Critical Reading, Intellectual Writing, and the Rhythm of Tutoring in the Writing Center (2010)

What I want suggest may initially sound, as arguments about pedagogy sometimes do, quite obvious: centers, as often as possible, should turn their attention developing practices for tutoring that enact a rhythm between critical reading and writing. Yet reconceive of center as a place for textual play and approach tutoring in ways that interweave and harmonize generative energies of both reading and is actually quite an ambitious project.1 Joseph Harris's two books Rewriting: How Do Things with Texts (2006) and A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966(1997) - former, written for students; latter, written for teachers - suggest several sophisticated yet elegant strategies for this project. Informed by Harris's approach, and drawing from Edward Said's model of intellectual as a special kind of amateur, I urge center practitioners reimagine our practices. In particular, Harris's Rewriting helps me suggest why ought be a new category of concern in center and how frame and name some of its teachable moves. What almost always makes college and university distinctive is its unique ways of engaging - probative, analytic, creative - with texts, and especially with difficult written texts. Writing center practitioners need acknowledge more explicitly centrality of advanced reading-writing practices our work, especially if we are articulate a vision of center that passes beyond mere service. While conversations in center scholarship have usually been richer about craft of tutoring than about readingwriting connection, we need attend both with equal subtlety. I suspect many people hold similar views mine, even though there simply hasn't been a lot talk in center literature about advanced reading and practices that Harris's pedagogy helps define. Instead, our discussions of tutoring of often seem be derived from two opposing images of center, one reductive and practical, other visionary and radical. On one hand, we hear a lot about dutiful center - practical comma shop, place fix remedial errors. This center works efficiently solve problems students have that others don't want see. Although understaffed and underappreciated, it is still the academy's prime site of social and linguistic regulation (Welch 53). If this center's vision is often shaped by a stultifying ethics of service, its practices are too. We notice, for instance, tedious appeal practical service, drives toward control and correctness, in online worksheets and resources - about how a write compare/contrast paper, how avoid plagiarism, how check one's punctuation, etc. - that many centers link on their websites. And we find most detailed elaborations of practical center in competence-oriented tutor-training guides - textbooks of field that many use train new tutors. Often responsibly conceived, best of these books can be genuinely useful, but many are regrettably formulaic. Like guides working in retail sales or directions for changing an oil filter, either of which, if successfully followed, leads bland, satisfactory results, scripts they provide for learning tutor usually bleach crafts of reading and die point where they do seem more like instrumental or regulatory skills than ways of cultivating and composing a life of mind. Alternatively, we hear a lot about mythopoeic center, which is radical, subversive, playful, and sometimes magical. Here, romantic claims of field's early theorists - that centers work to produce better writers, better writing (North 68); that peer tutoring is not an extension but an alternative traditional classroom (Bruffee 208) - are revalued across decades. …