Contents
Cal Poly Pomona

Faculty: UWC News: Better Writers


From Writing Center News Fall 2002
Better Writers and Better Papers
By John Edlund

The Writing Center often gets calls from faculty with questions about student papers. Most of the time, these are questions about Writing Center services, student referrals, and student problems such as suspected plagiarism. Sometimes the caller has a complaint. All calls and questions, including complaints, are welcome, because they help us explain and improve our services.

The most common complaint we receive is that the instructor sent the student to the Writing Center, but the paper wasn’t error free when it came back. I want to take this opportunity to explain a bit about Writing Center pedagogy and why this might happen.

In “The Idea of a Writing Center,” an influential article published in College English back in 1984, Stephen North argues strongly against the view that the writing center is a grammar and drill center, a fix-it shop or a first aid station. Instead, he argues that the focus should be on the writers, and not on their texts, and that the job of the writing center is “to produce better writers, not better writing.” This long-term, student-centered approach has defined writing center pedagogy since the early 1980’s.

Of course, this does not mean that we ignore the paper at hand. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that Stephen North’s slogan could be re-written to say “Better writers and better writing.”

The tutor begins by asking the student about the assignment, and skimming the paper. Tutors are trained to respond to the writing on three levels:

  1. a global approach that takes such things as the assignment, the thesis, the arguments, the evidence, and the format into consideration;
  2. a sentence-level approach that works on readability, style, sentence structure, and punctuation; and
  3. a grammatical approach that works on recurring problems in grammatical systems.
In most cases, the tutor will not have time in 30 minutes to deal with all problems at all levels, so in the initial minutes of the session, the tutor will decide which are the most pressing problems and negotiate an agenda for the conference.

The tutor works mostly by asking questions, pointing to problems, and making suggestions. Tutors are taught not to mark on papers in most cases. The writer makes decisions about revisions and corrections, based on the feedback from the tutor. In the process, the writer learns about his or her problems, and the individual paper does improve. But it does not become perfect, and a failing paper is more likely to become a “C” than an “A.”

Ideally, the writer revises the paper and comes back for more feedback. We often work with writers over several quarters, with writing from many different courses, and that “A” paper may be achievable several sessions in the future. Improving writing skills takes time, effort and commitment, but it can be done.



Go back to News List-->