Tutor reports on writing consultations are seemingly indigenous to writing center culture, yet their audiences and functions are, to borrow a phrase from Muriel Harris, "as varied as the students who stream in and out" of the center ("Talking" 27). Conversations at conferences and on the WCenter listserv, as well as writing…

As the population of international--and particularly Chinese--students grows in US academic institutions, it is critical that writing center tutors be able to address these students' needs. However, whereas writing tutors at the author's institution are often taught to be indirect and focus on higher order concerns, such strategies are not always…

Andrea, a doctoral student in education, has a demanding schedule. She has a young child, a job, a house on the market, and a spouse who travels so much that she can only see him on certain weekends. To cope with these unavoidable distractions to her research, she found the writing center and was paired with a fellow graduate student, Charisse.…

The writing center where the authors were trained and currently work emphasizes the model of non-directive, writer-based peer tutoring in which, as Jeff Brooks puts it, tutors "make the student the primary agent in the writing center session." As undergraduate peer tutors, they recognize that some students come into their writing center with goals…

This is a story of a failed study. In 2007, the authors set out to demonstrate that Kurzweil 3000, an adaptive text-to-speech software program, would help any student revise with its read-aloud function and numerous writing tools. During the course of the study, the authors confronted their misconceptions about students' technology use and…

In 1998, Catherine Prendergast observed that, although composition scholars sometimes identify a subject by race or ethnicity, "the legacy of racism in this country which participates in sculpting all identities--white included--is more often than not absent from the analysis of that writer's linguistic capabilities or strategies." Since then,…

Writing center tutors play a key role in advancing L2 writers' language learning because the tutorial interaction involves the introduction of new language and vocabulary at the point of need or interest. This tutor-research case study presents a detailed, complex portrait of how a second language writer in a US writing center learned and used…

This essay presents case studies of "course-based tutoring" (CBT) and one-to-one tutorials in two sections of developmental first-year composition (FYC) at a large West Coast research university. The author's study uses a combination of rhetorical and discourse analyses and ethnographic and case study multi-methods to investigate both the scenes…

Michael Mattison's "Someone to Watch Over Me: Reflection and Authority in the Writing Center" explores the problem of audience for tutors' reflective writing. In Mattison's case, tutoring practices and learning are undermined because reflective writing leads consultants to feel as though they are being spied upon by the writing center director.…

Through the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), the authors have set out to explore and document what peer tutors take with them from their training and experience. The Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project has made it possible for the authors to sample and analyze more systematically the reflections of 126 former tutors from…

One of the virtues of writing centers is that they compensate for the alienation of writing. If the canonical literate encounter is one where writer and reader meet only through the medium of the text, then the writing center consultation restores immediacy to written communication. Like an author-attended rehearsal, writing center consultation…

Writing centers are places not only of practices and policies but also of inquiry. Increasingly, research conducted in writing centers is informing the theoretical bases as well as the day-to-day goings-on in our various local contexts. In turn, the situated daily activity of each writing center as well as the theory or principles behind it…

Janangelo's article "The Polarities of Context in the Writing Center Conference" appeared in "WCJ" in 1988, and in that piece, one he wrote as a graduate student at New York University, Jangangelo identifies what to the author is likely the central tension in writing center work: local versus general context. While other authors have explored the…

"The Function of Talk in the Writing Conference: A Study of Tutorial Conversation" is, the author thinks, an excellent example of what a well-designed analytical study of conversational narratives can reveal. People in this field have long made the claim--anecdotally, for the most part--that writing center tutors occupy a liminal space between…

In 1991 when Diana George, Ed Lotto, and the author were publishing their first issue as "WCJ" editors, this multivoiced essay struck her as a prime example of their editorial belief that writing centers could be "agents of change in the academy." As Gail Okawa and Tom Fox observe, "Most universities are inhospitable to more democratic definitions…