University Writing CenterThe UWC has a 65-page training manual that covers tutoring strategies, language acquisition theory, sentence structures, punctuation, and many other issues. However, in the hustle and bustle of actual tutoring, some of the principles taught in this lengthy manual can be forgotten. For this reason, seven basic guidelines for tutors are posted in various locations throughout the center.
A friendly, collegial environment is essential to a successful writing center. Students must be greeted quickly when they enter the center, their questions answered with a smile, and their needs met to the best of the center’s ability. Clericals, tutors, and other staff must work to ensure that students feel important and welcome.
The tutor needs to understand the writing assignment, the student’s questions and concerns, and the instructor’s comments and pedagogical goals. A tutor who doesn’t listen may miss the point of the assignment and the writing. Tutoring is not the same as teaching, but the teaching model is hard for some tutors to avoid, especially when the student is shy and quiet. Tutors learn that letting a silence in the conversation grow a little beyond what we are normally comfortable with sometimes results in allowing a student to ask an important question.
This guideline is perhaps the most difficult to follow, but it is also very important. It is easy for most tutors to sit down with a paper, mark all of the errors, and write in all of the corrections and revisions. Writing on the paper seems like the quickest way to cover all of the problems. However, the student may not understand any of the corrections, and may not learn from the process. The tutor’s role is to call attention to grammatical and rhetorical problems, and make suggestions. The student’s role is to make decisions and implement them. If the student makes the corrections, the tutor can see exactly what the student understood. It is a slower process, but a more effective one in terms of learning.
This is related to the guideline above. Tutors do not write papers, paragraphs, or even sentences for students. They do not put unknown words in students’ mouths, but help them find words they know. Tutoring is necessarily collaborative, but the purpose is to help the student perform at a higher level.
UWC tutors are peer tutors, working in a variety of disciplines. It is not possible for them to know the answers to all of the questions students may have. For this reason, the UWC has a library of dictionaries, handbooks and reference works to consult when difficult questions come up.
Writing center tutors often encounter papers in which sections are technically plagiarized due to insufficient paraphrase or a lack of documentation. In this case, the tutor gives the writer a copy of our plagiarism handout and teaches the student how to appropriately document the sources.
This last guideline is the essence of writing center work. We don’t want students to be forever dependent on the writing center for assistance. We want them to grow as writers, to understand their errors and problems, to gain in confidence and their ability to express their ideas. Not all students want to improve. Some are focused on the paper at hand, and what grade it will get. We do our best to satisfy their concerns. The paper improves, but over the long term, the writer improves too.
