Writing center tutors know that improving writing skills requires sustained effort over a long period of time. They also know that motivation--the drive to actively invest in sustained effort toward a goal--is essential for writing improvement. Because motivation can direct attention toward particular tasks and increase both effort and…

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…

Much writing center assessment literature focuses on the deep importance of local, institutional context. Still, a tension exists in the field more generally, and in assessment research specifically, between a reliance on local practice and a reliance on shared lore (Driscoll and Perdue; Thompson et al.). This tension can be fruitfully examined…

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…

Writers who do not speak English as a native language perennially have presented unique challenges to the writing center, for these writers, who study English as a second language (ESL), or even as a third or fourth foreign language (EFL), may also be unacquainted with American academic discourse. ESL/EFL writers may face unfamiliarity with…

Because writing centers have long been viewed as fix-it shops, mentioning the word "grammar" can spark a heated debate over the writing center's role. A brief history of the most recent grammar wars begins with researchers in the 1960s who found that "formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in…

This study directly compares face-to-face writing center consultations with two closely related variations of Online Writing Instruction (OWI). Although the study takes place in a busy, dynamic writing center, the authors try to make their comparisons as systematic as possible so they can better foreground some of the benefits and disadvantages of…

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…

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…

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…

Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses--where they are with a piece of writing and where writing tutors' experience tells them they need to be in order to succeed in…

Tutoring and conferencing have assumed important instructional roles as composition theory and practice have shifted from product-centered to process-centered approaches. The benefits of conferencing (Reigstad), of peer tutoring (Bruffee), of professional tutoring (Franke), and of group collaboration (Nystrand) have been presented and supported.…