Writing Center Staff

The Curse of Stephen North
Todd Killmeyer
April 2003

In 1984 Stephen North wrote the essay “The Idea of a Writing Center.” It was an essay he wrote “out of frustration” (2) with how his fellow faculty members and the student body perceived his Writing Center. Many thought his Writing Center was a “Fix-it shop,” while others thought that they could simply drop off papers for staff members to work on, while they waited or pick them up like some sort of dry cleaning service. What particularly bothered North were the misperceptions that many of the members of his English department held and the difficulty in changing their false ideas about the Writing Center, “this false sense of knowing, makes it doubly hard to get a message through” (2). Unfortunately the sources of North’s frustrations have not ended with his article or through the passage of nineteen years. As a new peer tutor working in my university’s Writing Center, I find that I have inherited many of the problems North had. North had to deal with his fellow faculty members so it is only fitting that I stand here now in the face of my fellow students.

Like North, I too have students who believe I am a “fix-it shop” and expect me to write papers for them. Like in all things no matter how revolutionary someone tries to be he always ends up standing on the shoulders of those who came before him. Those who refuse to are fools and are wasting their time. I look to North and other writers of Writing Center essays for guidance but I see the most parallels to North. I feel this way because I now find myself in a position similar to the one North was in and also find myself searching for the same answers to the same questions, such as “Why do people think of the Writing Center in the way they do? Where do they get these ideas and how do we re-educate them?” Re-education. It sounds like I want to lock random students in a sensory deprivation chamber and brainwash them somehow. What I really want is to inform members of the University community, in my case students, what we really do.

Before I dive into the reasons I believe there are problems in the way people perceive the Writing Center, I should start as North did by saying, “you may [dismiss] my argument as the plaint of a ‘remedial’ teacher begging for respectability” (2), but unlike North I won’t agree that there is any truth to this statement. I already feel respected as someone trying to help others. I just think as writing tutors we can do so much more for our students if they know why we exist. I also believe we can reach out to more students who would truly benefit from the service we provide if they only truly knew what we did.

I agree with North that a good deal of the concept of the Writing Center comes from teachers in the classroom who think only the “bad” writers should go there. North’s friend thought “he would not recommend a student to the Center, he said ‘unless there were something like twenty-five errors per page’” (2). At first I thought that North might be exaggerating, that is until the other day. I worked with a freshman almost in tears because some “well intended” teacher picked apart her paper until there was nothing left, wrote some rather scathing and vague “insights” as to why her paper deserved the D+ (how generous--it was given a plus), and wrote at the bottom of the last page “Go to the Writing Center for help.” I was fairly shocked she actually showed up.

To some extent it was for vindication against the teacher, but ultimately she did want help. I don’t know which party was truly at fault for this run-in but because of the way her teacher tore her to shreds I needed to walk a very fine line in how I tutored her and looked for every last positive I could. I also had to attempt to explain phrases like “Vague,” “Sentence Structure,” and “Transition.” What do those phrases even mean? They sound like a copout for not wanting to actually explain why something could be written better, almost like saying, “Figure it out yourself.” I tried to convince her that anyone in the Writing Center would be happy to help her develop a style and that she was only a freshman and had plenty of time and chances to develop. It may be the teachers who feed into some of the Writing Center’s bad press but it is with the student that the battle is won or lost. Ultimately who cares what the teacher thinks, provided the student truly understands the Writing Center is there to help? However, this idealistic view of the tutor-student relationship is not always the one that exists. Sometimes a student’s idea of the Writing Center is so far gone that it is next to impossible to bring it back.

It has happened to all of us at one time or another: a student has come in with some off-the-wall idea of what the Writing Center is or should be. I say this with great authority because, despite the fact that I have only worked in the Writing Center for only one semester and have had only about thirty sessions or so, I have run across a few students to whom I would like to attribute the scientific term of being nuts. The squirrels love them. Anyway I don’t just arbitrarily call any student who doesn’t know what the Writing Center is all about nuts, just the ones who truly are.

Perhaps it would be more helpful if I describe the type of student to whom I am referring. North says a tutor should try to get the student past “Any given assignment--a class assignment, a law school application letter, an encyclopedia entry, a dissertation proposal” (1) and get them to develop good writing habits, not just a good grade. In one of my first sessions in the Writing Center I had the opportunity to try to do just that with a law school application. The student was an aspiring law school student who was sending in his application to the University of Pittsburgh for the fall semester. I initially thought that it would be a very straightforward sort of session where he would want to discuss the traditional conventions of writing an application, or perhaps he would simply want someone to look at it to ensure that the information was written in a coherent, easy-to-read format. Unfortunately, as soon as the session was about two minutes old, I realized this was not to be the case and he expected me to be “Mr. Fix-It” and edit all of his mistakes without even the slightest mention of improving his writing process. His one and only concern was getting into law school and I was only a means to an end.

This is a common perception of the Writing Center, and while I was greatly irritated at being turned into a living, breathing version of Microsoft’s Spellchecker, I had been prepared for this eventuality by my training the semester before. With my thorough understanding of how to turn around a situation such as this, I began to make him do more of the work than he was doing and started to pull some of the answers to my questions out of him. He didn’t seem to like this and when he got closer to me I realized why. It was early on Friday afternoon but this guy already smelled like he crushed a six-pack. So much for teaching the masses how to be more effective readers and writers. I wouldn’t trust this guy’s mental state to properly synopsize Green Eggs and Ham.

At this point I felt like totally giving up, but after another fifteen minutes of agonizing, tedious prompting I was able to finally get through this guy’s law school application (hurrah for the legal system). During the last five minutes of our session he pulled out another piece of paper that had something else written on it and despite the fact I was too afraid to ask what this was I had to. Apparently along with his law school application he needed to send in a short explanation as to why he had a criminal record (great) and it just so happened that he was busted for underage possession when his buddy got busted for D.U.I. (big shocker). While I went over his little paragraph that would undoubtedly convince some dean somewhere that he was worthy of becoming one of those entrusted with the legal system our country is so proud of, he tried to explain to me how he would never do such a thing and that the State Trooper had made a huge mistake.

I may sound a little jaded after this encounter but I think it is much more a case of having had reality smack me in the face. I’m a little more careful about having naïve feelings of saving the world with my pencil and my LB Brief. I learned from my lawyer friend that beyond all reasonable doubt not all students truly want to be helped more than just having someone do the work for them. It was quite sobering to think that not everyone who will ever sit down on the other side of the table will be a student trying to excel. It’s a lesson we should all be aware of. North certainly was. He had people simply dropping off papers at his Center. The Writing Center is seen by many as a place full of people willing to do their homework for them as opposed to help them do it themselves. That’s okay, but it needs to addressed. People need to be educated why we are here and one of the best places to stop this sort of thinking is in the Writing Center itself. Giving an inch is like giving a mile when you begin to edit a student’s paper. The student begins to expect that sort of service from you for the rest of the session and from future tutors. It has certainly happened to me.

ESL students are a different type of challenge than native speakers in that they may be entirely competent in idea formation and how they deliver those ideas. Often the difficulty lies within technical things like word usage and article placement. It is very easy to want to help them out by “fixing” the paper for them instead of actually tutoring and teaching something. Apparently one of my colleagues fell into this trap the other day and left me with a native Arabic speaker who expected me to finish cleaning up his vocabulary and verb usage. I found myself actually beginning to allow myself to be sucked into this trap when I stepped back and said to myself, “Self, if this guy wants an edited paper that’s fine but he’s going to learn why I’m doing every last thing that I’m doing if it kills me.” Fortunately despite the perceptions he had about my role, he was very receptive to my different style of tutoring and actually asked me some questions.

On the other hand, too many questions can be as detrimental as not enough. Some people out there think that the Writing Center is some sort of think tank where today’s Delphic Oracles sit around learning the wealth of knowledge amassed by the human race since the dawn of time. This has varying degrees: from the student who forgets that you haven’t necessarily read the book that he’s writing about for his General Writing class to the student who thinks you should know absolutely everything about the history of Greek philosophy. I’m sorry but to me I don’t know the difference between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. I’ve never had a class that went into it. It’s all Greek to me (sorry, had to).

A student studying the history of philosophy came into the Writing Center with a book about all of the great ancient Greek philosophers and a shiny new assignment to go with it. She had some rough material that she had started on and had it on her. Naturally I started by asking her if I could see it. Rather unnaturally she bluntly told me no. I thought I must have missed something so I asked her if I could see it again, which came with another no. At this point I felt pretty blindfolded because I couldn’t even see her work. It occurred me that this is the Writing Center not the Psychic Friends Network. My clairvoyant abilities are a little rusty.

In light of these developments, I decided to take the next logical road, which was to ask her for the assignment sheet, which I was actually allowed to see, and to talk about the assignment in general. She had other ideas. She didn’t necessarily understand the assignment, which is common, but it wasn’t only help in comprehending her teacher’s wording she wanted. She also expected me to have a thorough understanding of Greek philosophers and became very hostile every time I asked her questions about the shorthand her teacher used and references that were impossible to interpret through context. At this point I’m not only blind but now she’s swinging a stick at my head, too.

I tried to salvage what I could and tried to discuss her interpretation of the reading but she had very little clue as to what she read because it was incredibly confusing to her. Apparently the book wasn’t the only thing she was confused about because she expected me to interpret what she read through my minimal knowledge of Greek philosophy. When I say my knowledge of Greek philosophy is minimal I mean to say that all I know derives from seeing Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure a dozen times. In the end, I was the bad tutor who didn’t know everything and her post-session survey reflected her opinion of me. All I can say is that I legitimately tried. As North said, “we can question, praise, cajole, criticize, acknowledge, badger, plead-even cry” (1). I wanted to cry because I was so frustrated. I really wanted to do something for that crazy girl and her stupid philosophy assignment, but the battle was already lost before she even walked in the door. She thought the Writing Center was something it wasn’t and because of this she couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t doing what I was “supposed to.” Because of these false ideas we both lost.

No matter where they come from, the false ideas that students carry with them into the Writing Center are a chief concern of any tutor. It comes with the job description that tutors will hear, “Why don’t you just look over this and tell me what’s wrong.” Inherently there is nothing wrong with this statement provided that the tutor either through words or actions creates an answer that says, “Sure, but after I find the problems you’re gonna help me figure out why it’s wrong and what to do about it.” Creating this spin is not as easy as it sounds due to the fact that by the time students reach college, or even high school, they have become experts in manipulating teachers into doing precisely what they want. This includes wandering off subject for an entire class period or, as I did in high school, help create a conspiracy where the class convinces a French class sub that it’s a good idea to go play on the swings, provided we name every thing in French on the way to the park. I don’t think I need to spell out that it was our desire to go out on a spring day that inspired our little field trip, not a desire to learn French in a new and innovative way.

As Muriel Harris of Purdue would agree, the best technique to deal with this problem and any other problem in the Writing Center is to consult research. This research includes nationally published papers, but the best research is the personal experiences of the Writing Center staff in question. Harris believes local research should be valuable to the Center in question, “some local research has as its goal local application for the particular setting in which it is needed” (1). This concept applies to the problem of students who don’t know what we’re all about trying to take tutors for a ride once they realize editing is not our job. The experience gained through bad sessions also provides tutors with questions that can lead to potential solutions. The questions I’ve come across are, “Why do so many people come in to the Center without a clue as to what we really do? Where do they get the ideas they do have? How do these ideas effect our session? If it is a negative effect, how do I turn it around? Why do some of the people I try to help hate me?” They really do come off like they hate me. These are some big problems and like any other problem if you want something done about it you usually need to take care of it yourself. With that in mind I have decided to go to the source of the problem. That source is the ideas students have about who we are. It shouldn’t matter what any professor says about us if we can get to the student first. I know it sounds like a propaganda race to brainwash the students of the university and in a way it is. With correct information hopefully a better educated student body would start to come to the Writing Center for the right reasons, not because some teacher said to go there because the student is a “bad” writer with “twenty-five errors per page” or because the student has created a false assumption that the Writing Center is the Editing Center or some think tank with all-knowing-scholar-gods ready to hand down their infinite knowledge of every book ever written. I’m an undergrad peer tutor not a supercomputer.

There are many ways of accomplishing this objective including flyers, pencils, and bookmarks but the way that ensures that at least some people will get it is to go out and talk to them. The most important group to be reached is the incoming freshmen. This tactic ideally utilizes the Freshman Studies program. This program is an opportunity to inform new students who are potentially attempting to take advantage of as many university services as they can to help with the transition into college. I know this sounds a little idealistic and in discussing the idea I have been told that I will be lucky if the FS students will stay awake. It is my hope that if the information about the Writing Center comes from a twenty year old undergrad it will sound a little more relevant than if it is presented by an older faculty member. I think if this works even a little it is worth the effort. Perhaps if enough students are informed instead of misinformed fewer students like my lawyer buddy will come in with the wrong idea.

Students having the wrong idea was a problem nineteen years ago when North first addressed the issue and today the Writing Center community is still cursed with North’s dilemma. As a peer tutor with only thirty sessions I feel like I have inherited years worth of problems that still haven’t been solved and perhaps they will never be. The curse of having continuous students who don’t really know why I don’t want to do everything for them, and the battles that erupt as a direct result, is something I will have to deal with but it doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything about it. Maybe it is pretentious for me to attempt to take up North’s essay and its problems which are as old as I am and try to solve them. But if I didn’t try I would feel like I was just complaining without attempting to do something. The false idea of the Writing Center is a problem that can neither be solely addressed within or outside of the Writing Center. The false idea of what we do won’t go away on its own. It is a problem that demands constant attention and effort in an attempt to achieve a resolution. The false idea of the Writing Center is an inheritance that I don’t want and I curse that I will work to dispel.

1. Harris, Muriel “Diverse Research Methodologies at Work for Diverse Audiences: Shaping the Writing Center to the Institution.” Purdue OWL website. April 2003. <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/lab/staff/homepages/wpa.html>.

2. North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 22-36.