A few comments and questions.

Before I began writing this piece I thought about what I was going to write, how I would write it, and finally, how many times I would be willing to revise it before publishing it. After I finish the first draft I’ll probably look over it about five times to check for any mistakes, and even then I probably won’t consider it done. Is doing this at all neurotic? Yes. Are these practices likely to result in “good writing?” Probably.

Whenever I write anything I go through a thorough process of planning, drafting, and revision. Most sentences have been looked at individually, and some words are even weighed for their particular potency. While most, if not all, tutors in the Writing Center could effectively argue that my writing is sub-par, the fact that this piece has been taken through most of the necessary motions is indelible.

The writing process that I have described so far is common knowledge for most tutors, but I am afraid that it will not be so for most of the Center’s tutees. Writing should be a process involving thought, originality, and above all, work ethic. This ethic is what separates the Stienbecks from the Steeles. What are the best methods for tutoring somebody who doesn’t want to work at their writing and craft their paper into something that does more than just meet their professor’s 750 word assignment on “anything that interests you?” How do you convince a tutee to care about those words that they are randomly blasting out onto the page?

I would like to shift the emphasis away from emergency triage and move it in the direction of neural surgery. As writing center tutors we should try harder than simply stopping the bleeding with band aids and cotton swabs. Let’s take out our scalpels. And lasers.

The validity of everything that I have written thus far hinges on yet another question that I have concerning our role as tutors. Are we writing coaches or writing repairmen? If the answer is that we fall into the latter category then I will have to re-evaluate my approach to this topic. Until this question is answered I will assume that we fit into the first. Perhaps the only one who can provide the answer is the tutee.


Another critical assumption that I am making right now is that I have the ability to take somebody’s paper and make it better than it was before they brought it to the Writing Center. I hope that I have this capacity but continually fret over the possibility that in making any such assumptions I am being presumptuous, elitist, and most importantly, wrong. Last week I laughed over some of the horrendous mistakes that other people had made but inside I remembered that I have made, and still make, the same messes. The only difference is that now, due to an ever-growing sense of self-consciousness and acute paranoia, I don’t let anybody see my foibles before I can fix them.