Writing Center Ethics: The Process

Jordan had been sitting at one of the student computers in the writing center for the better part of an hour, working absently on a paper. Mostly, though, she was talking to Lindsey, one of my fellow peer tutors. I assumed the two girls were friends, that more than studying, Jordan was simply waiting for Lindsey to get off work. But at 4:00, Lindsey went home for the day while Jordan stayed at the computer. She would write a sentence or two, stop, spin around in her chair, talk to me for a moment, then spin back to face the computer.

“Can you take a look at my paper?” she asked at length, motioning to the screen. It was about 4:30.

“Sure, but why don’t you print it off first?” I responded.

“I don’t have my student ID with me.”

I drummed my fingers once on the desk. “You can print it off on my ID.” I handed her my card. “How long is the paper?” I asked, realizing that I probably should have inquired about this first.

“Five pages.” The sheets came off of the printer. I picked them up.

“You have Dr. Fontenot,” I said, looking at the heading—Honors Literature and Civilizations. It was the Patroklos paper. I had written the same one only a year before. Her paper began, “In Homers novel The Iliad by Homer . . .” and from there continued to commit some of the more egregious syntactical errors known to so-called honors writing.

“It’s due by 5:00,” she said.

I looked at the clock. It was now 4:34. I could feel my pupils dilating.

In the moments that followed, I worked through Jordan’s paper frantically, marking things in her paper, mumbling through the text and pausing only briefly for comments. A myriad of thoughts were tumbling through my mind. What would Dr. Fontenot think if he knew that I had supposedly helped this student with her paper? Was she really going to turn it in like this? I was embarrassed—for her and for me. There were numerous unaddressed issues on the conceptual level that could and should have been discussed in the paper, but I kept those to myself. Instead, I dished out some garden-variety tips about organization and structure and wished her good luck. She thanked me and returned to the computer, seemingly unconcerned. I took the data entry form to the front desk. It was 4:46, leaving her exactly fourteen minutes to make revisions and email the paper in to Dr. Fontenot.

Now, I suppose there is a chance that Jordan actually had time to implement some of the suggestions I made about her paper before her 5:00 deadline, but I doubt it. And it is possible that some of the things I said will benefit her as a writer in the long run, but I doubt that also. It is more likely that she will never again think of that paper or her writing until the grade comes back and another assignment is due. Then, I suppose, she will repeat something of the same process.

It was not until about 5:22 that evening (as I was depositing my first check from the writing center to the bank) that I began to think about all of the things that had gone so terribly wrong in Jordan’s tutorial.

Should I have accepted her request for help at such late notice? Should I have given her my ID to print her paper? Should I have rushed the tutorial for her to make the deadline with a little time to revise? Should I have even marked anything on her paper in this situation, or should I have simply made general comments? I have recently considered these questions and others in an attempt to magically resolve situations such as these, which present themselves to us all too often in writing centers. Unfortunately, I do not know that such solutions can be reached in any complete sense.

From our experiences, we build a framework for future actions with the hope that, eventually, we will be able to recognize our moral obligations, enabling us to act more consistently in an ethical manner. We learn how to become better tutors, as Steve Sherwood says, “by doing it, reflecting on our successes and failures (both practical and moral), and trying to do better next time” (4). Many times, extenuating circumstances generate difficulties for ethics, quickly turning clear-cut rules into muddled guidelines that are impossible to rationally uphold. Thus, while I find incantations of ethical relativism largely untenable, I recognize the fact that ethical studies often require us to make what seem like subjective judgments in order to deal with specific cases that fall outside the jurisdiction of the general principles we might establish.

We are, as tutors, often instructed to practice a minimalist approach to the teaching of writing. We are told that it is not our responsibility or even our place to expand the interpretation of a text by someone like Jordan. Yet I feel strongly that students like her need a more involved sort of help. Most peer tutors, I believe, have encountered similar situations. They have, at some moment in their work, felt that they had neither the time nor the authority to effectively enact real change in their students’ writing. In response to such a feeling, I approached Jordan’s paper haphazardly in a fruitless attempt to produce the most good in the least amount of time.

By considering my own investments in Jordan’s assignment, I can now see that became ineffective as a tutor. I was worried about working through Jordan’s paper as quickly as possible, worried about what my professor would have thought had he known I helped her, worried that she had not included many of the points I remembered making in the same assignment, worried about her reflection on the honors program (and by extension on my own academic credibility), too worried, in short, to fulfill my duties as a tutor.

Naturally, we feel an obligation to assist our fellow students in whatever way possible. After all, we face essentially the same struggles in our own academic lives. We want to help students with their writing, just as we would like to receive aid in our own work. Because we are all students, it is almost impossible not to place ourselves in the situation of the person we are helping. This heightened sympathy response is at once the greatest advantage and the greatest pitfall of having peer tutors.

Our desire to relieve our colleagues of their stresses (particularly those related to writing) stems, I believe, from two main factors: the nature of people and the nature of writing.

Human beings, according to Immanuel Kant, have “inner worth,” (235) a “dignity [. . .] above all price” (236). For this reason, they should always, in all circumstances, be treated as ends in themselves. I believe this notion should be the fundamental premise in writing center ethics. What this means for us as tutors is that we should focus not on the individual paper, on the grade, on the minutia, but on the needs of the student as a whole, namely, as a writer. This is readily accepted, so readily I believe, that we often forget to take the claim seriously. Each person we help should command our full attention. We must get into the activity of serving; we must embrace it. We must think of the student and of nothing else. If we do this, we not only shape better writers—we stand to become better writers and better tutors ourselves. But all of this is gratuitous. We need not intend these wonders. We merely intend to treat the needs of our fellow students. Our task is singular. Our task is simple, at least in theory.

As to the nature of writing, I believe that much of our personal identity is bound up in the way we communicate with one another—our language, our writing. According to Gloria Anzaldúa, writing “feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart” (1596). Writing is difficult. It can even be painful. And it is certainly personal. It is also, as Anne Lamott says, a “hat of belonging” (xvi). Writing is communal. It is a place we go in the hopes of encountering ourselves for the first time, a place of outward facing mirrors upheld by inexplicably beloved strangers. As tutors, we are these beloved strangers.

Yes, tutoring does require a certain air of detachment, an objective perspective unavailable to the author. Nevertheless, being a writing tutor is about more than the objective facts—statistics, grades, or grammar—it is about a shared experience, a shared identity. Ultimately, tutoring has to be about camaraderie, about trust. When we treat our peers as ultimate ends, we foster that trust. That is the foundation.

Of course, we will continue to make mistakes—that is humanness; that is writing—and we experience it as writers and tutors alike. Becoming a valuable peer tutor is not something that happens all at once; it is not something that can be contained in any particular set of instructions, no matter how fully developed. Writing (and the teaching of it) is messy, a skill we must refine and cultivate. As my late senior English teacher, Mrs. Joye Sanchez, told me, “It’s all about the process.”

Jordan’s tutorial and indeed most tutorials make it difficult if not impossible to predict the results of our efforts as tutors. In cases like Jordan’s, strict time limitations dramatically magnify the tutor’s already quixotic purpose—to mold better writers. Because we work with students on such a short-term basis, it is imperative that we direct our actions toward the best interest of the student, insofar as we can determine what exactly that means in application. We are not working toward better scores, better reputations. We are working toward better relationships, better identifications. Our goal, what we are tying to reach, is the students themselves. This approach means not allowing ourselves to get bogged down by policy, where what is ethical often becomes not what is right in actuality, but merely that which keeps us out of trouble on the surface. Most importantly, though, we have a moral obligation to continue to act—to instruct, to teach, and to assist in whatever way possible—despite our uncertainties, for ethics is rendered vacuous without action. Then, while we are busy, engrossed in our activity, sharing our experiences, our writing, we begin to progress, and when we finally look up, we may see for the first time just how far we have traversed and what we have become.

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. “From Borderlands/La frontera.” The Rhetorical TraditionReadings from

Classical Times to the Present. 2^nd ed. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1585-1604.

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. Thomas Hill Jr. and Arnulf

Zweig. Oxford: University Press, 2002.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.

Sherwood, Steve. “Ethics and Improvisation.” Writing Lab Newsletter 22.4 (1997): 1-5.