“What I Learned at College”

1. Keep the budget lines short.

2. Control your own budget.

3. Keep reporting lines simple.

4. Write your own evaluation process before somebody else does.

5. Use the principle of productive embarrassment.

6. Eat out often with your colleagues.

The Writing Lab Newsletter, published in ten monthly issues from September to June by the Department of English, Purdue University, is a publication of the National Writing Centers Association, an NCTE Assembly, and is a member of the NCTE Information Exchange Agreement. ISSN 1040-3779. All Rights and Title reserved unless permission is granted by Purdue University. Material will not be reproduced in any form without express written permission.

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Along with controlling the budget, one must know well the reporting lines. If they look like a plate of linguini, pick through them until a clear sense of reporting lines develops. If you are in a position to simplify or change them, all the better. I didn’t learn this lesson in time to apply it to the writing center I established. The re-sult is that it remains mired in a tangle that includes a department chair, a couple of different deans, and various committees, all trying to steer the cen-ter, not always in a single direction. Worse, subsequent directors and I faced a needlessly complex evaluation process for promotion and tenure. I re-alized later that I (and any writing cen-ter director establishing the position) could have written the process for my-self, because no one else seemed to un-derstand what directing the center in-volved or how it should be evaluated. The principle that emerged is to design the process of evaluation yourself, be-fore anyone else does. Do it for your-self before someone does it to you.

Jeanne Simpson 375 Prospector Lane Estes Park, Colorado 80517 970-577-9770 numprs@ezlink.com

What happened in our neck of the woods

The urgency to create a shared project between our writing center and campus library initially grew from a very practical and woefully untheoretical source. Numbers. Being only a year old, the Writing Center at Bryant College wanted to demonstrate its unquestionable value. As we know, one of the most common measures of a center’s success is the number of stu-dents receiving assistance. Logically, if students visit the writing center, they perceive it as a valuable resource. The library, on the other hand, is the heart and soul of a college campus. Regard-less of how many students use its ser-vices, the library will never fear disso-lution. Sure, it may have to cut its hours or lose some of its journal sub-scriptions, but like Emerson’s Over-Soul, it is, and always will be, there.

1. Announce the Reference and Circulation Staff

2. Explain the function and materials of the main level of the library

3. Brief tour

4. Return to the main level

5. Show students reference books

useful for their research

1. Demonstrate the use of the book catalogue

2. Demonstrate the use of the ProQuest network

3. Briefly explain to students other resources available (Magill 1998)

While this outline covered the “what” of the tour, it still—and contrary to our decisions in the meetings—left out the hands-on work that would allow stu-dents to do their own research. Also, the “finding information” stage of re-search was not being presented as part of a process, in relation to other stages such as refining a focus or developing an argument. Clearly, we hadn’t com-municated our intentions as well as we thought. Perhaps we were also guilty of not hearing the librarians’ intentions during this second meeting. We began to wonder whether or not the Writing Center would have a distinct role in the workshop. What were we doing wrong?

This story does have a somewhat happy ending. Another meeting prompted reorganization of the project. Once it was clear that students would be coming to the workshop with ideas and topics in mind, we were better able to identify what information would be most useful for them. The final prod-uct was primarily a workshop format. Students sat at computers, guided by reference librarians and Writing Center staff, found appropriate sources, and were taken to the area of the library where these sources could be found. Every student left the workshop with at least one source in hand. In practice, the workshop had been a partial suc-cess. Students performed a library search relevant to their own coursework, though they learned little about how to use what they found. In theory, we were able to identify some major differences in the ways in which the library and the Center view the pro-cess of and connections between re-search and writing. These points of departure and discrepancy are where we need to begin in rearticulating the work that we can do—together.

Regardless of the alternatives pre-sented, what is important is that a vari-ety of methods, processes, or paths are presented. These differences cause us to wonder what happens to students’ writing processes if they begin their re-search project in the library as opposed to the writing center. Would Sheridan’s suggestion cause students to overemphasize existing “knowl-edge,” or would reviewing these mate-rials help students see themselves as part of a community of learners? It seemed to us that librarians focused too much on locating or finding infor-mation without integrating this activity into students’ particular writing pro-cesses.

Our first attempt to bridge the work we do led us to some problematic con-clusions. Based on their sense of what students need to know and how they go about teaching that information, the li-brarians we worked with seemed to find a more general approach the most beneficial. We believe students who are initiated into the research process via a general tour remain passive as the librarian tells them where to go to find “materials.” Like spectators at the Great Exhibit, students tour the library; they never interact with it. Though these librarians are genuinely con-cerned with the students they work with, this approach leads to inactive, disengaged students. Students would be better served if the staff of the writ-ing center and library shared their par-ticular understanding of the research process.

Writing center and library staff need to be willing not only to talk, but to lis-ten to each other’s principles and methods. Marilyn Lutzker, a librarian, writes that “Librarians need to talk to writing instructors. To put it bluntly, there are quite a few things librarians should be prepared to tell them” (Sheridan 105). However, our own misconceptions about the library indi-cate that Lutzker’s suggestion to talk “to” instead of with fails to establish a productive collaboration. Instead of talking to members of the library about what we do, the staff of both the li-brary and the Writing Center need to identify and exploit the important in-terdisciplinary links we share. What needs to be addressed is the nebulous disciplinary space—the realm of re-search—that both academic resources share.

Jean-Paul Nadeau Bryant College, Smithfield, RI and Kristen Kennedy Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

Works Cited

During an interview, Ernest Hemingway expressed his belief in the importance of revision: “I wrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satis-fied.” The interviewer asked what had “stumped” him. Hemingway replied, “Getting the words right.”

This sentiment of Hemingway’s not only describes the endless revision a writing tutor experiences in trying to refine tutoring techniques but also de-picts the struggle to find the right words to express writing and gram-matical concepts to students. I have been a writing tutor now for eight months, and I discovered I am continu-ally refining my tutoring skills. Every tutoring session is different, and every personality is different. So how do I keep on top of the constantly changing atmosphere of tutoring sessions? Well, as the year comes to a close, I want to re-evaluate my tutoring skills by exam-ining my habits as a tutor and, from this interrogation, determine what qualities classify a tutor as good.

My friends think I have it easy with this job as a tutor. In many cases I do. How many people can say they love coming to work and they took the job for reasons transcending monetary need. Yet, in many cases, my task can be quite cumbersome. Students come to the writing center with a paper, not even a long one in most cases, and in twenty minutes I am expected to dis-cover its weaknesses, uncover its hid-den beauty, and then help its creator improve. Sure, it sounds easy; I’m an English major, right? I have been trained to track comma splices, unclear thesis statements, disorganized para-graphs, and “bad flow.” Well, unfortu-nately, this militant training does not always save me in the midst of the crucible. Sometimes, this training does not prepare me for the artillery that comes in the form of a paper that really does not fit any recognizable or conventional format.

Lastly, as a tutor, I believe my own physiological reactions to a paper af-fect the tutoring session. Even the slightest movement of an eyebrow the wrong way can set a student off and the whole session is destroyed. In the same tutoring session with my Frost paper, the tutor’s physical response further crushed my ego. She acted irri-table and impatient by rolling her eyes and tapping her fingers on the desk; she did not want to spend another mo-ment looking at this blatant insult to Robert Frost. When I am tutoring, I try to be patient and sympathetic. Simply smiling at the student helps deflate any resentment or anger a student may ini-tially bring to a session. Patience is perhaps the hardest virtue to maintain in the writing center. Tutoring writing can be hard and frustrating, but I know when I start to act frustrated, I discredit my capabilities as an effective tutor. A student can sense my feelings and leaves a session even more frustrated than when she first arrived. Patience can make the difference to students who do not have any left themselves.

Lisa Higa

Utah Valley State College

Orem, UT

Writing Lab Newsletter 19.6

(1995): 8.

Kellogg Institute and Conference

The Kellogg Institute for the training and certification of developmental edu-cators will hold its 22nd Kellogg Insti-tute, June 23-July 20, 2001, at Appala-chian State University, Boone, NC. The Kellogg Institute will also hold its Third National Conference on Re-search in Developmental Education, October 24-28, 2001, to be held at the Omni Charlotte Hotel in Charlotte, NC. For information on both the Insti-tute and Conference, write or call the Coordinator, Kellogg Institute, ASU Box 32098, Appalachian State Univer-sity, Boone, NC 28608-2098; phone: 828-262-3057; website: <www.ncde. appstate.edu>.

College of Liberal Arts

212 Johnson Hall

101 Pleasant Street S.E.

“All politics is local.”

-Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1977-1986

If there is a theme to The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher, it is that WPAs—including Writing Center Directors—are—and need to be—in the business of local research. This is the rationale: local research re-flects and responds to local pressures in order to justify, sustain and develop local writing programs. Or, to put it more baldly, as Anson and Brown do in their case study of a WPA and her colleagues: “If they don’t look both co-operative as citizens and demonstra-tively successful as a service organiza-tion, their writing program could be in danger” (145). Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, the editors of this vol-ume, want to make a virtue out of this necessity: they want to reconstitute the political value of local research and to argue that what WPAs do counts as scholarship in the larger academic community.

The deeply political nature of our lo-cal research—and of most academic research, I suppose—reminds me of Tip O’Neill and his well-known apho-rism. O’Neill achieved national stature during the Watergate years and he knew about politics. Take care of the people in your own backyard first is the folksy advice from his political handbook titled—not surprisingly—All Politics is Local. If you don’t, you’ll be out of a job. But O’Neill adds that taking care of the local will “allow” the politically astute to address national is-sues. While he acknowledges that local issues are only sometimes related to larger issues, I believe that for our lo-

“Reconstituting the Local”

New York: Times Books, 1994.

What do WPAs really want? A dis-cussion on WPA-L last March vari-ously titled, “Thinkin’ about quittin’,” “Doin more than thinkin’ about quittin’,” and then finally, just “The failure strand” suggests that besieged WPAs want respect. We want respect for the validity and the scholarly sub-stance of the local research we do. We want understanding for the rough and muddy administrative waters we trans-gress. We want resources to do the job we need to do: help students become more effective writers and university citizens. The WPA as Researcher: In-quiry in Action and Reflection con-firms these themes and offers a repre-sentative sample of best practices in writing program administration. It also hints at, through interesting discus-sions of historical method, what disci-plinary identity might look like. But it does not do the work necessary to es-tablish what WPAs also want: a para-digm for theoretically sound local practice.

The local research shared in Part One, “Writing Program Administra-tors’ Inquiry in Action,” suggests that WPAs want validation for the local, highly contextualized research they do. Many WPAs will no doubt recognize versions of their own local research in outcomes assessment (Betty Bamberg, Wanda Martin), placement (Kathleen Blake Yancey and Meg Morgan), or teacher training (Sarah Ligget), and will gain insight about how to best re-vise or expand their own practice. In the opening essay “Diverse Research Methodologies at Work for Diverse Audiences,” Muriel Harris justifies these methods of local research, par-ticularly for writing centers, when she states, “Such locally produced knowl-edge also can contribute to the inquiry of other writing program administra-tors within the institution” (3).

Further, though the goals and meth-ods of local research do not require at-tention to all the conventions of social science research, closer documentation of the results and statistical analysis might better validate the empirically-based conclusions in some cases. In a bit of unfortunate phrasing summing up her local research, Wanda Martin writes, “Later this year we’ll be in a position to analyze the data thor-oughly, cobble together some rough comparisons of what we see this year with what we saw last . . .maybe even offer some cautious reports to adminis-trators and the world at large” (50). With these conclusions she unwittingly articulates the beleaguered face of WPA research, and confirms our col-leagues’ worst suspicions about our work: it is anecdotal, fraught with reli-ability problems, and most useful when defined as “service,” rather than schol-arship. It suggests that our justifica-tions for using local research are no better than what Julia Ferganchick-Neufang, in her discussion of feminist methods in WPA research, concludes: “As WPAs, often we must react to and act in circumstances not of our own making. The use of situations at hand offer research possibilities for WPAs who are too overburdened with day-to-day responsibilities to design research projects unrelated to their WPA duties” (25). With this statement, the collective sighs that accompanied “the failure strand” on WPA-L last March seem to go up again.

Finally, while the models for research on assessment outcomes, placement practices, and program design range widely in methodology and scope, the collection seems weak on two counts. First, there is no study rep-resenting the work of the WPA at the small college. In a thoughtful article in the spring 2000 issue of WPA, Thomas Amorose points out that the absence of the small school story in our literature discounts both the richness of that tra-dition and the benefits their work might bring to the discipline. He rightly believes, “The fuller the record, the greater its richness and utility” (98). This collection would have ben-efited greatly from one story of the vastly different political and practical realities of the small school WPA.

Works Cited

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Many instructors are combining the best qualities of writing center tutoring and peer group collaboration by enlist-ing “knowledgeable peers” who serve as tutors in writing classrooms and in the writing-focused classrooms of other disciplines. On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring will explore various ap-proaches to classroom-based writing tu-torials. We seek theory-grounded manu-scripts that discuss various features of classroom-based tutoring. Topics might include successful and /or unsuccessful approaches; institutional and/or class-room power relations; assessment; dis-tribution of labor (between teachers and students, between disciplines, etc.); the dynamics of race, gender, and/or class in tutoring relationships; peer writing groups; online environments; Writing Across the Curriculum; and basic writ-ing.

Please send 2-3 page proposals or completed manuscripts by March 1, 2001 to Candace Spigelman (cxs11@psu.edu) or Laurie Grobman (leg8@psu.edu), Penn State University, Berks-Lehigh Valley College, P.O. Box 7009, Tulpehocken Road, Reading, PA 19610-6009.

Why the urge to try new things? In my case, why not be content with a well-running, in-center peer tutoring program? Certainly, a legitimate rea-son for change is program develop-ment, because whatever design an in-stitution has chosen for its writing center, that design will have limita-tions. In-center, generalist tutoring— my institution’s choice—only partially taps the tremendous potential of the peer writing tutors. Extending beyond in-center tutoring draws upon the writ-ing tutors’ expertise, spreads our writ-ing center message, and builds new re-lationships between students and faculty. An additional, more personal reason I have for exploring new op-tions is that, with over a decade of run-ning our peer tutoring program, I seek new outlets. Trying new efforts keeps me challenged and invigorated.

Hamilton College is a typical liberal arts undergraduate institution. Founded in 1987, our Writing Center annually employs 24 generalist, peer writing tu-tors to serve the student population of 1600 students. The writing tutor re-cruiting process is highly competitive. Potential tutors are nominated by fac-ulty for consideration, and finalists are selected after rigorous screening. Each year, the writing tutor staff includes many of the college’s very best writers and represents a wide range of disci-plines. Due in large part to our writing-intensive curriculum, about half of the 300 monthly writing conferences are required by faculty; the other half are voluntary.

In the past few years, we have tried a number of additional ways to draw on the tutors’ expertise beyond the physi-cal confines of the writing center: in-class presentations, tutor/faculty con-sultations, study groups for tutors, regional peer tutor conferences, and specialist writing tutors. Some of these outreach efforts have been successful, some not. I would like to describe these efforts and then explain why or why not these ventures have been successful on our campus.

Successful Ventures

• In-class presentations

Like writing tutors at many schools, our tutors visit classes to discuss a va-riety of topics. Our most effective class visits are those that focus on topics in which the writing tutors have genuine expertise: the revising process and peer review. Some faculty prefer to have their own students review classmates’ drafts rather than send their students to the writing center for conferences. When visiting a class to discuss peer review, the writing tutors describe the thinking process of a reader responding to a peer’s draft, pass out materials de-scribing the typical questions the peer reader should be asking, and discuss why it’s not in the best interest of the writer that the reader focus on spelling errors, word choice, and other surface features—a tendency of most inexperi-enced peer readers.

• Surveying/interviewing faculty

Whenever a fairly plausible reason arises for doing so, we send writing tu-tors out to consult with faculty. The payoff for this tutor/faculty contact is high, with an immediate advantage be-ing “face-time.” As faculty talk with writing tutors, they see for themselves the quality of the students who are writing tutors. The typical purpose of faculty/tutor exchanges is to gather in-formation for a project we are working on at the writing center. By consulting with our faculty, we better understand our own faculty’s expectations and how we can work together to meet our common, institutionally-specific goals.

Let me illustrate how faculty/tutor consultation typically works for us. Over the years, our writing center has developed many handouts on specific subjects related to writing, such as “In-troductions and Thesis Statements,” “Elements of Persuasive Essays,” etc. Last year, two writing tutors decided that we needed a handout for students on journal writing assignments. Rather than simply write the handout on their own, they first consulted with the fac-ulty. They e-mailed all faculty asking for comments on journal writing as-signments and then met with those fac-ulty who had provided interesting re-sponses to the e-mail. The final handout (“Journal Writing: Bungee Jumping for the Mind”) is a blend of both tutor and faculty understanding of the Why and the How of journal writ-ing at our college. Several faculty are quoted in the handout, which is a nice plus for them.

An unexpected outcome of this out-reach effort is that a number of the pro-fessors whose comments are quoted in the final handout are faculty our writ-ing center program does not typically serve: professors of computer science, photography, and Spanish. This year, we are continuing the same process of incorporating our faculty’s ideas, this time on the topic of evaluation of on-line sources for research projects. Once again, we are hearing from some fac-ulty who usually have little contact with our program.

• Voluntary study groups for writing tutors

Four conferences later, it is fair to claim that the conference design has worked, though with a bit of tinkering. The groups have been on the small side; after a high of 80 participants for the inaugural conference, we now av-erage about 60 participants from five schools, fewer than we originally hoped for. Even with a conference that is just a day away, it still involves a whole Saturday, and students are busy. At first, we thought we would have nu-merous presentations from each school, but the average number of pre-sentations per school is now two.

We have found that the conference design can be streamlined and thus more inviting to busy students. With the goal of making the conference feel “professional,” we initially required that proposals be submitted several months ahead, with the pretense of a review by the conference organizers. We have eliminated both the require-ment of early submission of a full de-scription of a presentation and the pre-tense of review. Now, titles and short descriptions must be submitted ahead, to encourage the tutors to think through what they will be saying and to allow for preparation of the confer-ence schedule. But no proposals are re-jected, and everyone who proposes a topic is on the program.

An additional means of streamlining, one we’ve tried at the opening ses-sions, is to divide the participants into small groups, ask every group to dis-cuss a topic among themselves, such as ethical dilemmas in tutoring, and then report to the whole group. The advan-tages of this strategy are many: no one has to prepare an opening talk, the groups are mixed so the tutors right away meet with tutors from other schools, everyone gets to speak in the small group, and the entire group hears numerous perspectives on topics im-portant to all of us.

A nice side effect of the annual conference is that tutors from different schools can get to know each other and look forward to meeting the next year (there’s even been one romance thus far). The lunch conversation is lively and loud, which makes us organizers think that maybe we should aim for even less structure and more free time for the tutors to talk.

An additional, unexpected benefit of the conference is that the tutors’ pre-sentations become incorporated into permanent training materials. As a re-sult of UNYWCC, we now have tutor-developed materials on strategies for pre-writing conferences, working with excellent first drafts, and teaching grammar so it will really stick.

The consortium has sponsored four conferences so far, at Hamilton Col-lege, Clarkson University, Colgate University, and Union College. When the National Peer Tutoring Conference in Writing was held on the Potsdam campus of the State University of New York, the consortium elected to pass on our own conference.

The consortium and its annual conference offer obvious benefits. One is that peer writing tutors from a number of schools gather to talk about their work and see that they are part of a larger, national movement to help writers learn to write better. Even the writing tutors who don’t attend hear about the conference and see that we don’t work in isolation. An additional advan-tage is that we administrators have lo-cal colleagues to reach out to; we all know how frequently writing center administrators have to work in a vacuum on their own campuses.

Of the six designs for specialist writ-ing tutors, only one truly prospered. That one worked because the profes-sor, in the English department, had very specific writing activities the stu-dents would do with the tutor in man-datory, weekly small group sessions.

The philosophy arrangement was fairly successful because the professor is very organized and regularly as-signed individual students to work with the designated writing tutor. However, apart from the use of the designated writing tutor who was a philosophy major, this design was not so different from the standard arrangement of the generalist writing tutor being available in the writing center for conferences. The tutors’ majors are posted in the center, so students have the option of selecting a tutor with specific exper-tise, such as philosophy.

The other designs either failed, or the results were no different than if the students had the standard access to generalist writing tutors at the Writing Center. Hence, the net result of the specialist tutor venture was a loss of writing center tutoring time.

How and why did the specialist tutor venture not work? For the other three classes, Biology, Psychology, and a second English course, the arrange-ment was that the designated tutor would be available in a department room on a drop-in basis for a regularly scheduled set of hours, and students would come by voluntarily, on an ‘as-needed’ basis. Faculty regularly re-minded the classes of the availability of their writing tutor and planned as-signments suited to the idea of writing as process—with time for pre-writing, first drafts, and final drafts. The as-sumption was that the students would use the specialist writing tutors for help on various stages throughout the pre-writing and writing process. For these classes, conferring with the tutor was not required but was highly rec-ommended by the professors.

What went wrong with this plan? Even though the faculty strongly and regularly recommended that students use the writing tutor throughout the writing process, few students did. What happened instead is that the stu-dents who decided to use their writing tutor all dropped in on the same night—surprise!—one or two nights before the due date for the final draft.

Alas, perhaps the most interesting of our recent efforts to venture beyond the realm of our typical, in-center ser-vice ended up being a disappointing use of writing tutor time. Why? Cer-tainly, the coordination and organiza-tion of the designated, specialist tutor service needed some fine-tuning. Any time one tries something for a first time, there are snags. But I think the more significant reason why the drop-in, specialist tutoring did not work was that, although the students were strongly urged to consult with their writing tutors at each stage of the writ-ing process, they were not required to do so.

The specialist writing tutor is a suc-cessful model on many campuses, but, with our campus model being the gen-eralist writing tutor, an initial attempt to institute specialist tutors was disap-pointing. Some faculty were eager to get involved, which is encouraging. Adjustments in organization and coor-dination of the specialist tutoring effort could help, but the most significant contributing factor appears to be un-willingness of the students to consult with the writing tutor in the early pre-writing and writing stages when not re-quired to do so by the faculty. If we were to try this sort of service again, we would have to consider requiring that students meet with the tutor at some time during the early stages of invention and drafting. An alternative refinement would be to locate the tutor back in the writing center, available for regular, generalist writing conference appointments if no one from the desig-nated class signed up.

It would be interesting to hear what new ventures you have tried on your campus and how successful they have been. If you’d like to share such infor-mation, or would like copies of any of the materials mentioned in this article, please contact me at swilliam @hamilton.edu.

Bowling Green State University Writers Lab: What’s in a name?

Then as might well happen in a group of grammar-minded people, a discussion about the advantages of the singular possessive version of this title

(i.e. Writer’s Lab) relative to the plural possessive (Writers’ Lab) was broached. The singular possessive form, i.e. Writer’s Lab, held sway for a while. We liked this version’s focus on the individual writer, the one we col-laborate with for the hour. It looked neater too—there can be something trickier looking, at times, about the plural possessive, we noted, and being user-friendly, of course, is a priority.

On the other hand, we noted that our entire lab is for any or all campus writ-ers, not just one writer, and our motto of “writers helping writers” supported this view. The plural possessive ver-sion, Writers’ Lab, then came out ahead. We then speculated that if we were having trouble with the singular possessive/plural possessive issue so might others. And we didn’t want to give anyone problems figuring out how to spell us!

At this stage of our deliberative pro-cess, we consulted a trusty copy of The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual edited by Norm Goldstein (1998). It advised us to follow these guidelines for Descriptive Phrases (in the larger context of possessives): “Do not add an apostrophe to a word ending in s when it is used primarily in a de-scriptive sense: citizens band radio, a Cincinnati Reds infielder, a teachers college, a Teamsters request, a writers guide.” The Handbook provided this memory aid: “The apostrophe is usu-ally not used if for or by rather than of would be appropriate in the longer form: a radio band for citizens, a col-lege for teachers, a guide for writers, a request by the Teamsters”(163-64). That consultation helped us make a de-cision! We knew we were: A Lab for Writers, or the BGSU Writers Lab.

This name change has been benefi-cial in a number of ways. For one thing, referring to the writers whom we help as “writers” or “student-writers” is easier, and less awkward, than call-ing them “tutees.” Not that we don’t use the term “tutee,” but we use it less often, and now we have a comfortable option, (also acknowledging the word “tutor” can be problematic, as well).

Calling those who use our services “writers” is also more accurate than re-ferring to them as “students.” Although most of the campus-writers who visit us or seek out our services may be stu-dents, they are not our students or may not be visiting us in the capacity of students, if they are working on a résumé, for example. Moreover, if we refer to them as students, the tendency is to expect us to be instructors, not tutors. And experienced tutors know how problematic that expectation can be. Countering this expectation is par-ticularly important for those tutors who may, in a given semester, also be bonafide instructors. The name “Writ-ers Lab” can then serve as a reminder to switch from instructor mode; how-ever, that may be played out in a classroom, to a more collaborative mode, which is appropriate in our lab.

This change has forced us to be more self-conscious, and even inconve-nienced at times, in re-phrasing de-scriptions of ourselves and our ser-vices. But becoming more self-conscious rather than less about what we do is a good thing. Granted, this nominal move has by no means solved all of our struggles to match name with nature and to educate others about our services, but it seems a step in a good direction. Plus experiencing the excite-ment this change has stirred has been fun! By the way, if you’re wondering why we didn’t revise the “Lab” part of our name, it is because of the academic history and culture shared with other divisions of the university. We’ve grown up with the Math Lab and the Study Skills Lab, all of us components of the Academic Enhancement Office of BGSU. We three labs have shared experiences and administratively stra-tegic reasons for keeping “Lab” intact, at this point.

This recounting of our metamorphosis is not at all to say that we have placed less emphasis on writing either. On the contrary, we continue to focus on the text, but in a way that serves the needs of the human being weaving it, or so our name reminds us.

BGSU Writers Lab is our new name at this point in our evolution. We’ll try to keep you posted about how we con-tinue to reinvent ourselves just as we’ll try to keep current with the re-inven-tions of your centers. In addition, we’ll continue to be on the lookout for seren-dipitous “mistakes” sent our way!

Barbara Toth, in collaboration with Camilla Dacey-Groth and Debbie Hine Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH

Muriel Harris, editor Department of English Purdue University 1356 Heavilon Hall West Lafayette, IN 47907-1356

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