Ask for feedback.

A wonderful way to establish rapport with a student is to ask about his or her learning preferences. By observing a writer’s demeanor and responses, con-sultants can use this information to fur-ther facilitate learning. How does the writer respond to verbal feedback? Does the writer seem genuinely disen-gaged from the writing process? These could be indicators that the writer has not processed information through his or her preferred channel. Rather than plodding through the conference, a consultant can ask for feedback about the writer’s preferred style.

Students respond positively when I ask, “How do you learn best?” This simple, non-threatening question can be used to elicit important information about the writer as well as enhance communication. I always explain that understanding how an individual learns helps me better assist writers. Some writers are not aware of their own pref-erences, and posing a straightforward question can serve as a springboard to personal discovery. Consultants may wish to ask questions such as “Do you know your learning style?” or “Do you prefer to learn by visualizing it, hearing it, or by tactile methods? Ulti-mately, requesting feedback from stu-dents about preferences can impact their progress in writing conferences (as well as in the classroom) and serve to enhance attitudes toward the writing process.

Act on it.

Read current research on learning styles and understand its applications in a learning environment. Learnativity.com is an excellent site that offers a plethora of resources on learning styles, andragogy, and pedagogy as well as motivation styles. A learning styles assessment test is available on-line so individuals can determine their own preferences. It also offers a bibliography of learning styles resources for further review and study. By understanding the impact of learning styles on writers and learning key strategies that can help a student work through the writing process, tutors will have equipped themselves with invaluable information that will ultimately enable them to reach students effectively.

Activate it.

To help a student negotiate the writ-ing process, suggest strategies that are tailored to that student’s learning pref-erences. For instance, after Matt re-vealed his disdain toward writing, I asked him to describe his learning preferences. “How do you learn best?” I asked. “By seeing? Hearing? Doing?” Matt looked at me and said “I like to use my hands. I learn by doing.” I knew I had just discovered a key piece of information. “I think I know what will help,” I said. I placed col-ored index cards on the table. “Okay, Matt. Let’s start by writing the thesis and topic sentence of each paragraph on the cards.” As he wrote on each in-dex card, I noticed a positive change in his demeanor. I then encouraged him to place the cards in the order he thought they belonged and explain how he had categorized his cards. This caused him to rethink his organization strategy. Much to his surprise, he had reorganized pertinent sections of his paper, and, by explaining it to me, he understood why he had made those choices about his own writing.

Utilizing learning styles theory and practices in writing conferences ulti-mately fosters a complete immersion in a learning experience that enables the consultant and writer to achieve the conference goals. This knowledge can also aid the writer in assessing his or her progress in the classroom and, pos-sibly, in the workplace. By engaging writers through their preferences, the writing consultant can create a fluid and adaptive learning environment where each writer’s needs are ac-knowledged and valued. Isn’t this the optimal learning environment?

Techniques for tailoring the writing conference to writers’ preferred learning styles

Consultants may wish to adopt the tutoring techniques listed below to en-hance conferences once they have de-termined the writer’s dominant learn-ing style. These techniques can be used at any stage of the writing process and for a variety of purposes. For example, the suggestions for visual learners will aid the writer on a creative writing pa-per or a critical analysis.

Visual learners

• Suggest that the writer form visual images of the topic, story, or characters in his or her mind. The writer can visualize the characters speaking to one another, the setting and the action that will take place in the story, essay, or poem.

• Encourage the use of photographs or a visit to an inspiring location to stimulate the mind and creative processes.

• When working with the composing process, color code important parts of the essay, e.g., highlight the thesis sentence in yellow and the topic sentences in pink.

• Ask the writer to record key

words or phrases.

• Suggest a web or cluster.

• Encourage the student to develop a working writing portfolio that contains photographs, collages and webs as well as all pre-writing, revisions, and final drafts.

Auditory learners

• Recommend the use of a tape recorder. Advise the student to carry the recorder in order to archive spontaneous thoughts as they occur.

• Interview someone about the topic. The writer may even tape the interview, if it is permissible.

• Encourage dialogue with other individuals about the paper.

• Suggest that the writer play soothing music while writing.

• Advise the student to silently recite each sentence before writing it.

• Read the writing aloud with the writer.

Kinesthetic learners

• To assist with brainstorming, ask the kinesthetic writer to make a list.

• Make it contextual. Suggest interviewing someone about the topic.

• Counsel the writer to use a pen or pencil and paper (rather than the computer) in the drafting stage.

• Advise the writer to record topics and specific details on colored index cards and move them around as he or she organizes thoughts.

• Suggest listening to soothing music when writing.

• Make it personal. Suggest that the writer think about personal experiences and record them.

• Recommend writing for short periods of time. e.g., brainstorm for 30 minutes and take a break. Then write the first draft.

• Physical environment influences

writers. Suggest that the writer compose in an area that allows for physical movement.

• Teaching concepts to others increases comprehension. Advise the writer to read the essay aloud to classmates or friends.

• Recommend the use of physical objects to demonstrate the story or essay to others. Stacey E. Brown Montgomery College Conroe, TX

Work Cited

Two types of business readers

In spite of the fact that students will usually not be able to tailor business documents for a specific reader, tutors can still help them tailor their docu-ments for two general types of busi-ness readers. Business readers usually fall into one of two categories: skim-mers or skeptics. Skimmers are read-ers who are typically very busy. Pressed for time, they often skim docu-ments in a short period of time. To help students meet the needs of skim-mers, tutors can encourage students to state their main point clearly and up front, place the most important infor-mation at the beginning or ending of paragraphs, and highlight key dates or figures. Skeptical readers, on the other hand, are cautious and doubtful; they will tend to read a document carefully, questioning its validity and the writer’s claims. Writers can tailor documents for skeptical readers by supporting their statements with sufficient details and evidence and by providing specific examples, numbers, dates, names, and percentages. It is usually best for writ-ers to tailor documents for both skim-mers and skeptics, a task that can be difficult since their needs are so differ-ent from one another.

Claims are key

Skimmers, then, will glance at busi-ness messages quickly while skeptics will read to see if what the writer is saying makes sense and has been proven in the document. The secret to addressing both of these readers’ needs is the document’s claim, and perhaps the best way that tutors can help writ-ers with business documents is in help-ing them to state their claim clearly. Even documents that do not clearly spell out their claim will make one. It is best, though, if writers state their claim clearly and early in the docu-ment so that readers will understand the writer’s purpose and so that the writer can make certain that the claim is well supported in the document. In business letters, the claim is usually written as one or two sentences toward the end of the first paragraph. It should summarize the writer’s purpose in writing and briefly forecast what will be discussed in the rest of the let-ter. Consider the opening paragraph from a cover letter presented here:

As a sophomore majoring in Avia

tion Administration, I recently came across your posting for avia-tion interns on the employment opportunities board. My organiza-tional, leadership, and problem-solving skills uniquely qualify me for the position of planning and development intern at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

The writer claims that she has orga-nizational, leadership, and problem-solving skills that qualifies her for a specific position. It would be rela-tively easy to see whether the writer proves that she has the skills she claims to have, and a skimmer would be able to determine quickly what was most important about the writer. The following demonstrates a cover letter that has a claim that needs more work:

Effective time management is im

portant for success in the position

of receiving and delivering. You

need look no further for someone

to fill the position you advertised

in the Feb. 28, 2002 edition of the

Journal and Courier. This writer claims to be the best appli-cant for a job. The second claim would obviously be much more diffi-cult to prove in a business letter and would not help a skimmer to quickly identify what makes this writer unique.

For resumes, the writer’s claim usu-ally comes in the objective statement. This is a 1-3 sentence summary of the writer’s qualifications for a specific position. It is sometimes helpful to suggest to writers that their objective statement is the thesis statement for the resume. Everything contained in the resume should work to prove that what the writer has said in the objective statement is true and that the writer is qualified for the position he or she wants. Although objective statements are not technically required elements of the resume, they are essential for meeting the needs of busy and skepti-cal readers because they help both types of readers to understand what po-sition the writer wants and the nature of his or her qualifications. A good objective statement answers the questions: 1) What position(s) is the writer applying for? 2) What are the writer’s main qualifications? and 3) What are the writer’s career goals? It is possible to write an objective statement that does not answer these questions and is therefore too vague to really provide concrete information for the skimmer or the skeptic. Tutors can often help writers to develop objective statements or help them to make their objective statements more effective.

Sentences A and B demonstrate the difference between a clear and unclear objective statement:

Sentence A

Objective: To obtain employment within your company with the possibility of future advancement.

Sentence B

Objective: A summer internship

that will allow me to apply my in

terpersonal and written communi

cation skills to public policy

projects in a legal environment

Sentence B. obviously makes the clearer claim. The objective statement presented in Sentence A. is probably true of all applicants and doesn’t give any sense of what makes the applicant unique. It simply claims that the applicant wants a job. The objective statement in sentence B is very clear and concise, and the skeptical reader could look through the resume to find evidence that it is true. It claims that the applicant has interpersonal and written communication skills, qualifica-tions that should be borne out through the resume.

Evaluating the effectiveness of business writing

Tutors can also help business writers to evaluate whether they have effec-tively addressed the needs of skimmers and skeptics and persuasively devel-oped their documents. Two strategies that Purdue’s Business Writing Con-sultants rely on frequently are the 35-second test and testing the writer’s as-sertions. The 35-second test is based on the idea that busy business readers often spend 35 seconds or less skim-ming a document, especially an em-ployment document, to decide whether or not to read it more closely (Ober 540). When a writer brings the draft of a business document into the lab, it can be very useful to spend 35 seconds “skimming” the document with the writer, marking everything that stands out in that amount of time. After 35 seconds, the tutor and writer look at what was marked to see if the message was clearly conveyed in that amount of time.

Testing the writer’s assertions is de-signed to see whether the writer has made clear assertions and whether he or she has adequately developed major assertions. With this strategy, the tutor and writer read through the document, identifying major assertions together. After each assertion has been under-lined, the tutor and writer ask: Is each assertion clearly stated? Are enough details and examples included to sup-port the assertion? Is it clear what the reader should do or know? Is there enough context for the assertion or is more background information needed? Both the 35-second test and testing the document’s assertions are valuable strategies because they are effective at addressing the needs of skimmers and skeptics, and with them the tutor can help teach strategies to the writer that the writer can then apply to other busi-ness writing situations.

Conclusion

Although tutoring business writing documents is different in some ways from tutoring academic documents, many of the same tutoring strategies are useful in both cases. Asking stu-dents “how will this be perceived by your reader?” “will your main point be clear to a busy reader?” and “how do you prove this claim?” helps students to retain control over their documents and shows them where to improve on their writing. Additional strategies such as the 35-second test and testing the writer’s assertions are also valuable in helping to structure business writing tutorials and equipping students to write and proofread their documents for a business audience. All of these strategies are intended to address the fact that business writing is persuasive and consequently must prioritize the needs of the reader, and they have been invaluable for helping Business Writ-ing Consultants at the Purdue Univer-sity Writing Lab to meet the needs of students from a wide range of majors in a variety of writing situations.

Angela Laflen Purdue University West Lafayette, IN

Business Writing Resources Available Online

The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides a variety of resources designed to help tutors and students during business writing tutorials and outside the lab. Some of the handouts and workshops most relevant to the topics discussed in this article are:

1) Higher Order Concerns and Later Order Concerns for Business Writing <http://owl.english. purdue.edu/handouts/pw/ p_hocloc.html>.

2) Writing Business Messages—This 41-slide PowerPoint presentation is designed to help writers analyze their audience and organize information effectively in business messages. It can be downloaded from: <http://owl.english.purdu .edu/workshops/pp/index.html>.

3) Resume Workshop—this hypertext workshop guides users through the steps of creating a personalized resume for a specific position or field. <http://owl.english.purdue .edu/workshops/hypertext/ ResumeW/index.html>.

(continued on page 3)

’

Going long

thoughts about the little white lie he just told. “ Well . . . maybe I didn’t work on it all weekend,” he says, “but most of last night, anyway.” He doesn’t want to raise her expectations.

He asks her to read the essay before they go over it together. But as soon as she starts to read, Jeff thinks he sees her smile fading, already.

A flash of worry appears in her brown eyes, which she tries to cover up by raising her eyebrows and nod-ding, like she’s offering encourage-ment, or reassurance, to them both. She holds his paper at a slight angle, with both of her hands—a good grip, as if it’s an important document she doesn’t want to misplace, or maybe she’s hold-ing on like that to brace herself for reading the rest of his essay.

He slouches down in his seat, which puts more comfort space between his knees and the table. He’d hoped col-lege desks would be taller than the ones in high school. Bruised knees are an unexpected college pain. His zool-ogy class is another pain. Who’d have thought Professor Marshall would have such a “thing” for nematodes?

He straightens his button-up cotton shirt (it’s plaid—”seersucker”—his mom says), and tries to smooth the wrinkles. He pulled it out of the clean clothes pile on the floor of his dorm room this morning and didn’t get a chance to iron it. He rests his chin on his chest and tries to look interested . . . polite. He can’t write worth beans, but he does have good manners. It’s the way he was raised.

Wendy puts his paper on the table between them. She points to the intro-duction. “OK, Jeff, let’s see now. Maybe we can start by you telling me what your main idea is for your essay. Now, what are you trying to say here?”

Jeff tries to remember . . . what was his main idea? He knew it last night. He wants to tell her: it’s just an essay for this stupid writing workshop. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But obvi-ously Wendy thinks it’s supposed to be more perfect than it is.

Junkin was a lousy teacher, but Jeff wishes he’d tried harder in his high school English classes. (Like, for in-stance, he never studied for one spell-ing test his whole senior year.) Maybe he shouldn’t have just got by. Wouldn’t be here, trying to pick up a main idea.

Maybe he could grab one out of the air. Or call out to everyone here in the writing center: Does anyone have a spare main idea? A main idea to spare?

All these students huddled around tables with their tutors remind him of his high school football huddles. There were some hot main ideas tossed around in those sessions out on the field. He can still hear Matt, their quar-terback, saying: “We’re gonna move the ball down the field and they’re not gonna stop us!” Or, “Jeff, go long. Just be there, in the end zone, and I’ll get it to you.” Why can’t writing be more like football? Clear cut. Definite pur-pose. You always know where you are and where you’re going.

“OK, Jeff,” Wendy says, “why don’t you read your introduction out loud to me? Remember, this is just your first draft. Sometime a first draft is where we figure out what we want to say in our essays.” Wendy scoots a little closer, so she can read along with him. A faint scent of red licorice comes to him. He wonders if it’s some new per-fume. He doesn’t mind it, in fact, he likes red licorice.

“Excuse me, Wendy?” The secre-tary, a friendly woman who always smiles when he enters the writing cen-ter, comes up behind them. “Your eleven o’clock appointment, Susana, is on the phone. She wants to talk to you for a second.”

“I’ll be right back,” Wendy says to Jeff. “Why don’t you read over your essay. Think about what you’re trying to say.” She gets up, and he watches her walk away. Purple shirt, jeans, san-dals. Neat and casual. She always seems so put together. It’s probably be-cause she’s an English major. If you know how to write, life probably goes smoothly in all areas. Not to mention the fact that she probably has all her main ideas in the bag—ready and wait-ing to pull out whenever she wants one.

Main ideas seem to be such a big deal with all these college-writing ex-perts. Why not have a lot of little ideas? Why focus on just one. FOCUS is one of their favorite words, too. Prior to coming once a week to the writing center he’d only heard the word “focus” in reference to cameras and movies. Now he knows all about it in relation to essays—especially since “focus” is something he stinks at.

He wonders if he might have A.D.D.—although he can spend hours working on his car or tossing a foot-ball. Too bad this college doesn’t have a football team. But then, he’s here to concentrate on his studies. He could have played football at the junior col-lege. But he and his parents decided it was time to leave football behind. (But can a person ever leave football behind, he wonders.)

And he wonders, too, can A.D.D. be just specific to writing? Or maybe it’s a matter of discipline . . . or desire. Why does writing have to be so impor-tant, anyway. He’s pretty good in math and science. Why isn’t that enough? When he becomes an anesthesiologist he can hire someone to be his personal writer. They have personal trainers, personal shoppers, personal chefs . . . why not personal writers, too?

Wendy sits down again. “Why don’t we go back and review the original assignment,” she says.

Wendy’s OK, really. Seems to want to help. And it is red licorice. He’s sure of it. Maybe her shampoo. Her long black hair looks kind of damp and shiny, like she’s just washed it.

Jeff opens his binder and reads out loud: “Write an essay in response to any of the assigned reading from Chapter 3. You have written journal re-sponses to all of these essays, and we have discussed them thoroughly in class. Your essay may grow naturally out of one of your journal responses, which often serve as preliminary drafts. You may decide to disagree with the author and show why he or she is not right. You may. . . .

Jeff pauses. He thinks about the reading and the lively discussion they had in class. He was surprised that some of his classmates agreed with the author. It was obvious to him that the guy was all wet. He closes his eyes and concentrates. And now mixed in with the scent of the red licorice, the back-ground hum of conversation, the anxi-ety over his zoology quiz which is coming up next period, suddenly, he sees the faint glimmer of his main idea.

Far away, like a football arcing in the air . . . sailing . . . on the way, from Matt’s arm. Flying somewhere up there. He sees it, and he’s running, running downfield to the end zone. For a few seconds, it’s lost in the dazzling lights, then he sees it again, falling now, like magic, like a miracle, falling perfectly, into his outstretched arms.

Kristina M. Santos California State University Stanislaus, CA

Help preserve the history of writing centers

The Writing Centers Research Project (WCRP) at the University of Louisville has established an archive—spoken memories and written records of writing center history—to preserve writing center history and facilitate scholars’ research.

In their effort to create a compre-hensive archive of written, audio, and visual materials, they invite do-nations for the archival collection. Before you discard materials related to your writing center’s history, please consider donating them to the WCRP archives. Those willing to donate materials may mail them to the WCRP or make other arrange-ments with the WCRP to submit them. Your tax-deductible donations will be acknowledged by return mail, and the Research Project will reimburse mailing costs where re-quested.

They would like grant proposals, notices to faculty, workshop descrip-tions, flyers, bookmarks, writing center handbooks, reports, studies, training materials, schedules, meet-ing minutes, mission statements, dissertations and theses on writing centers, policy statements, etc.

For more information, their Web site is: <http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/ writingcenter/wcenters index.html>.

Would that my writing center were one of those long-established centers with a well-endowed budget to which this essay’s title speaks. Unfortunately, it is not. Mine is a fledgling, one-year-old center, which had no budget when it started, and which has had to share space with a computer classroom since its doors first opened. While working without a budget and competing for space with a computer classroom has been problematic, one benefit has arisen from the latter: my staff and I have had access to wonderful new technology, including a SMART Board.

For readers unfamiliar with the SMART Board, let me explain what it is and how it functions. Simply put, the SMART Board is a medium for dis-playing information electronically. When interfaced with a computer and a projector, the SMART Board serves as a 5’ X 5’ electronic white board that allows users to view and, by touching the screen, perform any function that can be executed with a mouse on a computer monitor. Thus, with the SMART Board, surfing the net, brows-ing through menus, opening files, run-ning programs, and creating documents is literally at the control of users’ fin-gertips. In addition, the SMART Board allows users to highlight text or graph-ics, draw illustrations, and write notes on screen while any number of win-dows may be open—an especially at-tractive feature for those interested in helping students analyze and revise their writing.

Sound like a glorified chalkboard? Well, maybe. But what makes the SMART Board particularly valuable is its screen-capture function that allows users to save screen material—text, graphics, or notes—so that it can then be printed, emailed, or uploaded to the Internet. As Jeffrey R. Young notes, this feature is a real boon for students, instructors, and tutors because it gives them the ability “to store information that once vanished into chalk dust”— or was lost when disks failed or paper copy turned up missing.

Still skeptical? Consider some of the benefits the SMART Board could bring to the writing center:

• The SMART Board can be used as a visual aid in one-tn-one tutorials or in writing workshops, and on-screen material can be saved, printed, emailed to students or posted on a writing center OWL;

• SMART Board screen shots can be saved as part of tutorial reports and incorporated in tutor portfolios;

• Screen shots can also be used to train tutors and document the work tutors do with students for administrators;

• The SMART Board can be used for generating computer graphics for the web or for promotional materials like brochures and handouts.

While the SMART Board brings such possibilities to the writing center, it also sports a price tag more appro-priate to Neiman Marcus than Circuit City. Although price may vary accord-ing to model and by dealer, in 2001, my institution purchased the basic model for our writing center/computer class-room for around $1,700. Remember, however, that the SMART Board re-quires a computer and a projection sys-tem to function, so prospective buyers will need to be prepared to spend, as we did, an additional $1,000 on a com-puter and $2-$4,000 on a projector (un-less, of course, you already have these accessories lying around your centers). With these additional expenditures, the SMART Board’s start up cost can climb to nearly $7,000.

Doug Enders North Carolina Wesleyan College Rocky Mount, NC

Work Cited

Picture a tutorial in which you see several writing consultants circled around a table, jostling elbows, and all trying to assist a lone, bemused writer. The first consultant you espy is a six-year veteran of the writing center who’s now a Ph.D. candidate in Rheto-ric and Composition. She’s expressing a concern with the product-over-pro-cess approach that she’s seen in those students who come to her for help with professional documents. Competing with her for space at the table is a con-sultant who is also a professional com-munication teacher, a woman who is energetically stressing the importance of understanding the rhetorical situa-tion of business writing— particularly in résumés, cover letters, and grad school applications—and who tells the writer to consider larger content issues before focusing on grammar. Volubly competing with these first two indi-viduals is another writing center staff member, who states she used to be a manager in a highly competitive field and has firsthand knowledge of the im-pulse experienced when facing a hun-dred résumés for a single job; that is, the strategy of reading until given any reason to stop. And topping such a list, she claims, is mechanical error.

I’m sure you can imagine how con-fusing these competing discourses would appear to the writer seeking help, an individual already intimidated by a first attempt at professional writ-ing. And it is similarly disorientating for a single consultant, like me, who carries this range of voices in her head, or for the writing center director who must advise tutors faced with such a quandary. Thus, in this essay I’m con-cerned with the problems and opportu-nities that seem inevitably to arise when consultants and administrators try to take care of business, so to speak, in the writing center.

The professional writing tutorial: Three scenarios

“Not better papers, better writers.” A beloved if well-worn motto of writ-ing centers, this phrase sums up the cross-purposes that seem to be the problematic nexus of many profes-sional writing tutorials. The consult-ant is invested in the notion of assist-ing the student to improve his or her writing skills, while the writer is con-cerned with the exigency, which, when writing a résumé and cover letter, is often the writer’s first extracurricular rhetorical situation. Tensions tend to run high, for this a situation where you can’t “settle” for a lower grade. It’s pass-fail in that you get the job or you don’t. Due to such anxiety, when one is writing for the job market, phobias can be expressed in a variety of ways. Before moving to the larger picture by considering possible strategies to deal with training in professional communi-cation, I therefore first offer three snapshots of common scenarios I’ve seen along the spectrum of the com-posing process and the ways in which I’ve addressed each.

Perhaps one of the most common is the quandary that hits students at the most preliminary invention stage. These are the students who, sometimes sheepishly, sometimes tearfully, in-form you that they have nothing, liter-ally nothing, to offer an employer. In such cases, I seem to spend a sizeable portion of the tutorial just calming them down and the rest of it walking them through invention questions. Often, the problem at this stage isn’t the students’ total lack of pertinent ex-perience; rather, they have no real un-derstanding of the professional conver-sations they are trying to enter. That is, they have no idea what experience “counts.” At this stage, it helps if the consultant has been familiarized with the various forms of résumés and the sorts of general skills that an employer will look for in a new college graduate, such as the ability to communicate or evidence of collaborative skills. Usu-ally, a tutorial dealing with a client in this fundamental stage of the compos-ing process takes the form of a brain-storming session. At the end, the would-be employee goes away with some handouts, some preliminary ideas, and a sense of reassurance, if not total satisfaction, that composing a job package cannot be done in one sitting. And, as I’ve repeatedly assured job seekers, I have yet to meet anyone without at least SOMETHING to put on a résumé.

The next issue in the composition process of business communication— and offering a nice contrast to the pre-vious scenario—is the “I’m-not-going-to-rewrite-it-I-just-want-to-fix-it” response. In less successful tutorials, this situation gives a consultant the feeling of watching Wily Coyote walk off a cliff in the Road Runner cartoon: you know what’s going to happen is going to be painful, but sometimes you just can’t stop it. This tutorial often begins with a writer thinking (a) “I hate writing this document and the sooner it’s off my desk the sooner I can stop worrying about it and get a job”; (b) “This person is a writing consultant and will have no notion of the profes-sional discourse of food sciences / elec-trical engineering / fashion and tex-tiles”; or, finally (c) “Style doesn’t matter in a job package. As long as ev-erything is spelled right, no one is go-ing to care how or where I put things.” Thus, these clients want their materials, often crawling with rhetorical missteps, simply fixed grammatically.

In this situation, I find it’s important to establish my professional ethos be-fore moving into the documents. By talking about the plethora of job pack-ages I’ve seen, both in the academy and out, I can usually convince writers at least to hear out my predictions on audience reactions to their approaches. From here I move to— and perhaps this is more pertinent for those consult-ants with less experience in a profes-sional setting to draw upon— the posi-tion of invoked audience and attempt to persuade the prospective job-seeker that, even in a document as ostensibly concise as a résumé, style and sub-stance cannot be separated. Through a “when you say X, I hear Y” analysis, I can often convince the writer that we need to work on revision before we get to the proofreading stage.

My final scenario is this proofread-ing quandary where consultants may find themselves grasping for answers. That is, if “Not just better papers, bet-ter writers” is the first credo of the writing center, “We don’t proofread” often runs a close second. Job materi-als, however, are going to have to be proofread in order to be successful. Yet, when I attempted to resolve this conflict through the scholarship most influential on my own tutoring, I real-ized that the rhetorical situation it ad-dressed is the consultant-writer rela-tionship or the consultant-writer-teacher triad. When I went back to Jeff Brooks’ “Minimalist Tutoring,” for ex-ample, I saw that this sort of approach is predicated on the notion that the writing seen in the writing center is not “real world”; indeed, it exists in con-trast to professional writing:

While student writings are text,

they are unlike other texts in one

important way: the process is far

more important than the product.

Most “real-world” writing has a

goal beyond the page; anything

that can be done to that writing to

make it more effective ought to be

done. Student writing, on the

other hand, has no real goal be

yond getting it on the page. In the

real world when you need to have

something important written “per

fectly,” you hire a professional

writer; when a student hires a pro

fessional writer it is a high crime

called plagiarism. (85)

If, in the real world, you hire a pro-fessional writer (a contention increas-ingly invalidated by the changing workplace and the ever-expanding use of technology), whom then does the as-piring professional hire? Along with helping the applicant with the situation into which she writes and assisting her with marshaling the evidence of her fitness for employment, is it a writing center’s job to intervene in the text on the proofreading level? How can we reconcile minimal marking and busi-ness communication?

Joan Hawthorne’s essay “‘We don’t proofread here’: Re-visioning the Writ-ing Center to Better Meet Student Needs,” gives a contrasting view of proofreading by examining those times in which copy-editing strategies can be useful in a tutorial. While Hawthorne thus challenges any instinctual proof-reading moratoriums, there neverthe-less appears a gap between the rhetori-cal situation she describes and a writer’s inauguration into the profes-sional writing situation. That is, as Hawthorne delineates on a consultant handout distributed in her own center, “If students leave the conference (a) with a slightly better paper, (b) as a slightly better writer, and (c) feeling comfortable with the center and likely to return so you can continue the work that was begun, you’ve had a ‘good enough’ conference” (6). Despite their disparate visions of proofreading and directive tutoring, then, both Hawthorne’s and Brooks’s approaches seem designed for the classroom, not the marketplace.

So where does this leave me—or, more importantly, those students I’ve assisted with their job materials? Not in an axiomatically consistent place, I’ll admit, nor in one with which I’m particularly easy. Admittedly, there are times I’ve fixed a writer’s letter, when pen in hand, I’ve zipped through, unsplicing those commas and tucking in those last dangling modifiers. But this only happens after the writer and I have worked through a variety of other issues, and only after we’ve talked about proofreading strategies that she’s then applied to her document. This sort of editing is, after all, the final step in the agonizing and protracted writing process of a job package. For this final scenario, I have no ready tips, just a description of my own awareness of the complicated balance that must be struck in this situation.

The business of administrators

From invention to drafting to proof-reading, then, to me business writing tutorials are murky waters to navigate, for those who offer training in the writ-ing center as well as for consultants themselves. In other words, from a director’s point of view what sort of policy decisions and consultant train-ing are predicated by the decision on how to deal with this student need? While all undergraduate consultants will have experienced the classroom writing situation, many may have little or no experience with the professional job search, a situation that can lead to negative feelings for both consultant and writer in a business communica-tion tutorial. Indeed, this frustration isn’t limited to the writing center: I have given papers related to this topic twice at business communication con-ferences, and, both times, several people who worked in schools of busi-to access. In conversations with indi-communication is a concern that de-ness expressed to me their frustration viduals outside the field of writing cen-serves additional attention. Despite the that the writing center wasn’t supply-ter studies, however, I find myself underlying thorny pedagogical issues, ing students what they need. After all, wondering if some centers aren’t miss-professional writing presents an oppor-it was argued to me repeatedly, if stu-ing a chance for our students and our-tunity for writing centers to raise our dents can’t get this help at the writing selves. Were we able to engage our own profile, both in the university center, where ARE they to get it? And, business colleagues in a conversation community and as our students send if we send these writers elsewhere, about creating an approach to these their professional materials into the such as career centers, does that mean documents that satisfies the clients’ marketplace, the larger community as writing centers don’t have the ability to dual needs as job seekers and as writ-well. Thus, I believe that everyone assist with “real writing”? ers, couldn’t we not only improve the stands to benefit if we make these

Ghost.

At the beginning of the fall 2001 se-mester, the OwLet—Online Writing and Learning at LeTourneau Univer-sity—opened its virtual doors. The idea behind the OwLet was the product of conversations I had with my divi-sion chair about our need to encourage and support student writing beyond the two required composition courses. We had begun by talking about how much we’d like to develop a writing center, but since we had neither space nor re-sources at the time, the conversations were more about wishing than plan-ning. Then I attended a summer tech-nology workshop where I heard Becky Rickly from Texas Tech University and Bill Condon from Washington State University talk about OWLs, and I thought to myself, “We can do this!”

My division chair encouraged me to pursue the idea, so I began to think about what our mission and who our audience would be. Since the OwLet would stand alone, its mission would have to be broader and more encom-passing than that of most OWLs if we were to accomplish exclusively online what other universities are doing on-site or in combination with an on-site writing center. Additionally, our remediation program desperately needed overhauling. We have an En-glish proficiency requirement for graduation; students who do not pass the English proficiency exam are re-quired to take a one-hour English re-view course that consisted, at that time (as it had for many years) of grammar exercises and tests with little or no writing. We were looking for ways to restructure that course, and since most of our students are pursuing technical majors and are computer savvy, the OwLet suggested all sorts of interest-ing, interactive possibilities.

With these two goals in mind—to support and encourage better writing throughout the university and to pro-vide curriculum for the English review course—I began talking with col-leagues and students who helped me develop the following objectives:

• Provide easy access and round-the-clock availability

• Present content for multiple learning styles

• Focus content on writing for specific majors and professions

• Use technology to further

independent student learning Thinking about these objectives, how-ever, made me realize that while the OwLet would be student-centered, it could serve faculty as well. Along with referring students who need extra help, faculty could also benefit by having a resource archive of helpful information about writing in their disciplines. The most effective way to achieve the goal of focusing content on writing for spe-cific majors and professions would be to get faculty involved in developing discipline-specific content for the site, content which could then be included or referenced as part of their course materials.

I soon realized that in articulating a mission, I was also designing the architecture of the site. That architecture developed into four main content categories:

• Submission of papers for review by online tutors

• Content units for specific genres and writing projects in and across disciplines

• Strategies for research and citation

• Interactive grammar and usage tutorials

The idea had become a plan. My di-vision chair and I met with the Director of Information Technology to find out about technology resources and needs. Then we drafted a proposal and met with our university Provost, who gave us his wholehearted support. Since the OwLet proposal was included in a pro-posed curriculum change (we not only restructured but completely overhauled and renamed the English review course), the proposal had to go through committees and be approved by the Teaching Faculty Organization. Al-though the OwLet itself did not depend on these approvals, in retrospect I real-ize the value of that process because it generated initial faculty awareness and investment in the OwLet. The Provost funded the project, including summer salaries for me and a student assistant to develop the site, and committed funds to train and pay student tutors for the next school year.

That’s when the fun began—and when I finally realized just how huge a project I had taken on. I felt confident of my own ability to develop content for the site, especially with the help of other faculty. I can code HTML in my sleep, but I realized that simple HTML was insufficient. My friend in Informa-tion Technology blithely told me that I would need a database to keep track of the papers students sent in. Once a pa-per was submitted, the database would add it to a list of papers waiting to be critiqued. Tutors could be assigned a username and password that would al-low them to login to the database and see the list of papers. A tutor could simply click a link to check out (down-load) a paper, critique it, then click an-other link to check it back in, and the database would automatically send the critiqued version back to the student.

This all sounded wonderful, especially when I realized that we could ask stu-dents about the class, the professor, the due date, what they liked about their paper so far, and what they wanted help with, and the database would de-liver this information to the tutor checking out the paper. I didn’t know anything about databases, but my IT friend said not to worry: two program-ming languages would do the job— MySQL and PHP. MySQL is the lan-guage used to program the database functions. PHP can be used with HTML to make personalized pages based on user input. With PHP, we could insert user-specific information like names, dates, and titles into a sub-mission confirmation page. Also, PHP would enrich our grammar and usage tutorials, returning a customized page based on how a student answered a tu-torial question and including the student’s answer in the page. My IT friend recommended I talk to one of the computer science professors who taught databases and smilingly handed me a book on PHP, assuring me that despite my complete ignorance of computer programming, I could learn it. Attaching the OwLet to the overhaul of our English review course meant we had to be up and running at the start of the fall semester. We had about five months.

Thankfully, the computer science professor was teaching a database class that required a real-world project. Two of his best students hadn’t found a project yet, so I became the client, and the OwLet database became the project. My debt to these two students and to my assistant (who did most of the initial HTML coding while I wrote content) is enormous, not only because of the sheer volume of work they ac-complished, but also because they brought the students’ perspective to the project. When they suggested that a page would make more sense if it were arranged “like this” instead of how I had planned it or that my language didn’t communicate to them, I listened. As end users, they know what works.

My assistant’s visual learning style contrasted sharply with my read-write learning preference, so she initiated presentation strategies I would have missed. I frantically read about and coded PHP, but I wasn’t very good at troubleshooting when something went wrong (which it frequently did). My assistant couldn’t code PHP, but she knew just enough C++ to find and fix my mistakes. We made a good team.

With still-gaping holes in the site but enough content to support the English review course, we launched the OwLet at the beginning of the fall semester. Three weeks into the semester, I had hired and begun initial training of my student tutors. Tutors are undergradu-ates who have completed both semes-ters of composition with at least a B. As part of their application, I require a writing sample and two recommenda-tion letters from professors who have graded significant written work. When a student sends in a paper, the tutors respond to content, structure, style, and grammar/usage (prioritized in that or-der). We meet regularly to monitor the quality of tutorial responses and sug-gest improvements. Along with re-sponding to papers, tutors assist faculty teaching the English review courses. Students in this course are assigned specific OwLet content units based on the results of their English proficiency exams. By logging in to the OwLet da-tabase, students can see a list of their assigned units and their completion status. Each content unit consists of an interactive tutorial on a specific skill and culminates in a writing assign-ment, which the students bring to class for one-on-one conferencing with a teacher or tutor. Content units include graphics, video, written explanation, and suggested action and are designed to address the needs of visual, audi-tory, read-write, and kinesthetic learn-ers. Additionally, each unit contains mouseover icons for javascript hints specific to each learning style.

Once we had caught our breath in the English review classes, we began to invite students to submit papers. At pre-semester faculty orientation, I had pre-sented the OwLet to the faculty and passed out bookmarks for them to use in referring students. One of the tutors was also the editor of the campus newspaper and made sure we got a fea-ture article and an ad. We put flyers in student mailboxes and kept encourag-ing faculty to refer students who needed help, and the papers began to come in. The option of sending papers to a tutor was made available to only part of our student population—the al-most 1,100 traditional students at our main campus. (They make up only about 1/3 of our total student popula-tion which includes graduate and non-traditional degree programs for work-ing adults at the main campus and several satellite campuses. We plan to broaden our services to include these students this school year.)

During the first semester, I had only two tutors. About four weeks before the semester ended, we discovered that one common student complaint is le-gitimate: professors really do assign papers to be due all at the same time! The tutors worked more hours than they had bargained for, I tried to fill in gaps, and we still couldn’t manage the load within our 48-hour turn-around time commitment. For the second semester, I hired three additional tu-tors-in-training. They worked with fac-ulty in the English review courses (the best hands-on training I could imagine) and were on-call to assist the regular tutors when the queue was backed up.

During these first two semesters, tu-tors responded to 182 student papers. Our Web site statistics show that we process an average of over 700 suc-cessful page requests per day. We’ve been accessed through every major search engine (with Google leading the pack). We’ve tracked accesses from 20 foreign countries and have verified that composition instructors from several other universities have linked to our site. All of this makes me feel like the late nights falling asleep on the PHP book were worthwhile.

More important, though, are the reactions I’ve had from our own students, our primary audience.

• A student I had never met stopped me in the hallway one day and thanked me for including video clips that explain the concept behind each grammar/usage tutorial. He learns by hearing some-thing explained, and he said that for the first time, he can focus on what he’s trying to communicate and not be stumped by how to structure sentences.

• This summer, another student I didn’t know stopped by my office. She asked whether I am the “OwLet person” and told me how much the site had helped her. One of her professors had included using the OwLet as part of a writing assignment. Doing so ben-efited her so much that she started sending all her papers in for tutorial review.

• A student in the English review course sent me an e-mail a few weeks before the semester ended. The last few tutorials he needed weren’t finished yet. He reminded me that “At the beginning of the semester, in all honesty, I did not want to take this review class.” I remembered his objections, both for their vehemence and their poor use of language. This e-mail demonstrated much greater proficiency with written language as it argued that the class had “really boosted my grammar and writing skills” and encouraged me to finish the tutorials so he wouldn’t miss out on them. (When is the last time a student asked me for additional work?)

• My “It’s Worth the Effort” file includes an e-mail from another student: “OwLet, I just wanted to write and thank

you for all the help you have provided me with. The staff at OwLet really does an incredible job of critiquing my papers that I have sent to you. I have used OwLet many times during the last semester and will continue to use the service this semester. I tip my hat to you and your staff.”

These and other similar responses keep me going when I feel intimidated by the still-gaping holes in the site. Several planned tutorials are yet to be written, and additional learning style specific content needs to be woven into existing ones. The “Research and Cita-tion” section of the site is only about one quarter complete, and the section of “How-To’s for Writing Assign-ments” is barely begun. (Currently, it contains only information on teaching students to write for the Web, but it’s great stuff if you’re looking for that.) Developing these two sections is one of my main goals for the upcoming school year. To do so, I will be visiting with faculty in every department of the university and soliciting their help with content development. I envision a con-tent unit for every kind of writing as-signed in every department in the uni-versity. Suppose you are a business major and have to write an executive summary? What is it? What kind of in-formation should it—and should it not include? How should it be structured? How formal is it? How long should it be, and what should it look like on the page? I’d like to include a sample of a good one, annotated—What makes it good?—and a sample of a poor one, annotated—What makes it poor? The “HOW-TOs” section of the site is de-signed to serve as a curriculum re-source for faculty and for current stu-dents, as well as for graduates once they’ve left the university and are writ-ing on the job. Content for this section will take a long time to develop and will remain in a permanent state of evolution, especially as technology continually changes what and how we write. I’ve realized that the OwLet will never be “finished.”

I’ve also learned some other really important lessons along the way:

• Institutional support is crucial to the success of this type of project. Funding was only the beginning; ongoing commitment to the project is essential, and I’m blessed to have strong adminis-trative support that recognizes my administration and develop-ment of the OwLet as part of my workload.

• Faculty support is equally important and comes through investment. When faculty contribute to the site, they share ownership of it. The success of the site depends on faculty referring students. Part of my job needs to be continually bringing the OwLet to faculty attention. (Anyone need more referral bookmarks?)

• The folks in Information Technology are some of my best friends. They understand what I need better than I do, and it is well worth my time to cultivate good relationships with them. They deserve to be thanked, appreciated, and treated to homemade cookies.

• Student input is invaluable. They know what they need and what sort of presentation makes sense to them. Their input merits my undivided attention.

• And finally, I can now troubleshoot my own PHP.

All of which leads me to suggest that even a project of this magnitude is, in fact, possible and is definitely worth-while. I hope you’ll check us out on the Web at http://owlet.letu.edu. Please feel free to link to our site—and we’d like to link to yours too. We welcome questions and suggestions—and we don’t mind kudos either. Send e-mail to owlet@letu.edu.

Annie Olson LeTourneau University Longview, Texas

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

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