room to do what she really wanted.

So the WA has to probe carefully to find out what the client is really concerned about. And whether the client actually likes the writing well enough to do some serious work on it. As Peter Elbow pointed out in a recent article, if we like a draft, no matter how bad it is, we'll revise it until we get it right. But if we don't like it now, we probably never will, no matter how we work at revision. It will never be right. The WA may think the session is going swimmingly, but if the client doesn't like the draft and doesn't want to admit it, or just pretends to like it, then WA and client will be working at cross purposes the whole time.

WA's have to remember that they are not teachers but coaches. An athletic coach can't make the moves for the athlete; the athlete has to learn to make them. When the athlete gets as good as talent will allow, that's it, no matter how much the coach wants the athlete to do even better -- until the athlete matures more, which is a matter of time and can't be rushed. Just so, the WA knows that if she were writing this paper, she could make it better than the client ever could -- but she has to hold her tongue and let the client hold the pencil. No matter how hard the WA tries to coach and encourage, some tutoring sessions get nowhere, because the client doesn't want to work or won't face the challenge of rethinking the paper.

Some of the most creative work the Writing Center does is negotiate the agenda through this maze of contrary expectations.

Tensions of knowledge

Instead of "knowledge" I almost wrote "the loss of knowledge." In a system as dynamic as a writing center, knowledge is always being gained and lost, and always with consequences.

Any given year, about half the WA's are new, just learning the job. They are taking a three-credit course in tutoring writing. Part of that course is a practicum in which they are "thrown to the wolves" (not my words, but those of a current trainee) -- they are assigned hours in the Writing Center starting the third week. The main purpose, at first, is just to observe the seasoned WA's at work. But soon enough -- too soon, they think -- they find themselves tutoring, because sometimes there are too many clients and not enough seasoned WA's to go around.

Scary for the new people? You bet. What do you do when you first sit down with a client, unsure if you're going to say the wrong thing, or even understand what the client needs? (Some of the WA's say it's as scary as the first time they themselves came as clients, before they started working in the center.) But they weather those first scary sessions. They find that clients don't bite, not usually, and that their own knowledge of writing is solid enough to begin helping other people. They learn a lot, fast.

So far I've talked about individual knowledge. There's also corporate knowledge, what the Writing Center as a body "knows." It knows administrative stuff like intake cards, tally sheets, appointment charts. It knows instructional tools like brainstorming, clustering, ladder of abstraction, TRIAC, evidence loops. The interesting and frustrating part is trying to keep all this knowledge in motion. Like a shark, it has to keep moving to stay alive.

I catch glimpses of WA's doing wise and brilliant things with clients that they don't even know are wise and brilliant. I've seen them exercise patience of heroic dimensions. All these WA's graduate, leave, and take their knowledge with them. They are replaced by others who have to learn it all over again -- but the only way they can learn it is to reinvent it for themselves. They study theory, but theory is not real for them until it's put into practice -- not just talking about what to do in certain situations, not just observing an experienced WA doing it, but actually doing it themselves. The director and the experienced WA's help all they can, but they in turn have to become the coaches, sit on the sidelines, watch the new people teach themselves.

Tensions of failure and success

And the clients? While the WA's are learning, how do the clients know what quality of assistance they'll get? Well, some tutoring sessions do fail; I can't deny it. Even the experienced WA's fail at times. Personalities clash, even though we study personality types and try to be sensitive to differences. Communication breaks down, even though we work on listening and questioning skills. And we worry about these things. We've let someone down. Not only that, but we've put a dent in our reputation. Another axiom: "A client who has a good experience in the Writing Center will tell three or four people. A client who has a bad experience will tell 20."

Failure, the possibility of failure, is part of the tension that makes the place interesting. But most often, our clients take away something positive: a new strategy for developing or organizing a paper, renewed confidence, even some little thing like a trick for catching comma errors. The best indicator that we're doing something right is when they come back with a further revision, a new draft.

There's tension when the WA sees a draft that needs more work than can be covered in a 50-minute session. What if the draft is a bit off target toward the assignment, and this paragraph seems out of order, and these sentences sound awkward, and the whole thing shows a weakness in word choices or subject-verb agreement? How can the client get to "know" all this in 50 minutes? Impossible, of course. The WA has to figure out priorities, get the client to work on the basic things first -- focus, voice, organization, development -- and encourage the client to bring back a revised draft for work on the diction and grammar. If the paper is due tomorrow -- all too often it is -- the two of them can only work on the basics. Toward the end of the session, the WA can point out some sample errors and caution the client to look for those, too, before handing in the finished paper. So client and draft go off into the night. The WA may never know what becomes of either one.

As I write about these tensions, more keep coming to mind. I'm out of space, however, and I think I've covered the ones I most wanted to share with you. When clients come to the Writing Center, they come to receive help. But from our point of view, they also come to interact, to become part of the productive tensions, to make things interesting, to be our teachers.

RL