Abstract: service training; five through independent study, and the other 35 in a semester-long course called Tutoring and Writing. What have to say about tutoring and tutor training, then, derives from considerable experience with both. think the depth and range of my experience carry a good deal of weight, and could supplement it with anecdotes, portfolios of student work, affidavits from satisfied tutees, and the universally enthusiastic response of the tutors I've trained to the kind of tutoring they learn. Still, that's not necessarily a dependable body of data for use in supporting generalizations about tutoring. The principles for tutoring and tutor training will outline need to be tested, need to be studied. will suggest how this might be done. But my articulation of them here is that of a presumably successful practitioner on the threshold of research-a posture not as fashionable, perhaps, as that of a researcher groping toward practice, but one with an equally honorable tradition. Tutoring in writing is, to state it simply, intervention in the composing process. Writers come to the writing center sometime during the writing of something looking for help. Often, they don't know what kind of help is available, practicable, or sensible: Can leave this paper here and pick it up in an hour?; Do you have an outline for an economics paper?; I need to know grammar. They seem to think that tutoring in writing means either coming to know something new or getting something done to or for them. In fact, though, they need help doing something-in the quotations above, editing, generating ideas, and writing freely, respectively. A tutor training course, then, develops people who understand tutoring as intervention in the composing process and who can do something about it. Any such course ought to be founded on these three principles: Stephen North is Director of the Writing Center at the State University of New York at Albany, and is co-editor (with Lil Brannon) of The Writing Center Journal. He has published essays in CCC, Freshman English News, and The English Record, and is now working on the phenomenon of voice and on the possible roles of computers in the writing curriculum.
Publication Year: 1982
Publication Date: 1982-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 29
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