What is "help" with writing?
A look at three resources

The days are pretty much gone when students were admonished, "Do your own work," when writing papers for assignments. In those days, teachers used to feel uneasy about their students' getting "help" with their papers. They perceived it as, while not exactly cheating, at least close. So in the early years of writing centers, the 60's and 70's, tutors did not help students with papers in progress, but instead worked with papers that had already been graded, to help writers diagnose their errors. There was lots of emphasis on grammar, spelling, and punctuation; lots of grammar exercises and programmed workbooks.

During the past 15 years or so, educators have come to realize that writers hardly ever produce anything totally by themselves. True, the writing process includes long stretches of lonesome work, but at some point everyone needs outside help of one kind or another. This does not mean that the boundaries of plagiarism have been moved or that writers' responsibility for generating their own ideas has been lifted. But all writers need to try out their work in progress on an audience for feedback and suggestions.

Still, I suspect that we harbor some fuzzy notions of what "help" is, and what kind of help a writer can get from various sources. From talking with teachers who use peer groups and recommend the Writing Center to their students, I have seen, at times, unrealistic expectations about what peer groups and the Writing Center can accomplish.

This issue of Word Works will attempt to sort out expectations from reality. Make no mistake: my ulterior motive is to promote the Writing Center. But I'm going to take the long way around and look at other sources of help first. It is important to consider each one and understand what can be expected and what can't. Each source has advantages and limitations: the Writing Center is no exception.

The three main sources of help for a student writer are the teacher, peer-response groups, and the Writing Center. These three sources bear different relationships to the writer, and so they afford different kinds of help.

Help from the teacher

Some teachers willingly hold individual conferences with their students about drafts-in- progress, or even collect drafts from the whole class and respond to them. The biggest advantage of direct teacher help on a draft is that the teacher, who designed the assignment in the first place, is in the best position to know whether a student is on the right track. If a draft deviates somewhat from the assignment, the teacher can decide how much deviation to accept. If it falls short of the assignment's expectations, the teacher knows how it falls short. The student, then, can continue revising with the confidence that the paper will be acceptable in the end.

Another advantage is that the teacher's intervention in the student's writing process can cause a great deal of learning to take place, both ways. Students receive help directly from the person who will be grading the final paper (this is also a disadvantage, as we'll see in a minute). Teachers get to know their students better, and they receive valuable feedback on whether the assignments are clear or are too easy or too difficult. They also can pick up on problems students are having and address those problems in class, for everyone's benefit.

The main difficulty that teachers face is having to decide how much help to give their students. Helping them prepare for an exam is one thing, but writing is different. With an exam, there is the intermediate step prior to grading where the student has to take the exam independently. With writing, the draft on which the teacher helps becomes the paper the teacher has to grade -- no objective filter in between.

When grading time comes, teachers may find themselves in an awkward position. If they have been very directive in their suggestions for revision, they feel they are grading their own advice. If they have not been directive, but left the decisions up to the student, they may feel more comfortable with the grading. But if students make bad decisions, teachers might feel they have let the students down by not having been more directive.

Grades can also interfere with student-teacher interaction in another way. A lot of students want their A's, and they're not bashful about saying so. The teacher can reply, "I'm not here to see that you get an A; I'm here to help you learn." That may or may not improve the atmosphere of the conference. No matter how well teachers manage to take off the coach's hat and put on the judge's hat when grading time comes, the contrary roles still fight one another. This is why many teachers prefer, with good reason, to rely primarily on peer groups and the writing center to help students through the composing process.

Help from peer groups

In peer response, students meet in small groups, in class or out of class, to share and critique each other's drafts. The peer group has the advantage of shared experience. Everyone is doing the same assignment. Even if each student is working on a different topic, the topics are all related to the common body of knowledge of the course. And because each group member has struggled with the assignment and had his or her own successes and problems with it, they respond to each other supportively. Also, members of the group learn from each other. They see what others are doing with the assignment and can compare it with what they are doing, and if their drafts have gotten off track they can often see how to get them back on.

A peer response group focuses on each student's text, for the purpose of improving that text. The group looks at whole drafts and practices critical reading. Though the group should offer observations and encouragement, directive comments are the norm. Group members make direct suggestions for revision.

For all the good things groups can accomplish, there is a limit to the help peers can give each other. Members of a group have to divide their attention among three or four people's drafts, so time is limited. Directive comments, too, can only do so much. They may tend to narrow, rather than open up, the writer's thinking about options for revision. And peers usually don't know that much about rhetorical strategies. They are better at judging what a paper says than how it says it. Group members can also fail to offer substantial criticism because of fear that they might be wrong or might hurt each other's feelings.

Help in the Writing Center

The most striking difference between help in a writing center tutoring session and other kinds of help is that, in the Center, writers have to take on almost all the responsibility for their own work. Writing assistants go out of their way to be non- directive. Their main goal in most tutoring sessions is to help writers generate and clarify their own ideas. This is the fact about writing center help that is most often misunderstood by teachers and students alike.

The prime maxim for writing centers, first articulated by Stephen North in "The Idea of a Writing Center" and quoted before in Word Works, is: Change the writer, not the piece of writing. The writing assistant's main goal is not to see that a student's paper gets a good grade, but that the student learns some skills that will be usable in this paper and all writing to come.

Whereas a peer group's response to a draft focuses on just that draft, not the writer's skills, a tutoring session has the opposite priority. In a tutoring situation, the text becomes what Muriel Harris calls "the medium for discussion," rather than the subject of critical reading. The writing assistant focuses on general skills: how the writer went about writing the draft, problems encountered, strategies for overcoming those problems. The writing assistant may read only a few key parts of a draft and relate them to general skills the writer is learning. Whereas a peer group or a teacher might tell a writer, "Here's how you get from here to there," a WA will ask, "How are you going to get from here to there?"

In many circumstances the WA never reads the paper at all, or looks at only selected parts, such as the introduction, conclusion, and one or two sample body paragraphs. The WA helps the writer judge whether the introduction tells clearly where the paper is going and whether the conclusion indicates that the paper gets there. Together they may look at a couple of body paragraphs to see how the writer announces the main idea, restricts and clarifies it, supports it with evidence, analyzes the evidence and relates the evidence back to the main idea. Or the WA may try to spot a paragraph that is well developed and one that is not, and ask questions to help the writer see what is good about the strong paragraph and how to strengthen the weak one. Or. . . . There are many tutoring strategies, so no two tutoring sessions ever go quite the same way. Much depends on the nature of the assignment, the state of the draft, the writer's willingness to work hard, the personalities of the writer and the writing assistant -- the variables are many. But at the core of all the variables lies the principle that the paper belongs to the writer, and the writer is ultimately responsible for the quality of the paper.

The knowledge base differs in a tutoring session, too. Whereas a peer group will share the same body of course knowledge and knowledge of the assignment, the writing assistant is an outsider, and so has to have the assignment explained. Many a tutoring session gets nowhere fast because the instructor didn't put the assignment in writing or the writer forgot to bring it.

The WA's ignorance of the course material is often an advantage. The writer has to explain things clearly enough to be understood. The corollary, of course, is that the writer is responsible for the truth and accuracy of the writing. The WA, if suspicious of the truth or accuracy of some statements in a draft, cannot challenge them directly, but can ask the writer how he plans to back up the statements to make them persuasive to a knowledgeable reader.

Tutoring sessions can be hampered by grades, too, in a different way from teacher help. Some writers see the grade their work will get, not the learning, as the bottom line in a paper assignment. Recently a writing assistant reported a session in which the writer tried every possible way to get her to predict whether his paper would get an A. In every polite way she could think of, she kept refusing. Fortunately this happened near the end of the session, and meanwhile they had managed to talk about substantive things. If it had happened early on, it could have rendered the whole session unproductive, as the writer's concern with changing the paper clashed with the writing assistant's concern with changing the writer.

In tutoring, a danger is that writers tend to look up to writing assistants as authorities with all the answers, and they expect to be given the answers. WA's, Harris points out, are always "straining against telling students what to do." Harris provides an example of such clashing expectations in an experience of her own. After she worked with one writer, he filled out an evaluation rating her as "`ineffective' because, he explained, `she just sat there while I had to find my own answers.'"

We writing center directors hear complaints from faculty such as: "This student went to the writing center, and look, her paper is still full of grammatical errors (or has no thesis or is badly organized)." "I sent this student to the Writing Center to work on punctuation, and the tutor only talked about development." We don't complain about the complaints. It's part of a director's job to listen to them. But I want to explain a few more things about how a writing tutorial works.

First, tutoring sessions are limited to 25 minutes. In that time, only one or two matters can be discussed. The writer might go away with a better idea for a focus and an idea for an organization, or with one or two new proofreading strategies. For further work, the writer is welcome to make another appointment. But it is the writer's responsibility to follow up on what was discussed in the session.

Second, many students don't allow themselves enough time to get full benefit from a tutoring session. They wait until a day or two before the paper is due, when there isn't time to make much of a difference in the paper -- and then they may not be able to get an appointment for another day or two. Obviously, much more can be discussed about strategies for revising a paper due in a week than for a paper due tomorrow. Writing assistants develop a fairly impressive repertoire of polite ways to say no. They have to, when so many students expect them to proofread and correct papers. Proofreading is work the writer needs to learn how to do. We have two main strategies for helping writers learn to proofread. One is to put a check in the margin beside each line that has an error in it, then let the writer hunt down the error and correct it. The other is to go over about half a page, pointing out every single error and working with the writer to correct it. Then the WA tells the writer, "That's how you need to proofread the whole paper. Now you do the rest." Both of these strategies put the burden of proofreading on the writer.

Acknowledging help

That, in a drastically abbreviated form, is the kind of "help" the Writing Center offers, and I hope I've clarified how it differs from other kinds of help with writing. I have not even dealt with a fourth source of help, the help writers get from friends and family, which can take so many forms it can't be categorized. The whole business of help is so complex, in fact, that some teachers require students to submit an Acknowledgements page along with each paper, much as authors of books do, explaining who helped them and what kind of help each person gave. It is an excellent practice, one that has been incorporated in the English Department's pilot project in folder assessment. It gives students an appreciation for the rich, complex ways in which other people contribute to almost any piece of writing, and it forces them to think about how they use those contributions.

In the preparation of this issue of Word Works, I had valuable help from Sue Hudson, who asked the right questions of the first draft and made me completely rethink what I wanted to article to say and how to organize it. Phil Toomey read a later draft and made valuable suggestions for clarifying some fuzzy sentences. I also acknowledge the help of Muriel Harris' article, "Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups" (College Composition and Communication 43 (1992): 369- 383.), which gave me a useful way of thinking about the contrasts developed in this issue, and some specific ideas about peer responses and writing-center tutorials.

RL