College of Arts and Sciences 

By Dr. Ann Green
Founding Director of the Writing Center

Writing as Social Practice
A year ago most of my days went like this. Wake up. Make coffee. Drink coffee. Write. Drink more coffee. Stop writing. Drink more coffee. Teach. Grade papers. Drink a beer. Sleep and dream about writing. I was deeply involved in the process of writing a dissertation about writing, social class, and academic discourse. When I wasn't writing, I was often talking about writing with people--my committee, my friends, my parents, the students in my classes, my house mates and landlord.

Talk was a crucial part of the process for me. When I stalled writing my exam papers, my chair told me to go free write. When I struggled with an argument, my third reader coached me via email. My significant other cooked dinner for me and let me talk through chapters looking for structures and organization. Friends read drafts of chapters. When chapters came back from the committee, colleagues read their comments, and we discussed ways of interpreting them. I would never have finished my dissertation except for the conversations that I had with other people about writing.

When I ask my first year students about writing, they tend to think that a good writer writes faster and revises less than a "bad" writer does. A good writer, I am told, is one who does not need help from anyone else, someone who knows what to do and when to do it. The opposite, of course, is true.

More experienced writers tend to spend more time with their texts than less experienced writers. An experienced writer has developed strategies for writing, ways of getting through the process. An experienced writer might know that the first day of any writing project involves sharpening pencils, lining them up in rows, and pacing because it's a necessary step of his prewriting process. An experienced writer might recognize the possibilities involved in what I call a "random dump" draft, a draft that is then reorganized and shaped during the next stage of the writing process. An experienced writer knows that writing is always work. An experienced writer will often seek out another reader for a text before it is submitted for grading or publishing. An experienced writer revises.

Some days, writing can be like the zone you get into during one of those (for me, anyway) rare basketball games where it seems like you can hit a shot from anywhere on the court. Some days you hit your stride and get lost in the flow of paragraphs and words. But most days, even for the most experienced writers, it just ain't like this. Some days I would rather do anything than write, including clean out the refrigerator and assign grades to student essays. (Don't mistake me here. I like/enjoy/love reading and responding to student essays. It's the act of grading that I find onerous and loathsome. But this is a topic for another newsletter.) Writing is work. One of the members of my committee remarked he wished computers were cheaper because when he writes he almost always wants to throw one through a window. Writing is really hard work. However, writing doesn't have to be isolating work. Writing is a social process that involves readers. Writers in search of readers can find them in the Writing Center.

What is the Writing Center? Against the Isolation of the Attic
If you ask a class of students to describe what a writer looks like, the response you generally get is a cross between William Faulkner and Edgar Allan Poe. A writer, always a he, works in a cold, dark place. A writer is disconnected from material reality. He doesn't know what he's wearing or if he's paid the light bill because he's always thinking about his "next great book." A writer is messy, smokes a pipe, and drinks like a fish. The Great Man Suffers For His Art in Isolation. His Genius is misunderstood; he works through inspiration. These modernist ideas of a writer are undercut by the realities of most writers' lives. (Yes, Faulkner and Poe were drunks. However, Bill didn't write the screenplay to To Have and Have Not because of inspiration. He got a check.) The Writing Center works against these modernist notions and emphasizes the collaborative aspect of any piece of writing. Because any writing--except perhaps the most private journals--is for readers, the Writing Center provides readers who can offer responses to texts.

Located in Bellarmine 129, The Writing Center is a place where writers can come to talk about writing and experience a live respondent to their texts. Currently, the SJU Writing Center houses eleven "Writing Fellows." These Writing Fellows are undergraduates who enrolled in "Writing Fellows: Peer Tutoring and Practice" during the fall. Writing Fellows work with faculty in English, philosophy and theology. We're hoping to expand the Writing Fellows program next year to include Fellows in the sciences and social sciences as well. Writing Fellows tutor students from any class, and also work specifically with students from the classes of cooperating teachers. In addition to the Writing Fellows, currently five English department faculty spend one hour per week tutoring students in the Center. Some of the most productive moments in the Writing Center have been when English department faculty have brought their own texts--a dictionary entry, a scholarly article--into the Center and talked with Fellows about them. Seeing their teachers as writers (and as writers who struggle), is important, particularly in a Writing Across the Curriculum Program where we are all both teachers of writing and writers.

Tutoring Writing as a Recursive Process
Writing Fellows and writing center tutors will tutor at any stage of the writing process--from prewriting and brainstorming to the final edit. We don't "proofread" student essays or "correct" their grammar. We will show students how to proofread, and we will talk with them about "patterns of error" as their drafts approach their final revisions. Our focus, however, is always on higher order concerns--organization, structure, and argument; support, detail, and content. Because the most experienced writers need readers, we work with all levels of writers and all kinds of writing.

When a student is asked to write a paper in a new discipline or to write a paper that synthesizes complex information, often, even a student who is normally an extremely fluid and fluent writer, will fall apart on the sentence level. Research in Composition has found that correcting grammatical errors at this stage does not have a significant impact on improving student writing.
In other words, as a writer becomes more familiar (to use the jargon) with the conventions of the discourse community or discipline s/he is writing into, the writing itself-in style, content, and grammar-improves. When we ask students to write in new ways, consider new concepts, and think critically about difficult or unfamiliar material, we should expect to see some regression on the sentence level.

In my own experience as a writer, I know that I still write run-on sentences in rough drafts; particularly when the ideas are cooking, and I'm thinking faster than I can write. Writing is not series of skills that college age students should already know, but a content area which requires on-going exploration. Because of this, the Writing Center is not a storehouse of grammar handouts or a fix-it shop where new mufflers can be added to papers while you wait.
No matter what is taught in a first year writing course, students (and faculty) will not be immunized against bad sentences because they can't be. Students can simply be introduced to some of the writing tasks they'll encounter in the college curriculum and on the job. Learning to write is an ongoing process. This is the theory behind Writing Across the Curriculum programs: the teaching of writing must take place throughout a college career in different disciplines to facilitate effective written communication in different rhetorical situations. Compositionist Jim Berlin argued, ""In the era of flexible accumulation, workers who hope to earn an adequate wage must perform multiple tasks, train on the job, and work well with others--requiring at once more adaptability and responsibility than under a Fordist mode" (44). It is not enough for a student to know a rule like "The thesis belongs in the first paragraph," because in certain rhetorical situations, that rule is not enough. A writer must understand the context she is writing into and be able to manipulate that context for different audiences.

What we can do in the Writing Center is show someone how to do a tune up or change the wires if the paper is "missing." We can also-but this takes more time-show someone how to rebuild an engine or do body work if this is what the paper needs. However, as you know if you've worked on your own car or even changed your own oil, knowing the theory of how an internal combustion engine works and how to apply it to a different make and model takes practice. If you get a new car or if your car has a problem you haven't encountered before, you have to learn a new approach. If a peer can coach a student into a new organization or facilitate a new approach to an assignment, then the student may develop his or her own strategies and approaches to global revision. If a tutor can talk about her own writing process with a student, the student is more clearly able to see that the process of writing is not seamless or linear. If a tutor can demonstrate that you don't always brainstorm before you write, and sometimes you brainstorm in the middle of a draft, a student can come away from the tutorial with a more complicated idea of the writing.

What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Writing?
In "The Idea of the Writing Center," Stephen M. North argues "Our job is to produce better writers not better writing." (The full text of this essay is available from The Writing Center.) I interpret this to mean that we encourage students to take risks with their writing and to stretch beyond the familiar ground of the five paragraph theme.

If a student brings in a draft that is perfectly argued but does not deal with the complexity of texts the piece is addressing (or it's just plain boring), we might encourage the writer to talk about what she thinks about the class, the assignment, and the readings. If it's a good conversation and there's time for revision, she might talk her away into a more complicated idea that she then can revise her draft to incorporate. This does not always produce a "better" text in terms of style or organization, although it probably will in terms of content and thinking. And, if the student receives positive reinforcement for her attempts to grow as a writer, she might begin a paradigm shift in her thinking about writing.

If a student comes in with no idea of how to approach an assignment, we might help him get started and encourage him to write an exploratory draft. We might then look at it with him to see what a possible thesis might be. We encourage everyone to "write to learn," to write as a way of discovering meaning and insight, and we try to recognize and validate the variety of processes that writers might employ as they approach different writing tasks. An important component of this is that a student has ownership of his or her own text. We can make suggestions for improvement, but it is up to the writer to decide which suggestions to use and how to use them (if at all). If you want to drive an Edsel (or in my case, a lovely Ford Escort) the decision is up to you.

What Can the Writing Center Do for You? (And What You Can Do for the Center)
In a Writing Across the Curriculum programs, the Writing Center (and its director) can serve as resources for faculty that assign writing in their classrooms. We encourage you to assign writing, and we can help you define writing assignments that will meet your pedagogical goals. In concrete terms, we will provide outreach programs for your classrooms on writing; help you design rough draft workshops for student papers; brainstorm assignments and assignment sheets; and, depending on availability, provide you with a Writing Fellow who will specifically assist your students with writing assignments. All you need to do is fill out the form at the bottom of this newsletter and drop it in campus mail, and we'll be in touch with you.

You can help the Writing Center by letting students know about us and by encouraging them to visit us early in the writing process. Students can also visit the Learning Resource Center to talk about writing. The writing consultants there were trained as Writing Fellows last year. The LRC hours compliment ours, and together we provide 33 hours of tutoring four days a week. Please do not require students to come to the Center. You may recommend, suggest, or cajole, but we have found that tutoring is much more effective when students choose it. If you work to dispel the myth of the writer-as-isolated-individual in your classroom, you will do much to promote the Center.

Coda: Still Talking About Writing
Now most of my days go like this. Wake up. Drink coffee from the Starbuck's cart on the Bellarmine landing. Write a memo about the Writing Center. Answer email about the Writing Center. Schedule class visits and demonstrations with cooperating faculty. Open the Writing Center. Talk to tutees about the writing they're doing. Talk to tutors about their writing. Drink coffee. Talk to tutors about tutoring. Teach. Talk with faculty about teaching. Answer more email. Submit an abstract to the National Writing Center Conference via email. Tutor a student. Conference with first year students. Encourage students to visit the Writing Center. Go pick up interlibrary loan books. Think about writing. Think about writing the over-due article that the interlibrary loan books are for. Write an assignment sheet for the Craft of Language.

The only thing that I would change about this day (except for slightly more decafé) is that I would like to spend more time on my own writing. Thus, I have an invitation for those of you who write or who are writing. If you would like to form a writing group that meets regularly (or semi-regularly) in the Writing Center to discuss drafts of work in progress, note that interest on the tear off form on the bottom of the newsletter. I'll organize a first meeting, and we can go from there. After all, if we are to teach writing, we must write. And it is much easier to write with readers than to return to our own academic attics (or Ivory tower offices) and suffer in solidute.

Works Consulted
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1890-1985.

Brodkey, Linda. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only.

North, Stephen M. "The Idea of a Writing Center."