A few thoughts and notes on Week 4 readings

I find it difficult to post on the weekly class readings because it's hard for me to formulate an opinion. I always read and consider what the author's of the articles are saying but with the blog, I almost feel like I need to make some sort of opinion up so that I have something more to talk about then just restating some of the articles main points. I did this a few posts back when I criticized the readings from Hjortshoj's The Transition to College Writing. The following day, Dr. Essid came to speak to our class and he mentioned that this was one of the "best" resources in the realm of writing. Since he is the director of the Writing Center and is clearly an expert in this field, I felt that my ideas were immediately wrong. Later, I realized that it wasn't that my opinions were wrong, it was just that I need to worry less about trying to formulate some sort of opinion and just write about the readings in a more relaxed manner. So my goal for this post on the Week 4 readings is to simply just write about the basic arguments of the articles, connect any ideas, and hopefully as I do so, my thoughts and opinions will naturally come out opposed to being forcefully formulated.

Stephen M. North's essay, "The Idea of a Writing Center" from The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors: Something I noticed and considered was that this article was originally published in 1984...that's a good 16 years ago and it's interesting that the arguments made by North are the same arguments that can be made today. North loves using the words "ignorance", "disappointment", and "frustrated" as he almost complains that people don't understand the proper role that a writing center should play. This article really reinforces the "idea of the writing center" that other articles we've read have similarly argued. A quote I really liked from this article: "Tutors are not, finally, researchers: they must measure their success not in terms of the constantly changing model they create, but in terms of changes in the writer" (pg 39). This reminded me of when Dr. Essid made the point that Richmond's Writing Center doesn't aim at producing better papers, but rather producing better writers.

Jane Cogie's article, "In Defense of Conference Summaries: Widening the Reach of Writing Center Work": This article definitely takes a different approach. It targets the summaries that the consultant writes to the faculty member after the meeting. I honestly never thought about the reports sent to faculty by the consultant as a negative. But Cogie completely changed this perspective. She suggests that the student might carry a degree of anxiety during the session that what they say and do is going to be reported back to their professor and that perhaps, the summary reports lead to a loss of intimacy between the two students working together. I completely disagree. Not only have I never thought of it this way, but when I go to the Writing Center, I can only see a summary report as beneficial. I believe it's basically giving an extra opportunity for an external party to clarify something that the writer may have been struggling with and this might even change how hard the professor grades the paper because they may be a little more sympathetic. Furthermore, the Cogie article outlines the difference between "productive and unproductive summaries" (pg 50) and she clearly indications a preference in "conference summaries" that have "emphasis on the collaborative process" (pg 55). This article also had a bit of a scientific approach because Cogie includes actual research findings about the correlation between the summary reports and the grading process.

It may sound silly, but both of these article made me realize how frequent writing centers are. Also, how similar their practices are. For some reason, I assumed that every school had a sort of "tutoring" option for student essays but I never really realized that the Writing Center really follows a concrete set-up and practice.