For many years, writing centers have been viewed as grammar “fix-it” shops, in which the focus of a tutorial is simply to fix spelling, grammar, and structural “flow” before sending students on their way (Murphy and Sherwood). This could not be further from the writing center pedagogy of today, and from my own philosophy on tutoring. My tutoring philosophy stems from Stephen North’s statement that “in a writing center the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. In axiom form it goes like this: our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 438). To achieve this, I work with writers on the basis that they are individuals, with their own individual ways of learning and writing.
My focus on the individuality of students incorporates the expressivism approach to tutoring, which places emphasis on “the individuality of the writer’s voice” and “on writing as a means to discovering one’s own individual truth and expression in that truth in writing” (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 34). In the world of academia, writers often feel pressured to conform to academic writing standards in a way that makes them feel they have to suppress their voice within their writing. As a tutor, I encourage students to develop their voices within their writing, showing them how doing so can make their writing more meaningful to both themselves and to the academic community as a whole.
By adapting my tutoring strategies to suit the individual writer, we are able to work through collaboration to provide strategies that go beyond just addressing problems in their piece of writing. In this form of collaboration, the inherent aspect of conversation within writing plays an important part. When we write, it is with a specific audience (or audiences) in mind. This works to create a conversation between the writer and their intended audience. As Kenneth Bruffee describes, “Writing is at once both two steps away from conversation and a return to conversation (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 329). In my tutorials, I help writers to move forward in developing their conversation through taking on the role of their audience(s). In this way, I provide a different perspective for writers on their writing, while at the same time teaching them how to take a step back from their work to view it from this outside perspective.
My goal for every tutorial is that writers leave the tutorial equipped with new information and strategies for writing that will help them in the future, while also feeling more confident in themselves as a writer.