The Idea of a Writing Center

Abstract

This is an essay that began out of frustration. Despite the reference to writing centers in the title, it is not addressed to a writing center audience but to what is, for my purposes, just the opposite: those not with writing centers. Do not exclude yourself from this group just because you know that writing centers (or labs or clinics or places or however you think of them) exist; involved here means having directed such a place, having worked there for a minimum of 100 hours, or, at the very least, having talked about writing of your own there for five or more hours. The source of my frustration? Ignorance: the members of my profession, my colleagues, people I might see at MLA or CCCC or read in the pages of College English, do not understand what I do. They do not understand what does happen, what can happen, in a writing center. Let me be clear here. Misunderstanding is something one expects-and almost gets used to-in the writing center business. The new faculty member in our writing-across-the-curriculum program, for example, who sends his students to get their papers cleaned in the Writing Center before they hand them in; the occasional student who tosses her paper on our reception desk, announcing that she'll pick it up in an hour; even the well-intentioned administrators who are so happy that we deal with skills or fundamentals or, to use the word that seems to subsume all others, grammar (or usually GRAMMAR)these are fairly predictable. But from people in English departments, people well trained in the complex relationship between writer and text, so painfully aware, if only from the composing of dissertations and theses, how lonely and difficult writing can be, I expect more. And I am generally disappointed. What makes the situation particularly frustrating is that so many such people will vehemently claim that they do, really, understand the idea of a writing center. The non-English faculty, the students, the administrators-they may not understand what a writing center is or does, but they have no investment in their ignorance, and can often be educated. But in English departments this second layer of ignorance, this false sense of knowing, makes it doubly hard to get a message through. Indeed, even as you read now, you may be dismissing my argument as the ritual plaint of a remedial teacher begging for respectability, the product of a kind of professional paranoia. But while I might admit that there

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