Through his reading of research on novice and expert practices in several fields, Hall views
writing tutors as "expert novices." He sees
writing tutors gaining expertise in the area of novice writers through their familiarity with the misconceptions and conceptions student writers encounter as they perform different academic genres.
Just as writing centers can inhabit many kinds of material places, so too can
writing tutors function in a variety of disciplinary spaces.
We need to better support
writing tutors who are not already embedded in disciplines invested in multimodal composing practices, tutors who may feel at a loss for ideas when it comes to working with writers on projects like infographics, research posters, or scholarly web texts.
Writing tutors with majors from across the disciplines can be encouraged to bring their research skills to bear on questions pertinent to their writing centers, and undergraduate researchers from across the disciplines who are not affiliated with their institution's writing center could design research projects for their majors using the writing center as the research site and as beneficiary of the research project.
Their work builds on the Peer
Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail, which surveyed over a hundred former tutors to gauge their level of professional development in writing centers.
Martin's Sourcebook for
Writing Tutors (Murphy and Sherwood), Beth Finch Hedengren's A TA's Guide to Teaching Writing in all Disciplines, The Bedford Guide for
Writing Tutors (Ryan and Zimmerelli), as well as resources from writing center publications such as WLN, Praxis, and The Writing Center Journal.
Patrick even writes that the "primary responsibility as
writing tutors here is preventive." It is worth noting, however, that at times Patrick leverages "preventive" to consider accidental plagiarism and grammatical and mechanical missteps in a student-athlete's writing.
Prior to going, they completed the training course for English
writing tutors. While studying in Toulouse at the Dickinson Center, they took the required French Methodology and Composition, a course that not only focuses on grammar and vocabulary but also teaches the basic French genres--commentaire de texte, dissertation, and expose oral--that form the basis of university writing (Donahue, "Lycee" 136).
"Exploring and Enhancing
Writing Tutors' Resource-Seeking Behaviors." How We Teach
Writing Tutors: A WLN Digital Edited Collection, edited by Karen Gabrielle Johnson and Ted Roggenbuck, 2019, wlnjournal.org/digitaleditedcollection1/Conzo.html.
"Research Methods for
Writing Tutors," the third main section, helps students structure their research questions.
Their program brings together librarians, First Year Composition instructors, and
writing tutors to help student writers become competent researchers.
Finally, in the "coming soon" category: 1) watch for the announcement of the first open-access WLN Digital Edited Collection (DEC), edited by Karen Johnson and Ted Roggenbuck, entitled How We Teach
Writing Tutors (developed from their WLN special issue on the subject).
