...FROM THE EDITOR...

Greetings, and welcome back, everyone!

With this issue, we begin the newsletter’s 25th year of publication, a good time for “Looking Backward and Forward.” And so I’ve invited some people with impressive writing center experience to share their perspectives with us. Joan Mullin’s essay begins this series, and I invite you to contrib-ute too, whether your membership in our writing lab community is lengthy or brief. (See page 2 for information on sending in essays.)

While Joan Mullin raises questions about professionalizing ourselves, Ellen Mohr shares her concerns about another topic many of us are now deal-ing with—going online to tutor. Jason Palmeri confronts an older, perennial question, the tutor’s position between student and teacher, and Ken Baake of-fers strategies for explaining concepts through the use of metaphor. New concerns and traditional ones—sounds like business as usual as we launch into a new academic year. I wish us all well as we plunge in. And try not to think about how really young the “freshpersons” look this year.

• Muriel Harris, editor

...INSIDE...

Looking backward and forward: “What Hath Writing Centers Wrought? A Fifteen-Year Reflection on Communication, Community, and Change”

• Joan Mulllin 1

Imagine Yourself in a . . .

• Ellen Mohr 4

Review of Tutoring Matters: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about

How to Tutor

• Reviewed by Leigh Ryan, Christa Ehmann, and Dean Hinnen 7

Conference Calendar 8

Tutors’ Column: “Transgressive Hybridity: Reflections on the Author-ity of the Peer Writing Tutor”

• Jason Palmeri 9

Metaphor in the Writing Center: How to Place Enthymemes in the Solar System

My earliest recollection of the writ-ing center community comes by way of the first Peer Tutoring Conference at Brown University. As a graduate stu-dent, I knew no one and hadn’t a clue that the nice man I chatted with at breakfast was Ken Bruffee or the really cool woman that lunched with me was Muriel Harris. Luckily, I wasn’t as in-timidated by the force of these two as I should have been—as a result, once I did find out their stature in the field, I recognized that this intellectual com-munity was much different, and much more welcome than the MLA. More than anything, these critical meetings signify the mentoring nature of our practice and our profession: despite our differences in opinions and personali-ties, people who become writing center professionals, I believe, have more of an opportunity to be mentored. This is probably the most positive factor that

some ways this was encouraging be-cause I didn’t feel so alone in my “battles”: there was much commiserat-ing about lack of position or recogni-tion in the institution of choice—and lack of budget. But another result of the “half-empty speech” was the cre-ation of a culture of victimization. As I went to each successive conference, I got tired of the complaints, tired of hearing the same stories of gloom year after year. I wanted to hear less words, words, words and more solutions. I wanted a different-looking cup.

As I struggled to find solutions in my own institution (as budgets were cut, administrators moved on through the assembly line and the English depart-ment continued to pretend the writing center wasn’t successful), I actively and assertively chose to study the mis-sion statement of the university, see how I fit in, became a part of commit-tees, acted like faculty (when, at the time, I wasn’t), published, taught and, ultimately, garnered the professional currency that gave me stature (and power) within the institution. Many of my new-found colleagues were engag-ing in the very same things in their in-stitutions—and gaining position and place for their writing centers. I would be lying if I said that the writing center at the University of Toledo has blos-somed unimpeded (some of you have heard my tales of the wicked queen)— and my successful colleagues all have horror stories to trade. But we agreed that in order to be understood in our communities, we each practiced a ba-sic rhetorical principal: sensitivity to audience. It seemed too many of our colleagues in the writing center forgot that basic principal—and several oth-ers of those they profess to tutors and students.

In order to change perceptions, many of us identified adopting the “lan-guage” of the academy—publishing, service, and teaching—as central to how we would be heard. All of us had started in a service category—the least valued in the language hierarchy—and therefore immediately lost ground with colleagues, administrators and budget officers. That changed as we purpose-fully redefined—re-articulated—our service as teaching and faculty devel-opment. As a result, many writing cen-ter directors, seen as leaders in assign-ment design, faculty workshops, or using technology in the classroom, have become involved in Centers for Teaching Excellence, Academic Learn-ing Centers, and WAC programs

Therefore, what I have seen change over the years more and more is a professionalization of writing centers. I know that writing centers exist without budgets, tied to soft money, subject to departmental whims, but there are also those that do not train their tutors, take on any work-study student as a tutor, are subject to paying minimum wage, dismiss a tutor—without pay—if a cli-ent doesn’t show and engage in a rhetoric of despair. I would argue that professionalization goes a long way to-wards changing many of those condi-tions, that it has been a necessary step towards being recognized as part of an academic institution, one that speaks to particular sets of audiences and recog-nizes that we need to adopt the lan-guage—the genre—of our context. This is not news; we tell our student writers this all the time as we explain academic-speak. We train our tutors to recognize genres and explain the need for them. Yet, as we train tutors and work with writers, I think we forget to reflect on our own words.

And here is the final difference: that professionalization for some has not come at the risk of giving up what we are: it has come at the expense of the institutions’ abilities to reconceptualize what it means to be professional. I have seen more writing center profes-sionals involved in teaching composi-tion, other writing courses on campus, theory courses, and WAC courses. We have influenced classroom teaching through faculty workshops, TA work-shops and by our presence in our own classrooms—WHEN, that is, we trans-fer our writing center pedagogy into classroom settings. As writing centers change the teaching culture, so too the idea that a writing center is a place for talking nice to students (though we still do that) changes.

We used to joke about being a writ-ing center—while we stood on the pe-riphery of the institution. We used to be proud of the fact that we were on the periphery and “not like them.” But I have seen more and more writing centers move into the institution, be-come a part of their mission, be adver-tised by admissions, appear in promo-tional literature because of their grant-getting abilities, because of their savvy technological, high school or elemen-tary school outreach. The difference between how these successful writing centers have grown to operate and writing centers of the past is that they have often moved into central locations by redefining institutional notions of teaching, learning, theory and practice. In a sense, the centrality has been rede-fined as the periphery. Institutions are finding that the ways in which we work, think, interact are successful be-cause they are not traditional. This puts us at risk of being in the limelight— and therefore under a scrutiny we can avoid on the periphery. It obligates us to be professional and serious about all aspects of our work as well as about our ties to academe. It puts us in dan-ger of becoming “like them”; however, if NWCA, regional conferences and WCenter are any indication of the live-liness, engagement and intellectual mentoring that still pervades our pro-fession, I would say that the changes we have created are yet positive, the cup is half full, the sky is intact, and there is plenty of room for more wine.

When I read Clinton Gardner’s ac-count of Salt Lake City’s online writ-ing center, I marveled at his technol-ogy savvy. Students may enter the virtual writing center and get responses from the tutors or they may leave their drafts on an electronic bulletin board to get feedback from other students. They can get online in a chatroom for real time responses or they can simply at-tach their papers to an e-mail message and pick up the response later. Of course, students can also still bring their drafts to the real center for a tra-ditional tutoring session. The SLCCC writing center web site provides clear directions for easy access to all of the center’s services. Is this model the fu-ture of writing centers? Will our cen-ters become more virtual than real? What do we lose when we tutor online? What do we gain?

The theme for a recent National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writ-ing was “Unmasking Writing: A Col-laborative Process.” The description asked that potential presenters explore the various personae that writers and tutors use to cover their real or per-ceived weaknesses. These masks sometime prevent the dialog from moving to what often needs to be dis-cussed. An example of this problem is shown in the student who comes to the writing center to have his/her paper proofread. The tutor responds with the memorized prompt, “We do not proof-read in the writing center.” The student believing that errors in writing are the major complaint of his/her instructor is confused that the tutor will not help with this problem. The tutor has been trained to use a hierarchy of questions to get to the root of the writing prob-lem with grammar and usage errors as the lowest on the pyramid. Those ini-tial verbal exchanges are crucial to the tutoring session as the tutor prods the student to discover potential revision opportunities, not just look for me-chanical errors. E. Goffman’s discus-sion about social interaction can be ap-plied to the tutoring session as the tutor seeks to conceal perceived inadequa-cies from the student while the student attempts to use the tutor to achieve his/ her goal of a “perfect paper.” Initially both are reluctant to move beyond this “false conversation” to the more open dialog necessary to achieve success in the writing center environment. This peeling away of preconceived attitudes and behaviors is the core of what hap-pens in a writing center. How can trust and comfort levels be built online? Thomas Newkirk explains the roleplaying that takes place in a face-to-face conference as both teacher and student become members of the “closed community” with its own set of rules (194). As tutors we know one of our goals is to break down those rigid expectations to create a comfort-able open community where ideas are valued.

Furthermore, when I asked the dis-tance learning instructor if teaching online had simplified his role, he said just the opposite had occurred. With no time or place constraints on them, his students e-mail him constantly which requires his spending as much as three to four hours on the computer daily. His course does not provide real time online for collaborative discussions, so messages are sent all of the time. In ad-dition, to keep costs down administra-tors often increase class size. For ex-ample, at Florida Gulf Coast University distance learning enroll-ment accounts for 16% of enrollment with hopes of this figure rising to 25% soon, according to James McKinnon in his Wall Street Journal article. Yet when surveyed, faculty did not agree that more distance learning classes should be offered nor that distance learning was “an effective alternative to the traditional classroom.” As we consider whether or not to offer our writing center courses online, we need to question their adaptability and effec-tiveness in this format.

Chris Anson also asks questions about the effectiveness of technology in changing the way teachers teach. Often lecture notes have merely be-come multimedia presentations and verbal discussions have moved online. Has technology changed what we do in the writing center? What happens when students send their papers for analysis online? Is the analysis as ef-fective as the person-to-person ses-sion? Again, without the human inter-action do students lose an important part of the writing conference? Tech-nology is good at sending information in a straight line but loses the stereo ef-fect of the traditional writing center en-vironment. As mentioned earlier stu-dents online miss the shared experience—or as Anson defines it, the “innerconnectedness”—between staff members who share answers in ses-sions, and among students who miss out on the environment, stimuli, and interactions of the center.

Ellen Mohr Johnson County Community College Overland Park, KS

Works Cited

Book Review

Rabow, Jerome, Tiffani Chin, and Nima Fahimian. Tutoring Matters: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About How to Tutor. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. 188 pp.

Reviewed by Leigh Ryan (University of Maryland, College Park), Christa Ehmann (Smarthinking, Washing-ton, DC), Dean A. Hinnen (University of North Carolina at Pembroke)

For most of us who read the Writing Lab Newsletter, the aspects of tutoring they describe are not characteristics of our tutoring situations. Most of us work with students/clients who come to us in our familiar surroundings—a writing center or lab in a college or high school. We deal with older stu-dents and with a single subject—writ-ing. Especially in larger writing cen-ters, we often work with students we don’t know and will likely never see again. As a result, much of the advice offered by Rabow, et al., including chapters on “Building Relationships,” “Teaching Techniques,” and “Other Adults: Parents, Teachers, Administra-tors” is of little practical use to writing center tutors.

We also wondered about the ways in which the authors came to their con-clusions. As a manual, a comprehen-sive methodology chapter would be in-appropriate; however, the conclusions presented in this book might have been strengthened by providing more back-ground about the research. For ex-ample, how did the authors choose their sample of tutors? how large was their sample size? what was the con-text of the tutor field notes? to what extent did the tutors know their words were going to be reviewed and used for research purposes? Furthermore, the authors introduce the book by stating: “Over the years, our feelings, intui-tions, and hunches have been either confirmed or changed, based on the ac-tual experiences of real tutors. It is this consensus that we have put to-gether for you.” We’d also have liked to know a bit more about the steps they took to reach that consensus: what were their principles and procedures for data analysis and how did they de-termine the themes that are central to this book?

We did appreciate the book’s frank-ness. We were pleased to see advice on adjusting to organizational set-ups, for example, and acknowledgments that sometimes tutors put their foot in their mouth. Although the text’s lim-ited bibliography contains no books on tutoring writing, the valuable and well chosen references to other readings at the ends of chapters includes works by Mike Rose, Jonathon Kozol, Lisa Delpit, and Shirley Brice Heath. Each of these composition/literacy research-ers, of course, uses ethnographic stud-ies—a technique borrowed from an-thropology and sociology—which makes their work a good fit with the discourse community in which Rabow, Chin, Fahimian exist.

Tutoring Matters views the world of tutoring through the lens of sociology. Although writing center tutors will learn little about peer tutoring from reading it, a writing center with a large library budget might want to purchase the book for another reason: it provides an excellent example of how disciplin-ary concerns and attitudes shape texts. Tutoring Matters treats tutoring as a sociological exercise, rather than an educational endeavor. As such, it pro-vides more insight into sociology as a discipline and a discourse community than tutoring as practiced in most writ-ing centers.

Transgressive hybridity: Reflections on the authority of the peer writing tutor

In my work as a writing tutor, I often encounter students who view their pro-fessors (and academic authors in gen-eral) as unquestionable authorities—as the very origin of knowledge. In talk-ing with students during sessions, I have found that lack of clarity and analysis in students’ papers often has more to do with students’ fears of sounding simple or obvious to an au-thoritative, all-knowing professor than it does with their own lack of analyti-cal insight or confusion about what they mean to say. For example, one student came to me with a very convo-luted paper, filled to the brim with un-explained quotes and lists of theoreti-cal positions. In talking to her, however, I discovered that she actually had a strong analytical argument in mind. When I encouraged her to put her verbal explanation of her argument into her paper, I encountered resis-tance. Worrying about sounding simple in the face of an authoritative profes-sor, the student told me that she didn’t want “to say anything too obvious. . . . The professor already knows about what I’m saying anyway.”² Explaining why she feels she cannot go to a pro-fessor to discuss her ideas, the student told me that “professors just have this aura about them . . . like they already know everything.” Viewing the profes-sor as both the origin of and the au-thority on the knowledge taught in the course, the student assumed that any ideas or critiques which she came up with must have originated from the professor and therefore did not need to be elaborated for him or her.

In this way, the beginning writer’s image of the professor as authoritative and all knowing actually holds him or her back from writing the type of clear, analytical paper which the professor requires. By granting authority to their professors rather than to themselves as writers, students fail to develop the ability to write in the authoritative aca-demic style that will give them recog-nition within the university system. Al-though the image of the professor as the “origin of knowledge” appears to grant total control to the professors, it actually decreases teachers’ ability to teach students to write the analytical, academic prose expected of them.

Significantly, however, a beginning writer’s image of the professor as an all-knowing being does not necessarily arise from professorial intention; rather, the image of the omniscient professor results from the disparate structural positions of teachers and stu-dents within the university. To the ex-tent that the professor is institutionally obligated to create a syllabus and to evaluate a student’s mastery of the ma-terial, the professor is placed in the role of the master authority or “origin of knowledge.” Despite a professor’s intention of creating a classroom con-ducive to dialogue among teacher and students, the professor’s institutional role as the creator of the syllabus and the arbiter of class time makes him or her the ultimate author(ity) of the course.

Recognizing the ways in which pro-fessorial authority often works to im-pinge upon students’ development of analytical thinking skills, many peer tutors seek to define themselves in to-tal opposition to professorial authority. Arguing that peer tutors should act as supportive counselors rather than as evaluators, many peer tutors often assume that peer tutor-tutee relationships are egalitarian interactions based on the tutor and tutee’s shared status as students.

While peer tutors may play the pro-fessorial role, however, the peer tutor’s wielding of authority in the writing conference does not depend upon the student’s perception of him or her as the “origin of knowledge.” Unlike the perceived originary authority of the professor, the peer tutor’s authority is clearly derived from his or her ability to meet the institutional demands of the professor—to write his or her pa-pers using the discourse of analytical, academic, standard English. In the minds of beginning writers, peer tutors are not the origins of knowledge; they merely pass on the knowledge they have learned from the professors. Ironically, in order to take on the au-thority of the professor in tutoring situ-ations, the peer tutor has to play the role of the good student—a person who has learned so much from (and about) professors that he or she can an-ticipate “what the prof is looking for” and come up with strategies to help the tutee give professors the kinds of pa-pers they desire.

Demonstrating the way in which the tutor’s authority derives from the pro-fessor, I have found that the peer tutor loses her or his authority to function as a tutor on an assignment if the advice ends up conflicting with that of the professor. Seeing a student before she had discussed her paper on Bataille and Sartre with her professor, I had given her an opportunity to express her dislike of Sartre and approval of Bataille. Careful not to try and get her to change the content of her analysis, I primarily worked with her on ways to translate her personal response into the language of an academic argument. When the student spoke with the pro-fessor, however, he suggested that she take a totally different point of view on Sartre. When I later met with the same student, she didn’t want to discuss her Sartre paper with me anymore. As my point of view had conflicted with that of the professor, she could no longer trust my advice that she build her argu-ment from her own personal reading of the work.

My loss of authority had paralyzed my ability to act as a tutor. Even though I did not want to use my au-thority to modify or to change her ana-lytical ideas, I still needed some sem-blance of evaluative authority to be able to tell her convincingly that her ideas were worthwhile. In this way, I came to realize that authority is a cen-tral part of peer tutoring. Paradoxi-cally, my ability to validate and en-courage students’ attempts to take ownership of their own texts directly depends upon the evaluative authority invested in my position. If my words have no authority, why would students believe me when I tell them they are smart enough and capable enough to pick and choose only those bits of my advice that help them say what they want to say?

If the beginning writer views my comments on her work as no more au-thoritative than her own, she will tend to disregard both my comments and her own opinions and place all reliance on the professor’s evaluation. In this way, a peer tutor’s loss of authority does not necessarily lead to a liberatory experience for the tutee. In fact, the divestment of authority from the peer tutor actually serves to in-crease professorial authority by mak-ing the professor’s opinion the only one that can act on a student text. If the professor is seen as the only person with a valid opinion on the student text, beginning writers’ image of the professor as the ultimate authority on/ origin of knowledge is further rein-forced.

Having realized that the total divest-ment of authority from the peer tutor is neither desirable nor easily accom-plished, I find myself left with the question: how can I use my authority in ways that encourage students’ self-confidence, independent thought, and ability to manipulate academic dis-course in order to make their voices heard within the university system? Acknowledging that beginning writers’ conflation of the authority figure with the origin of knowledge hinders their ability to think independently and write analytically, I would like to use my position of power to reveal the nonoriginary, socially constructed character of academic authority/knowledge.

For example, I could show a tutee a series of drafts of one of my papers. In the first draft, I could point out that I may have had good ideas, but that that I had not presented them in a way that was convincing for my particular aca-demic audience. I could then show the tutee how, through the process of gain-ing peer feedback and revising, I came to modify the form of my paper to bet-ter suit the expectations of my particu-lar academic audience. In this way, I would demonstrate that my “success” at academic writing is not based upon “natural,” intuitive knowledge, but upon the ongoing process of revising my work to increase its rhetorical power for diverse academic audiences.

Rather than attempting to completely remove myself from an authority posi-tion, I seek to use my limited position of authority to give tutees strategies that will help them gain academic au-thority for themselves. With the help of peer tutors, tutees can begin to tran-scend the confining role of the receiver of knowledge and come to claim the empowering position of a person who can use rhetorical skills to generate knowledge within the university system.

¹ I employ Haraway’s concept of situ-ated knowledge in order to suggestthat my experience as a peer tutor al-lows me a partial, limited view of theuniversity hierarchy that is dependentupon my positioning within it. For afurther discussion of situated knowledges, see Donna Haraway’sSimians, Cyborgs, and Women: TheReinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

² This quote is an impressionistic recon-struction of comments a particularstudent made to me over the course of seven weeks of tutoring. The stu-dent gave me permission to quote heranonymously in this paper.

Date change for NCPTW

The National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing has kscain@hotmail.com or kcain@merrimack.edu, and seebeen rescheduled to October 13-15, 2000. For further the NCPTW conference page at <http://information, contact Kathleen Cain by e-mail: www.chss.iup.edu/wc/ncptw/>.

Metaphor in the writing center: How to placeenthymemes in the solar system

One method I have found to be in-valuable in my writing center tutoring has been the use of individual meta-phors (and related metaphors grouped as an extended analogy) as means of instruction. Let the thesis statement, or whatever it is referred to at your uni-versity, become “the center of gravity for an essay,” for example, or let ar-rangement become a system of “orga-nizing clothes into a chest of drawers.” Metaphor has been popular for years among proponents of expressionist composition pedagogy as a means by which writers can create new ideas from old ones. Students of expression-ist instructors are told to rephrase ideas they have encountered metaphorically, which then brings those students to a unique understanding of the ideas. In writing about expressionist theories, James Berlin notes that “to present truth language must rely on original metaphors in order to capture what is unique in each personal vision” (241). My call for metaphor in the writing center draws from such insights, but it de-emphasizes the idea of a unique personal vision. Instead, I imagine metaphor to be a technique for helping tutor and student make sense collec-tively of concepts that are part of a well-established general writing canon.

Metaphor theorists define metaphor in various ways, but most convey the idea that metaphor is a rhetorical de-vice for transporting knowledge by us-ing a word that brings connotations from one field of knowledge into play in another field. If we say, for ex-ample, that “love is a game of dice,” we are bringing all the connotations of gambling (risk, high stakes, unpredictability, etc.) into the field of a human emotion, “love.” A metaphor “has the power to ‘redescribe’ reality” (Ricoeur 6). The origins of “metaphor” suggest a transportation or transference of ideas (Lanham 100), derived from the Greek root word phora, which means “locomotion” (Peters 155). Be-cause metaphor involves linguistic signs in play off of each other (“love” and “dice game” in our previous ex-ample), the use of metaphor invites the audience to participate in an implied dialogue between various concepts.

A writing instructor, then, who uses metaphor to redescribe composition terminology is helping to transport knowledge to the student by means of a dialogue between the tutor and stu-dent, and also between the ideas mov-ing through the metaphor. The use of metaphor in a session avoids the dan-gers of a monologic banking pedagogy because metaphor is a form of dia-logue. Metaphors also permit the stu-dent and tutor to find images that best suit the student’s learning style. Educa-tion theorists hold that individuals pro-cess information via three learning channels; each person has a channel that works best. These channels are (1) visual, where the learner benefits from information she can see; (2) auditory, where she benefits most from hearing information; and (3) kinesthetic, where she benefits most from tangible infor-mation presented in a way that is al-most palpable (Konstant 109). By searching for metaphors in the writing center, the tutor and student can strike a comparison that allows the student to see the concept, hear it, or touch it— whichever channel is clearest.

Here is where metaphor can come to the rescue. Metaphor can show stu-dents that some kind of thesis sentence is necessary to lend structure and mo-mentum to an essay. Metaphor works because it diverts perplexed students from an unproductive obsession with composition terminology and allows them to focus on the act of writing. As a tutor, I first would diffuse the jargon intimidation by reassuring the student that an enthymeme, for example, is not much different than the old-fashioned thesis statement. I would then tell the student that she encounters such thesis statements all the time; whenever she tells a friend that a movie was good be-cause it was funny, for example, she is using a thesis statement in the form of an enthymeme. She is stating a claim that she liked the movie and offering its hu-mor as the reason, and she is assuming that her friend shares her belief that funny moves are good movies. Once the student becomes less frightened of the thesis statement concept, I might then try various metaphorical approaches to help her engage in a dialogue with me about thesis statements—a dialogue that I hope would carry a workaday meaning to the student.

For example, I often use algebraic ex-pressions as a form of metaphor or anal-ogy when talking about thesis statements because almost all early college students have recently studied algebra. I suggest that one example of a thesis statement is a sentence that says, “I think X because of A, B,C, etc.” Then I tell the student that the bulk of her paper will be spent amplifying the reasons A,B,C, which were stated in the thesis. The student then can fill in the letters to match the essay’s main argument and points of support. Here is an example: “My ballet teacher was the greatest influence in my life (X) because she (A) gave me a love for music and dance, (B) she taught me that practice pays off, and (C) she be-lieved in my ability to succeed.” Of course, a tutor must be sensitive to the learning styles of particular students; a student with a mathematics phobia or one who is not a visual learner, for ex-ample, might find my algebraic analogy more disconcerting than the Ramage and Bean definitions. An auditory learner might respond better to a musical anal-ogy. The support paragraphs in an essay could be compared to the different parts of a symphony, in which all relate to the common musical motif. Certainly a tutor should have a few stock metaphors ready, but he or she must develop and modify those metaphors according to the specific conditions of each consulting session.

The students I have tutored have helped me fine tune various metaphors to convey the importance of a thesis statement in an expository essay. For example, “The claim in a thesis statement is like the sun,” I recall saying at vari-ous times to student writers. “It forms the gravitational center of the paper, and all of the supporting reasons orbit it like the planets. If you do not have an obvious sun as the center of gravity in your solar system essay, all the plan-ets will fly off into space.” Kinesthetic learners perhaps can almost feel the gravitational pull of the thesis state-ment when they consider it in light of this metaphor. The solar system meta-phor works especially well with writers who have assembled a lot of ideas in a paper, but who have not selected the ideas with a coherent claim in mind. For example, I tutored one student who argued on and off that not having a fa-ther in the house can emotionally dam-age children. His support paragraphs were somewhat contradictory; in one he offered statistics showing an in-crease in juvenile crime among chil-dren without fathers at home, but in another he offered reasons why the presence of any authority figure in the house, not necessarily a father, is suffi-cient to provide a healthy upbringing. We agreed that his “planets” did not appear to be in orbit around the same “sun,” and he found a way to modify the initial claim to deal more with au-thority figures and less with fathers in specific. His new claim better con-trolled all of his support paragraphs.

Sometimes students show up in the writing center with the opposite prob-lem: their support paragraphs are not strong enough to hold up the thesis statement. We have all seen papers that make a powerful claim that is not suffi-ciently backed up in the body of the paper. One student I recall working with made the claim that radical right wing hate groups were threatening to turn the United States into a type of Third Reich fascist state. His evidence pointed to a few hate groups sprinkled across the country, but certainly did not portend the outcome he predicted. Using a visual image, I told him that an argument is like a architectural blue print of a house. It may look impres-sive, but it requires strong support beams to turn the drawing into a real structure. In this case, his “beams” (support paragraphs) were not strong enough to hold up the house he was trying to build. Here the Greek concept of “invention,” which we often refer to as “brainstorming,” becomes clear when it is redefined as a process of gathering the necessary lumber before framing a house.

Arrangement of an essay also invites confusion among writers. Many papers seem to have enough support research, but often it seems to be scattered about haphazardly in a way that confuses the reader. We have all read papers argu-ing for the legalization of marijuana, for example, that seem to jump around even in a single paragraph from points relating to its medical use to those re-lating to the economic cost of prohibi-tion to those dealing with the rights of users to the pursuit of happiness. One metaphor that I have found effective here is to describe an essay as a chest of drawers that holds clothing. Each drawer should have related clothing items in it. “You do not want socks in the underwear drawer,” I tell students, “because you will be confused when trying to find them.” This metaphor is not entirely satisfactory because it im-plies that an essay is a container of ideas rather than a deliverer of ideas, but it is still effective for those stu-dents who suffer from essay clutter.

Students who have trouble moving from one idea to another often cor-rectly identify the problem as one of transition. In asking for advice on words to use to carry the reader from one paragraph to the next, student writ-ers are recognizing a real exigency in writing; a poorly connected paper is jolting and unpleasant to read. Yet stu-dents often see transition as merely a matter of formula, as if a few properly distributed “howevers,” “moreovers” and “as we can sees” will fix the prob-lem. Transition literally is a means of helping the reader move through an es-say without getting lost, and a meta-phor that reveals this helping function is often effective in showing students the reason for being concerned with transition. For example, I have had a lot of success with a metaphor where transition sentences are “stepping stones in a river.” The writer is leading the reader on a path that crosses a river, and therefore, the writer must provide enough stepping stones (transi-tion sentences) to keep the reader dry and on the path. A paper that jumps too far from one idea to the next requires the reader to step too far to the next stone, and the reader may fall in the river and never reach the end of the path. When I first developed this meta-phor, I actually walked around the writing center taking pronounced strides to help a student visualize the effect of forcing a reader to make tran-sition leaps. A writer who comes to see her paper as a journey will come to see the importance of helping the reader with his footing, and intuitively will develop effective transitions that are not formulaic.

Punctuation also can be made clear by a well-thought-out analogy, which calls attention to the underlying rea-sons for choosing certain punctuation according to specific needs. Too often punctuation rules, like those of gram-mar, seem arbitrary until the learner understands how punctuation affects meaning by placing boundaries on sen-tences. Sentence boundary issues are a constant problem among students who come to our writing center because stu-dents often do not fully understand the way ideas should be ordered. When tu-tors elaborate on the “boundary” meta-phor, students can learn to avoid frag-ments, run ons, and comma splices. Students come to recognize that punc-tuation marks are like the “signs” that delineate an idea property line.

A related series of metaphors can have punctuation functioning as symbols for how ideas are related, the way a wedding ring indicates the marriage rela-tionship between two people. I have had a lot of success helping students fix comma splices by using the following relationship metaphors:

• “Two independent clauses separated by a period are just friends,” I say. Then I give this example: “It rained today. The baseball game was can-celed.” Here the sentences are near each other and express ideas about things that happened at the same time, the way two friends might have a conversation about something they have in common. But the two sen-tences are separate, in the same way the friends are separate.

• I then move to the next level of relationship—engagement. “If independent clauses are separated by a semicolon, they are engaged to be married,” I explain. “It rained today; the baseball game was canceled.” In the engagement metaphor, the clauses are still separate, but they are deeply involved with each other in a way that makes a period and new sentence arrangement seem too distant.

• “A way to marry two independent clauses and make them one sentence is by using a conjunction word like ‘and,’ ‘but,’ or ‘so,’” I then tell stu-dents. “It rained today, so the baseball game was canceled.” The word “con-junction” literally means to “join to-gether,” so the marriage metaphor is a natural fit.

• Finally, I explain that using a comma alone (or no punctuation) is similar to an unmarried couple living together. “It rained today, the baseball game was canceled.” The relationship is not bound by law. “In your personal lives you are free to have any relationship you want,” I then say, usually with a smile. “But your sentences should all be legal. A comma alone is not sufficient to legally bind two sentences.”

In this essay I have offered some of the metaphors and analogies I have developed while working with students in the writing center and in the class room. Such techniques of comparison are useful for explaining classical rhe-torical concepts and other composi-tion theory concepts that may be new to students. These techniques are equally useful for explaining grammar and punctuation rules that students probably have studied, but may not have fully mastered. When writing coaches use comparative tropes with their students, they can help those stu-dents understand concepts that other-wise might be difficult to grasp. In some cases, this enlightenment comes because a new metaphor better flows along a student’s learning channel than the original concept did. In other cases, a metaphor works simply be-cause it is more like real life to the student than was the original concept.

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Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. NY: Continuum, 1996.

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MacLennan, Tom. “Buberian Currents in the Collaborative Center.” Intersec-tions: Theory-Practice in the Writing Center. Ed. Joan A. Mullin and Ray Wallace. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994: 120-131.

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