9.2: Talking It Up

Every day, tens of thousands of students across the U.S. and around the world walk into (or go online for) their campus writing center, many for the first time. They usually say something like, “I need someone to look at my paper.” They don’t literally mean they want someone to look at the paper and that’s all. They want someone to spend time with them, read the paper carefully, show appreciation, and say what they think about it. They also don’t merely want to hear what a tutor thinks about the paper. They want to ask questions, explain what they’ve written, and see how the tutor reacts. They want a conversation that revolves around questions such as:

What do you think about my paper? Is it any good?
What do you think my instructor and my classmates
will think about it? Does it need to be improved? And
how would I go about that?

A conversation develops around these and other questions, writer and tutor sitting in chairs or on a couch, pages fanned out on the table before them. The tutor might invite the writer to read the paper aloud, but that’s not a requirement; tutors also like to read the paper silently and absorb its content, structure, and stylistic nuances.

Reflecting back on her senior year as a tutor at Niles West High School’s Literacy Center in Chicago, Susan Borkowski told me,

I quickly learned that a tutoring session is mostly
about asking questions. Writing is a way to communicate
thoughts. It follows naturally that in order to
produce good writing, we have to start by stimulating
our minds to think deeply about our topics. So often
we think we’ve pushed our minds to the limit and
can’t see a way to make a thesis any deeper or more
complex . . . until someone asks a question about it.
We think we’ve explained ourselves as much as we
can because we are only thinking about it in a limited
way. But when someone else asks a question, we start
talking out loud and soon we find that we’re thinking
in completely different ways about a concept we
thought we had already flushed out completely.

Susan tutored her classmates in a place where every day, hundreds of students stop by on their own to write and read and talk and listen. Literacy Center tutors would be the first to acknowledge that not everyone leaves one hundred percent satisfied, but the many students who keep coming back for help says something about the good things
that happen there. Could these students do as well by themselves, sitting alone in front of a computer and waiting for inspiration? I tell my students to try it sometime, and when that doesn’t work, visit the writing center.

Tutors try to focus on things that are important to the writer: the challenge of the assignment, the ideas there seem to be no words for, the little editing stuff that attracts red ink. Tutors encourage writers to take notes and start writing when the ideas begin to flow. Tutors are usually paid by the hour, so they’ll wait while you write. The important
thing is to build enough momentum so that when you go home to finish the paper, you’ll already be on a roll.

Anthony, a first-year undergraduate from Philadelphia, had been coming to the Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, three to four times per week to write a rhetorical analysis for his freshman writing class. At first, he only wanted help in finding examples to illustrate logos, ethos, and pathos in an article he was assigned to read. It was a good session, and Anthony got the examples he wanted. Then he told his tutor that this was a hard assignment because all of the examples in the article seemed to fit more than one element. This observation might have ended then and there, but his tutor urged him to say more about the overlap. They talked for
another fifteen minutes or so, and on his next paper, Anthony focused on the overlap in his thesis, claiming that logos, ethos, and pathos are not distinct elements in persuasive writing. Anthony was one of the few students in the class who wrote about the overlap, and when the instructor read his paper aloud in class, he looked pretty smart. He thought of the overlap on his own, but it took a conversation with a tutor to see how he could go in that direction and still stay within guidelines of the assignment.

When I asked tutors why they believe students benefit from visiting the writing center, it would have been perfect if they had all said, “It’s the quality of the conversations we have here” because that’s my thesis. Instead, they gave richer and more interesting answers. One wrote to me from a pool where he was lifeguarding, another wrote during
downtime while working at the writing center, and another used a mobile phone on the road. All responses exuded the passion that leaps out from people who are totally committed to what they do, whether they make any money at it or not.

Daniel Phillips tutors in the Writing Studio at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Anyone who has ever seriously considered a career with Armani or Chanel or Claiborne would soon find that FIT is the first step to landing a job with these top tier design houses, and while there they learn that fashion designers spend a lot of
time writing. Daniel said:

When I sit down with a student for the first time,
there’s always a brief and slightly awkward introduction,
and then we talk for a few minutes about
their major, what they do, their assignment, the food
they’re eating hurriedly (“I’m so sorry, but I never get
time for lunch”). And then for me comes the challenge.
This is a new person. I have no idea how they
learn, what works for them, if I should speak more
or sit and listen, if I should focus on their grammar
or on making the subject of their essay more focused
and apparent. For you the student, it is a game of
expectation. You want us to help you with your writing,
probably. For us, it is a matter of pedagogy, the
way we can teach you what you’re asking to learn,
but without simply laying it out for you to gather up.
Sometimes in a session, I make almost no statements.
I simply ask questions. We are not so much tutors
as we are a presence that encourages you to write, to
question your own logic, to revise, to reconsider.

How does it happen, this conversation that leads to better writing? There are many ways, but it starts with getting ideas out of your head, through your lips, and into someone else’s head. When you verbalize something you have been thinking, several things happen:

• You hear what you just said and how it sounds, as if you were hearing someone else say it.

• The tutor hears what you said, and you have to respect their need to make sense of it.

• Once you speak, you become motivated to listen to what the other person says—because you started it.

• Once you both speak, there is momentum to keep going and to influence what comes next, or not. You can sit back, or disengage. It’s up to you.

• Both of you have fired neurons in your brains that change what is in your heads.

Each of these has consequences for thinking and writing. Erica Bazemore, a tutor at the University of Iowa, pinpoints some of the consequences when she says: “I have had numerous occasions when I couldn’t quite put into words what I wanted to say, and it only took a conversation with a professor or a colleague in my department to
help me put on to paper what I have been grappling with in my head.” Founded in 1934 by a professor of Communications, Iowa’s Writing Center may be the first center in the nation. Working at a place with such a long and distinguished history of helping students to write, Erica understands the relationship between conversation and writing.