Tools of the trade

by Linda Chaffee-Kirby

Last Christmas morning, I inadvertently nuked a pair of microwaveable slippers that my husband had unwrapped just minutes before. Unfortunately, I didn't just nuke them, but cooked the chemicals right out of them and into the very fabric of my living, dining, and family rooms. I spent the rest of my holiday in fear that the EPA would be paying me a visit and I would be forced to admit that I hadn't read the instructions first. But as usual my friend Derik could be counted on to give me a philosophical excuse for my behavior by saying, "I've always felt reading instructions first is a form of cheating anyway." I couldn't agree more. I have yet to accept that instructions are put there not for my frustration, or to test my patience, but for my ease and comfort, as a tool to be used for the purpose it was intended--to preserve what little sanity (and in the case of the slippers, air quality) I have left.

Since I have always been what my friends endearingly call "technically challenged," the idea of utilizing a specific tool for a specific purpose was never quite clear to me. Whatever was handy or took the least time would do. I could just as easily use the handle of a screwdriver or the heel of my shoe to pound in a nail. A tool was just a tool. That is until I came to work as a tutor (or Writing Assistant) in the writing center a year and a half ago. I knew I would be working one-on-one with students and their writing, but I didn't foresee having to know the appropriate tool to be used with each particular situation and student. And I was also about to discover, as I had with the slippers, that tools come in many forms.

In my own writing, I rely on a few, comfortable, tempered, and well worn implements that work for me. But in trying to help other writers, knowing when to pull out those shiny, new, unfamiliar ones in order to help someone else in their writing was intimidating at first. Even though each of us tutoring in the Writing Center comes recommended by one or more professors for our writing ability, we spend one full semester being trained in how to use various theories, methods, and strategies for helping students discover which tools work best for them. During the course, we are inundated with strategies for helping students learn methods of invention, cohesion, and development by using tools such as Burke's Pentad, The Ladder of Abstraction, the TRIAC, and the "funnel" to name a few. We had to ask ourselves such questions as: What particular problem is this student having? How does his/her individual personality and way of thinking evidence itself in writing? Is he/she visually oriented? ESL? A good writer who is unable to grasp the proper use of prepositions--in Washington, not at Washington? How do we explain the difference most of us English majors seem to know inherently but are unable to explain HOW we know? We also had to ask ourselves what role we played as individual tutors in relation to classroom instruction.

Unlike classroom instruction, tutoring, by its own definition, is personal, private, and individual. It is unique in that it is essentially collaborative, and each tutor must adapt him/herself to individual clients' needs on a paper-by-paper basis. Texas Christian Univeristy professor Christina Murphy says, "The relationship a student forms with a tutor differs from those formed with classroom teachers in that it is voluntary, more personal, and aimed at solving the student's problems" (The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 43). In order to give additional or special instruction, a tutor must be trained in all the theories, methods, and strategies available. What works well for one student might not work for another. For instance, the simple yet important strategy of prewriting can be done in a variety of ways: freewriting, clustering, webbing, and outlining. People who are visually oriented tend to find clustering or webbing most useful in trying to focus on a particular idea or subject. Clustering helps organize ideas into visual categories of priority or relevance to the topic. Those who are not visually oriented find it takes more time to "draw" something than to say it. Clustering and webbing can be visually confusing and disorganized to those who feel themselves to be "free thinkers" as well as free writers who like to allow their thoughts to flow without having to relegate them to a particular cluster or web of ideas--at least at this particular stage of the writing process.

Over time, as tutors are trained in various methods and strategies and begin to practice them in the Writing Center, it is all too human to become once again comfortable with particular tools that seem to "work" if not for the student, at least for the tutor. Certain tools become rusty due to lack of use, some get temporarily set aside, and some get put away altogether. This could be very discouraging if not for what I feel to be the most important and valuable tool of the Writing Center--the tutors themselves; the diversity in personality, writing style, and the methods and strategies employed by each. Each one brings a very individual, unique, personal, and valuable view of the writing process. The Writing Center might well be viewed as a microcosm of the University--staffed with traditional and nontraditional students, graduates and undergraduates, History majors, Philosophy majors, male and female, all with the same desire to help others in their desire to become better writers, whatever their discipline. Muriel Harris, leading writing center theorist and author of Teaching One-to-One, describes tutors as

mentors, teachers, therapists, editors, midwives, coaches, grammarmeisters, nurturers, diagnosticians, guides, facilitators, rescuers, advisors, consultants, and allies. (The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 5)

When to wear what hat and use which tool is as individual as the Writing Assistant using it. Intuition plays a big part in this, and most of the Writing Assistants, when asked to contribute to this article, were hard pressed to describe their individual processes to me. For instance, veteran Writing Assistant Kathy Baxter says her particular tutoring style is "more instinctual than concretual." (Kathy also doubles as the Writing Center wordsmith). Kathy's main priority is in "having a relationship with tutoring situations," and she spends time dealing with clients' emotional reactions to their writing when she feels it is necessary or appropriate. Kathy also believes that eye contact is an important tool in helping her establish a working rapport quickly and is helpful in building trust between tutor and client.

Last semester, Kathy found that eye contact was particularly essential when she worked with a deaf ASL student who brought her own interpreter to the tutoring sessions. During her sessions, the interpreter was virtually nonexistent for Kathy. By maintaining eye contact and speaking directly to the student, Kathy was able not only to conduct a normal one-on-one tutoring session, but also to allow the student her dignity and independence in the tutoring situation. Kathy also believes that humor is a useful tool in helping clients relax and gain perspective. She has even admitted to resorting to the left side of her brain occasionally and using does/says analysis (especially for Write Project responses) and the TRIAC.

Linguistics major Jennifer Ledford also worked with an ASL student last semester. This particular client had a speech impairment but did not have an interpreter. Jennifer says she was fortunate in that her client was used to communicating with people who don't know how to sign, and was patient in teaching her the sign alphabet. Jennifer was able to reply out loud, and to ask rather closed questions allowing the client a narrower range of what she needed to communicate back. Jennifer would make guesses as to what the client was trying to express and would stop when she "got it right." When talking casually, Jennifer felt they could converse quite easily through a mixture of hand gestures, guesses, and hand spelling, but when it came to discussing the process of writing, Jennifer felt she had to "introduce whole new paradigms." Still Jennifer feels that by reading and explaining her client's particular assignments, she gave individual and special attention to the client's writing (and perhaps even socializing) needs.

"By far the tool I use most often is Jay King's Ladder of Abstraction, and less frequently his funnel illustration" Jennifer says. Jennifer believes both these tools are useful when the session isn't going well, the client is frustrated, or the tutor is unable "to make a diagnosis." These visual tools help the client understand and see clearly what she suggests for their draft. Jennifer also uses her knowledge of linguistics to help clients understand grammar, of which she feels verbs are most important. "This is key to their understanding of sentence boundaries and, therefore, punctuation."

On the other hand, Derik Casper, an English/Philosophy major, offers a simple visual outline that clients can follow: a multi-paragraph flowchart for developing writing. Derik begins with a diamond shape with the word topic at the top point and thesis at the bottom, then goes on to a square with an inverted triangle below it. The square represents the general information backing up the topic and thesis, and the triangle represents examples, quotes, analysis and illustrations. This is followed by another diamond shape representing specific information regarding the above, and the final shape is a circle representing a new insight based on the information and research. Derik finds that this tool works best for most people in that it not only offers a visual depiction, but also a description to go along with it. Some tools are even more personalized and unique, as in the case of Jonathan Pierson, whose personal arsenal includes, curiously enough, the ever-present 52 oz. Pepsi. Since he is constantly sipping from it, he says it is a convenient excuse to go to the men's room when he feels his client "needs a little time to him/herself to write on the paper. The client gets a chance to sit quietly and concentrate on the paper without the rushed feeling that I'm sitting, waiting, or wandering around in the other room." Jonathan also asks a lot of questions to get an idea of not only what the client was supposed to do with the assignment, but what he/she would like to do.

One very important tool, as Jonathan points out, is excitement. Oftentimes students who come to the Writing Center either don't like their writing or they have gotten bored with the paper and their ideas. Jonathan says, "I try to get excited about their writing--gesture, get expressive in voice--try to show interesting directions they can take their ideas."

Writing emphasis major Gadrie Edmunds uses humor as a favorite tool, laughing at herself and allowing clients to see the tutor as humanly fallible. "I think it's important to laugh at humorous papers. Not laughing at mistakes, but laughing where they're laughing at something. I think it's important to show that we're fallible and peers to the clients, not over them in any way. If I call myself a big geek, then maybe clients will relax and feel better about being in the Writing Center."

A big problem for writing centers is clients feeling as if they are outsiders, inadequate in some way in their writing, and that in coming to the Writing Center, they are publicly admitting to this "deficiency." In a recent staff meeting, the metaphor of viewing the writing center as a separate planet on campus surfaced. Clients oftentimes feel themselves to be "aliens" to the Writing Center and its seemingly expert staff. We realized, with more than a little astonished humor, that we actually have them fill out "green cards" (our attempt at recordkeeping) when they visit. Tilly Eggers of the University of Alabama says of most writing center clients:

they do not see themselves as writers, not as writers in their future jobs and not even as writers in the classes for which they write papers, exams, and reports. They do not see themselves as part of the literate community. . . (Writing Centers: Theory and Administration 199).

And so in addition to more "tangible" tools of the trade that we learn through the E303 class, there are also the more intangible ones that tutors must discover for themselves in their own process of becoming--ways to make clients feel more at home, at ease, and part of a whole campus of writers rather than an outsider or an alien to the process of writing. Like writing, tutoring is also a process, a craft, an artform. It evolves with experience, wisdom, and experimentation. It is hard to measure in a quantitative sense, but for individual tutors, the values that bring them to the Writing Center in the first place--the personal satisfaction of helping others with their writing-- is reward in itself. The tools that each of us brings to the Writing Center are as unique as the tutor him/herself. We often do become specialized in certain areas of tutoring such as English as a second language, the Teacher Education Writing Assessment, linguistics, grammar, punctuation, etc.; it is an inevitable part of the job. Some tools will have a keener edge than others due to relentless sharpening, but others are available and within arm's reach. We sometimes wish it was as easy as switching tool belts when we feel we've become too comfortable with our own. Being forced occasionally to use what is awkward or less familiar can help in that evolution of individual tutors. In my own case, the habit of reading instructions has now become more familiar with use since Christmas. Two days spent suffering through what felt like chemical warfare will do that. I still don't like it, it's awkward, and it still feels like cheating somehow, but I am learning the more practical and efficient application of tools--even at my age.

Works Cited Murphy, Christina and Steve Sherwood, ed. "The Tutoring Process: Exploring Paradigms and Practices. " The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Gary A. Olson, ed. Writing Centers: Theory and Administration. Wilmongton: University of North Carolina, 1984.

This issue was edited by Kathy Baxter and Jonathan Pierson