Three Years in the Writing Center:
A Tutor’s Retrospective
By Ben Graber
I was flattered and a bit intimidated to be asked to speak to you today; flattered that Dr. Sherwood would assume that I had something useful, insightful, or at least moderately amusing to say to you, and intimidated when I realized that I had no idea what that might be. I wouldn’t describe myself as especially retrospective – some people keep a journal or a diary, some have a working draft of their future memoirs handy at all times, and some are born storytellers, with a gift for weaving their lives into tales of epic, even mythic, proportions. I am not one of these people. I think I tend to look back on my life the way I would on a rather dry history textbook – all of it happened, much of it I remember, but I don’t think about it that much.
Nevertheless, here I stand, trying desperately to be retrospective for you. To begin at the beginning, then: I had the very good fortune to take a freshman literature course from an outstanding professor, one who did things like give me Bs on papers. I’d basically gotten by on vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and reading comprehension prior to this, so the surprise of finding out that there were professors who expected essays to contain other things was enough to make me actually read the red ink. By the end of that first semester, I suddenly found myself possessed of a pretty good sense of what a paper ought to do, how one ought to draw a thesis from the available material, how one ought to argue in defense of that thesis, how one ought to make the whole thing seem worth reading.
Then I moved on to the second semester of this literature course, which was taught by a different professor. As part of the writing process for that class, we were required to do some peer review for classmates, and lo and behold, I actually had some feedback to give. Of course, at this point I would say I was pretty slavishly aping the kinds of comments I’d gotten from my previous professor, but I must have gotten lucky and given some advice that was on target, because as the end of the semester neared I got an email from my professor saying that she’d recommended me for a job at the Writing Center. An interview and a few training sessions later, there I was – a real live tutor.
In retrospect (now I’m getting the hang of it), I’m a bit surprised it wasn’t more of a power trip for me than it turned out to be. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there the sheer surrealism of being a sophomore, still on the uphill side of your college career, and being paid to tell people what’s wrong with their writing – sometimes people who are taking courses much more advanced than yours. It’s intimidating, on the one hand, but you also realize very quickly what a genuine sort of power is entrusted to tutors of whatever discipline. To tutor writing, especially, is to advise the uninitiated on the very language they ought to use to convey meaning – a sort of mental midwifery, helping to bring ideas out and onto a page, where they can have a sort of life and existence independent of the one from whom they sprang. While you’re actually on the job (at least while I’m actually on the job), this isn’t the kind of metaphor that would come easily to mind, but it’s sort of appropriate, and it came from Socrates or somewhere, so it must be good. Something that’s not yet fully formed is in the mind of each client, and at our best, we manage to guide it out and see it become embodied in a written work.
Of course, it’s comfortable enough to apply this metaphor to nice clean analyses of literary works or articles or rhetorical strategies or what have you; in my experience, these tend to need to have shape given to their shapelessness, to be coaxed out of the shadows, where they exist as vague impressions, affinities or aversions, and given a clear structure, a skeleton of thesis, supporting argument and conclusion. What’s frightening is when you realize that, once in a while, not only are clients offering hypotheses or opinions to their professors, but they’re actually revealing themselves, sometimes in poignant and meaningful ways, and the tutorial becomes a sort of confessional. I remember, in one of those three years I can’t believe have gone by, a tutorial with a young woman working on a “literacy autobiography” assignment. I don’t remember the particulars of her argument; I think it was a solid enough paper, and I was reading through it with her, stopping occasionally for minor recommendations, when all of a sudden, out of the clear blue (it seemed to me), I read the words “I was raped.”
She was raped – when she was 11 or so, I think it was. It almost stopped me dead – what was I doing reading about this? What business did her professor have knowing this, for that matter? How many people knew this about this girl? But here I was, and she’d brought her paper to me, and now I was within this privileged circle of those to whom she could share this kind of experience, because I was supposed to be helping her to make it read better, to make it seem more real to those who were presumably to try and attach a grade to this revelation. I sent up a silent prayer of thanksgiving that that particular sentence hadn’t had a comma splice or a misplaced modifier. I don’t really remember finishing out the tutorial, but I know it was tough, and I remember thinking about it for a long while afterwards. This would not be a safe job, apparently, a place where writing comes in and writing goes out (hopefully with better semicolon use); we’re in the business of helping people to put their lives on display, or at least to publish their lives for a select audience, and it’s something very serious because of this. For all the hundreds of students who’ve come and gone and gotten this or that advice without much fuss or interest beyond polishing their work up to the next letter grade if possible, there are a few out there who have something to say.
Sometimes it’s not necessarily the big confessions that clients need to unload in their writing; sometimes it doesn’t need to be written to be unloaded. I’ve had more than one tutorial taken up at least partially by commiseration over professors with seemingly irrational hatred of innocent conjunctions or verb moods. A recent client was the victim of a sort of glass ceiling of grades; he worked and worked and worked – and it was pretty clear to me that he wasn’t making this up, that he really did work at this; his major in neuroscience was a pretty good indicator there – but he couldn’t break into A territory in his English class. He’d brought in papers at all stages of the process before; this time, he decided not even to start before consulting with us. What I think the problem turned out to be, in the end, was a different mindset. This guy could ace an APA research paper, no problem, because he could do research, he could write down sources, he could quote, he used good mechanics, he could write a good, logical, orderly paper – but he wasn’t a liberal-arts-type thinker. He saw the information, and he knew how to present it well, but in analysis, there was some sense in which he wasn’t thinking in terms of looking between the data, finding the threads that combined them and that explained why they took the forms they did.
It’s not always a problem with the basic mental equipment; sometimes we’re in the business of trying to undo some of the damage already done by prior academic malefactors. I had another client, apparently a track athlete – I think she was from the Caribbean somewhere. I remember reading through the paper, making comments, fixing some grammar issues, the usual, and then giving my usual lecture on larger-scale issues. She didn’t really have a thesis, I told her, and so the paper lacked focus and didn’t really argue a point – which it definitely needed to do. I talked in some detail about how to do this, and sent her on my way, my message delivered, my duty done.
She came back a week or so later, with the same paper. She had fixed most of the little grammar issues; apparently she’d seen another tutor as well, because exactly one of the sentences in the still thesis-free introductory paragraph had been altered into what appeared to be a nice workable thesis statement. A job well done, I thought. Then I made the unfortunate mistake of reading over the rest of the paper. As it turned out, the addition of the thesis statement had had no visible effect on anything else she had written. I pointed this out, and I may have been more expressive of my frustration and irritation than was warranted; in any case, she got a rather more forceful version of my original lecture, a couple more pencil marks on her paper, and off she went. I haven’t seen her since, and I have no idea what the paper ended up looking like.
Looking back, I think of that tutorial as one of my worse failures. This client wasn’t stupid or willful; quite the opposite, she was trying to take instruction the only way she knew how: by listening to what the teacher says to do (or looking at the marks the teacher makes) and doing exactly what she was told. The paper didn’t have a thesis because it never occurred to her, given the rubric in the essay prompt, to try to draw a conclusion beyond surface analysis, because it just wasn’t clear that that was what was being asked. My best guess is that the educational system that had produced her had instilled in its students a deep need to find out what the Right Answer to an essay prompt was, and so this poor unfortunate had stumbled into a liberal-arts department in an American university that demanded of her that she find her own Right Answer and tell the professor why. It is, of course, not even as simple as that; she needed to be able to draw a connection, to have an insight, and show that insight’s origins, just like my poor neuroscience major with his English Composition bête noir.
The thing is, what we are attempting to teach is just not science. One client wanted it to be; another needed for it to be. What is demanded is art – a look at a subject from enough angles that it starts to see the subject as intricately connected with another subject, and with another, and then the depiction and explanation of those connections. How do you teach that? It’s not a clean process, at least for me. Time for my own confession: I wrote this last night. I didn’t start it until yesterday afternoon. The way I wrote it, when the heat and pressure of procrastination reached sufficient levels, was to stare at a blank Word document until inspiration struck and the speech started to be written. If you discern some sort of common thread, some sort of common thought tying my anecdotes together, it had nothing to do with my conscious efforts to produce something brilliant and witty and insightful for you to hear; it just happened. This is how I write all the papers I write. Admittedly, one of the perks of the tutor job has been a greater ease in putting things together, making the framework on which I build, but ultimately, I don’t think the process has changed for me – I just stare until inspiration strikes. First I don’t have a thesis, and then I have a thesis. Then I have a paper.
How on earth are you supposed to teach this? It’s a matter of aesthetics: can you see these data, and then look between them and see why they fit together in the way they do? Can you find something beautiful in the way the two authors argue their opposing cases, or how another two came to the same conclusion from such radically different angles? I wonder if the best way to teach writing is to teach art or musical criticism, to force students to stand in front of something they think is beautiful until they can say something about why it is beautiful, something about why proportion is pleasing or why color evokes this or that mood. Everything is like something else, I think. Everything has to do with other things. That, if anything, is the credo of the liberal arts as a set of disciplines. That is what we are really out to teach.
That’s why it’s so scary to read a freshman’s reflections on having been the victim of rape; who am I to tell her to think of this as being like something, or as connected to something in a way that is as beautiful and powerful as the original experience was tragic and frightening and cruel and hideous? But that is the only thing I know how to do. How do I convey to an obviously intelligent and capable scientific thinker that he needs to change his whole perspective on what it means to analyze rhetoric? But I know he does. How do I undo a whole system of education’s nagging insistence upon finding the Right Answer that the professor will want to hear? I have to, because the Right Answer has no place in the liberal arts as we know them. I can only hope to be a sort of Zen master, forcing the novices to focus, to stare into themselves until inspiration strikes and enlightenment is achieved. There are only so many facts to be learned in writing; once you learn them, you have all the tools of a sculptor but can just as easily end up with a pile of rubble as a recognizable statue when you try to use them – you all know this probably better than I.
Another confession, though: I usually don’t believe this. I usually read through the paper, and I find the tools that are lacking, and I try to provide them (or at least tell where they can be obtained). My daily work schedule is filled with the assumption that the teaching of writing is a matter of informing the ignorant, who will then certainly use their new knowledge to produce the kind of work their professors demand. If I were really honest with myself on a daily basis, though, I would be trying to find some way, any way, to get each of my clients to look at the content they’re analyzing and see something about it that’s not available to the philistines of the world. One of my favorite professors in my department is fond of the phrase “mental migration.” Many if not most people never manage to migrate, to see what they’re studying as through the eyes of someone else, and to see their subject as both like an unlike they’d seen it before. Anyone who can do this can write.
I hope truly that if I carry anything away from three years of writing center work, it’s a commitment to see teaching as the art of conveying the ability to think artistically. We are in a unique place in the academic world; we have the opportunity to stand between students and instructors, to migrate mentally between their worlds, and on our best days, to show our clients how to do so as well. If we can do this, we can teach them how to take semicolons and subordinate clauses and adverbs and MLA citations and make something beautiful, something that shows that they think beautifully and something that shows that the world is beautiful and that it means something and has something to say to us. I’m thankful to Steve and the rest of the TCU Center for Writing faculty and staff for giving me the chance to stare until inspiration struck, and I am grateful for the chance to reflect with you all here this afternoon.