Word Works
Learning through writing
at Boise State University
Number 89 December 1997
Published by the BSU Writing Center

When Tutoring becomes Counseling

by Dallas Hightower
BSU Writing Center

AT THE WRITING CENTER AT BOISE State, most often, most of our clients need help with common writing problems, such as organization, clarity, providing evidence, and so on. Occasionally, our clients require a higher level of tutoring. Some students write about highly personal and sensitive issues.

Tutors often find themselves wearing many hats, such as the Expert Writer, the Instructor, the Coach, and the Counselor. The role of Counselor has presented some of the greatest challenges as well as some of the greatest rewards for me as a tutor. I have tutored students whose papers discussed suicide attempts, traumatic childhood experiences, anorexia, abuse, rape, the death of an intimate. Tutoring in these situations requires a high degree of sensitivity and professionalism. The writing problems a tutor encounters with such clients vary. The most interesting problem I have dealt with concerns self-censorship.

One day at the end of September, a client came in and asked me to help him develop more warmth and humanity in his paper. I had worked with this particular client, whom I ll call David, a number of times in previous semesters. David was enrolled in a writing class and his assignment was to give himself a writing task and complete it. He generally wrote well. His writing described and elaborated his subject clearly. His style tended towards the technical and impersonal. Although he enjoys writing, this was not the way David wanted to write.

David's problem was that he had trouble writing about emotional issues and interpersonal relationships. This is not necessarily a writing problem many writers learn to write quite well without any self- disclosure. Indeed, many writing tasks, such as technical and research writing, require what one might call an objective approach. However, David felt he was trapped in a writing style which ran counter to his personality. He was more intuitive while his writing was more technical. He valued imagination and interpretation, while his writing described facts and reality. He yearned to write in a more personal style, but did not or could not express himself in his writing. As he explained to me later, he was self-censoring on a massive scale. In a way, he was not writing at all. He felt alienated from his writing and felt it was inauthentic.

David's draft discussed his summer employment experience refurbishing a forest ranger station in the mountains with a female co-worker. David's writing was detailed and descriptive. He described in striking detail a helicopter ride into the mountains. But when it came to discussing his relationship with the woman, with whom he developed an emotional attachment, his writing fell flat.

To bring more warmth and humanity into his writing I suggested he focus more on his relationship with the woman he worked with. How did he feel about her? He never said in his paper. What were the dynamics of their relationship? Furthermore, how did he feel about his job and the beautiful landscape around them? He was good at describing the landscape objectively, but he did not succeed at relating the landscape to himself.

After discussing these problems, I turned David loose to revise. When he returned for his next appointment, I saw that his revisions were not substantial, and he did not have time for another major revision attempt before he had to turn his paper in. We never worked together on this first paper again, instead, David wanted to move on.

Immediately upon receiving his next assignment, David returned to me with similar goals. I felt he was clearly reaching out to me for help. His new assignment was to write about himself as a writer. Once again, he wanted to write in a way which reflected his personality more.

David also brought in pages from a journal which he keeps. This was a major step for David. The journal entries revealed to me one of the major reasons why he had so much difficulty expressing himself in his writing. He was subject to abuse as a child and teenager. Reading the shocking account of his family life gave me a new perspective of His writing problems. His unusual family life had clouded his sense of how much and what sort of personal information was appropriate to share with others. Therefore he shared nothing. The writing in his journal had, as one might expect, a high level of personal disclosure. David's journal writing had an energy and interest which the essay he wrote for his class lacked.

I was aware that I was entering sensitive territory. Clients like David come to us for help. On the other hand, tutors should never attempt to fill the role of a professional therapist or counselor yet to some degree we must, or else we will find ourselves turning away a great many clients. The key is this: if we are wearing the hat of a counselor, is the counseling closely connected to their writing?

David's assignment was not due for at least four weeks, so we had plenty of time to work together to help him break through his self- censorship. I could not tell David what he should write about and what he should keep private. He had to decide for himself. I helped him along by having him freewrite on three subjects. I ensured him absolute freedom to write any way he wanted, without the concern of sharing with anyone unless he was so inclined. First, I asked him to freewrite on the issue of trust. Who did he trust and why? What levels of trust did he have for different people and for a given personal issue? I also asked him to freewrite about privacy. What sorts of things should be private, and what did he want to self- disclose? Finally I asked him to freewrite about risk. What did he have to risk through self-disclosure in his writing? What did he have to gain? I asked him to freewrite a rough draft after his other freewriting and bring it in for his next visit also. Finally, I assured him that the act of choosing what to write and self-disclose was an act of control over his own life.

At his next visit the following week, David told me he had done the freewriting I asked of him, but declined to share it with me. Later, David told me the freewriting on trust, risk, and privacy helped him to develop criteria for what to self-disclose. David's freewriting allowed him to clear away some of the clutter and punched a small hole through his wall of self-censorship.

David also brought a rough draft of his next paper. When I looked at his draft, it almost seemed to have been written by a different author with a style entirely unlike the impersonal technical character of David's previous work.

I asked David how he felt about his draft. David had succeeded in writing closer to a way which felt right to him, but there were still two problems. First, the freewriting on trust, personal risk and privacy helped David develop a set of internal criteria from which he could decide what he was willing to share, but did not help him decide what was appropriate to share in a given writing situation. Second, David felt constrained by writing conventions and the English language.

At this point, I gave David two external criteria to inform his writing: purpose and audience. David had been writing to himself, for himself. He had trouble writing for an abstract general audience. His instructor, as I understand, did not specify an audience and purpose, so I had him imagine them. I described possible types of audiences, and suggested he imagine people he actually knew as his audience.

Furthermore, we both realized he needed to bridge his personal and abstract ideas over to his audience more effectively. David complained that the conventions and rules of prescribed English grammar constrained and interfered with his writing. The range of words available in the English language do not adequately describe the full range of human experience or at least not to David. I explained that sometimes the context itself can provide meaning. I also suggested he use more metaphors and encouraged him to invent words by combining morphemes. I suggested three guidelines for breaking prescriptive grammatical rules: first, will the breaking of rules detract from the readability of the text, in other words, would he risk losing his audience? Second, does the breaking of rules accomplish a specific purpose or goal? Third, I suggested that he should know what rule he s breaking and the purpose of the rule (if any).

Another important step I took as I tutored David over the semester was sharing some of my own writing with him. I ve never before done this with any client. I decided to share my writing with him for several reasons. David reached out to me for help and committed himself to my care. He chose to trust me and took the risk of sharing highly personal aspects of his life. I wanted to reciprocate. I offered David two examples of my writing in which I treated personal aspects of my life in a creative way. I have found that reading the writing of others with whom I have a rapport has helped with my own writing. I hoped the same would prove true for David. I told him to read my papers only if he had the time. He accepted my writing samples eagerly and told me he read them.

One characteristic of my personal writing is that I usually construct a central message clearly discernible to most readers a quality which David's writing never quite developed. The high level of abstraction remained in his essays throughout the semester. I came to realize, though, that this abstraction was not necessarily a problem it was part of his style. His writing was nonlinear and highly symbolic, and it had a definite polysemic quality. David knew the general theme of his paper and had definite ideas, but simply could not provide his readers with pat answers. A reader could tell that David's papers had a center of gravity he was getting at something, but it was not always clear what. His conclusions were unresolved. Readers had to draw their own conclusion. David's personal writing created questions, not answers. However, through his writing, he dug deeply into the human psyche. He looked at slippery philosophical and psychological issues, and discovered much about himself. One of my tasks as his tutor was to help him keep his writing from floating away entirely.

David is a deep thinker. He is a man in search of answers to questions like: Who am I? What does it mean to be human? His changes in writing style have been reflected, at least to some degree, in other areas of his life. For example, he had been making progress toward a degree in engineering, but has told me he is considering changing his major to counseling instead.

Tutoring David has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my undergraduate tutoring career. His writing started influencing my own. I found myself writing in a more nonlinear fashion on some writing tasks, with unresolved conclusions. As a tutor, I learned several important lessons on how to handle the overlapping role as a counselor, and how to help a client break through a wall of self-censorship.