20.3 (2023) Re-Evaluating Traditional Practice in the Writing Center

P R A X I S

VOL. 20, NO. 3 (2023): RE-EVALUATING TRADITIONAL PRACTICE IN THE WRITING CENTER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS

From the Editors: Re-Evaluating Traditional Practice in the Writing Center

Kiara Walker and Emma Conatser

FOCUS ARTICLES

“There Is No Rubric for This”: Creative Writers’ Bids for Writing Center Support

Lizzie Hutton

STEMM Student Writing Center Usage at a Health Sciences University

Alison O’Keefe and Candis Bond

Effects of Writing Center-Based Peer Tutoring on Undergraduate Students’ Perceived Stress

Matthew Grendell, Brynn Pyper, Julia Elmer, Brooke Overly, and Marinne Hammond

Developing Purposeful Practices for Writing Center Introductory Presentations

Katie Garahan, Justine Jackson Stone, and Brynn Miller

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lizzie Hutton is an assistant professor of English at Miami University, Ohio, where she also directs the Howe Writing Center. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including College English, Writing Center Journal, and JEngl. She is also the author of one book of poems, She’d Waited Millennia, with poetry published in journals including the Harvard Review, Antioch Review, Sycamore Review (as winner of the Wabash prize) and Florida Review(as winner of the Humboldt prize).

Alison O’Keefe recently obtained her Bachelor’s degree in English from Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia. During her degree program, she worked in the Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence as an undergraduate peer consultant. Her work in the center led her to focus on writing center studies for her Honors thesis project. This project was a mixed-methods survey study examining STEMM students’ usage and perceptions of the writing center. The current manuscript was developed using data from her study. Eventually, O’Keefe plans to return to Augusta University to pursue a master’s degree.

Candis Bond is the director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia, where she is also an associate professor of English. Her research focuses on writing center administration, scientific and technical communication, and WAC/WID. Past writing center research by Bond has appeared in journals such as The Peer Review, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Writing Center Journal, and Southern Discourse in the Center

Matthew Grendell, BS is the former Co-Manager of the Family, Home, and Social Science Writing Lab at Brigham Young University where he recently received his Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He is currently a research assistant at the Western Institute for Veterans Research. Matthew plans to continue his education and earn a PhD in Clinical Psychology. In his research, Matthew focuses on stress and coping as well as their effects on well-being and health working with Dr. Patrick Steffen and Dr. Blake Jones. In his free time, Matthew also enjoys all forms of storytelling and writing novels.

Brynn Pyper, BS has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Brigham Young University with minors in Music and Family Life. In addition to performing research at the FHSS Writing Lab under Dr. Joyce Adams, she also worked in the Positive Psychology Lab at BYU under Dr. Jared Warren, with Project MEDIA and Dr. Sarah Coyne in the SFL Department at BYU, and with Dr. Blake Jones in his research regarding stress and well-being. She will be attending Pacific University pursuing a master’s degree in Applied Psychological Sciences in Fall 2023. When she’s not doing research, advising students, or doing homework, Brynn writes and reads fiction and fantasy, experiments with new recipes in her Instant Pot, and prefers to spend as much time outdoors as she can.

Julia Elmer, BS has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brigham Young University. Julia is a former advisor at the FHSS Writing Lab where she helped perform research under Dr. Joyce Adams. In addition to working with Dr. Adams, Julia performed research in stress and biofeedback with Dr. Patrick Steffen and group therapy with Dr. Gary Burlingame. Julia is hoping to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology. In her free time, Julia likes being outdoors, spending time with her loved ones, and creating art.

Brooke Overly is a Senior at Brigham Young University from Orange County, California. She loves people and having adventures with her friends and family. Brooke is studying psychology and statistics and enjoys

working as a writing tutor. Her goal is to become a school psychologist, so she can help children receive the resources and support they need to overcome the odds and succeed.

Marinne Hammond, BS is a psychology graduate and former writing tutor at the BYU FHSS Writing Lab. Marinne has worked as a research assistant for Dr. Jared Warren’s positive psychology lab since 2021. She currently works as a behavioral health technician at the OCD & Anxiety Treatment Center in South Jordan, UT. She plans to receive a PhD in Clinical Psychology. Marinne is a professionally trained violinist and works part-time as a private violin teacher and freelance performer. Some of her hobbies include hiking, fashion, and road trips.

Katie Garahan directs the Writing Resources Center at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from Virginia Tech and has been a writing center administrator for six years.

Justine Jackson Stone is a faculty member in the English Department at Radford University. She served as the assistant director of Radford’s Writing Center for three years and currently trains graduate teaching assistants to tutor writing and teach first-year composition.

Brynn Miller has a Master of Science in English Literature from Radford University, where she was also certified to teach Language Arts in the digital age. She began tutoring her peers in various writing subjects early in her education, which led to her work within the Radford University Writing Center.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: RE-EVALUATING TRADITIONAL PRACTICE IN THE WRITING CENTER

Kiara Walker University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

As the Writing Center finds itself facing a changing landscape of questions and challenges, centers are tasked with re-evaluating the role of writing support in an institutional setting. In this issue of Praxis, authors deploy survey methods to investigate traditional writing center practice and consider potential avenues for change. Each article contemplates the way writing centers stand as institution-facing entities and reconsiders centers’ roles. Whether regarding centers as navigators of student stress, presenters of instruction, or sources of support to creative and STEMM writers, each article gauges traditional practice and provides insight into the unique challenges centers face today.

Our issue opens with Lizzie Hutton’s article,“ ‘There Is No Rubric for This:’ Creative Writers’ Bids for Writing Center Support,” exploring the tasks and requested feedback that creative writers bring to the center. By analyzing the type of support creative writers ask for in their appointment forms, Hutton finds that creative writers’ requests are more evaluative, openended, and have fewer rhetorical constraints. These “bids” signal a different writing process that may destabilize and challenge a consultant approach reliant on genre or rhetorical awareness.

In their article, “STEMM Student Writing Center Usage at a Health Sciences University,” Alison O’Keefe and Candis Bond use their experience at an institution with an emphasis on STEMM programs to consider the support the writing center can provide to STEMM students. The authors share a survey of these students’ use of the writing center, their writing rationales, and their attitudes toward the writing center, highlighting new efforts to be made as centers consider how to best support writers from STEMM programs.

Grendell et al. follow, exploring the implications for writing support on student stress levels in their

Emma Conatser University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

article, “Effects of Writing Center-Based Peer Tutoring on Undergraduate Students’ Perceived Stress.” The authors’ model for understanding perceived stress is split between general stress and writing-specific stress, with both types of stress addressed in the authors’ questions about the outcomes of a writing session. The survey presented here seeks to understand the relationship between these perceived stressors and support provided by peer tutors in writing center settings.

We close our issue with Garahan et al.’s study of a common promotional strategy for writing centers: the introductory presentation. In “Developing Purposeful Practices for Writing Center Introductory Presentations,” Garahan et al. advocate for using evidence-based practices to better understand how introductory presentations shape students' understanding of writing center services. Based on their open-ended survey, the authors find that while both introductory presentations and mock sessions are able to communicate writing center services, such promotional strategies can be improved through offering students a positive framework around writing and scaffolding and meta-language to better understand what occurs in a session.

We want to take a moment to thank our readers and our review board for their continued support. And finally, I (Kiara) want to take a moment to say goodbye. I have been proud to serve as an editor for Praxis for the past three years. In that time, I have had the great and wonderful opportunity to participate in the conversations pushing our field forward. And I am excited to see the work that Praxis’s new and in-coming editors, Emma Conatser and Tristan Hanson will accomplish.

“THERE IS NO RUBRIC FOR THIS”: CREATIVE WRITERS’ BIDS FOR WRITING CENTER SUPPORT

Lizzie Hutton Miami University huttoneb@miamioh.edu

Abstract

This study explores the distinctive questions, challenges and types of feedback requests that creative writing students bring to writing center consultations. Through an examination of appointment form data, this analysis shows significant differences between these and other students’ bids for support, in both their conceptions of task, audience and genre, and in their expectations about the role that writing consultants might play. This study has implications for both consultant training and writing center presumptions about students’ varied writing and revising processes.

Introduction

I recently had lunch with two of the undergraduate writing consultants who work at our university’s writing center, and whom I taught in our center’s credit-bearing training course. Both are high-achieving, thoughtful, and full of can-do energy. Yet when they asked about my current research, a key difference between them emerged. I’d told them that I was investigating writing center consultations that centered on creative writing projects, and one of them I’ll call her Andrea immediately blanched. “I’m terrified of working with creative writers,” she blurted out, eyes wide. “I know nothing about that kind of writing! I’d have no idea what to say!” The other I’ll call her Jess laughed in surprise, looking from me to her colleague. “I love working with creative writers,” she told us, taken aback at the strength of her friend’s sudden show of absolute uncertainty.

For the sake of context, I should add that both these consultants are triple majors, and that in this capacity each is amassing a wide range of disciplinary knowledge that spans the humanities and the social sciences. Both, moreover, profess a particular affection for cultural and literary studies; moments before, we’d been discussing the varied pieces of literature, historical and contemporary, they’d each been reading for their courses. Both, finally, are experienced and confident writing consultants. They seem to genuinely enjoy the work, and in our professional development seminars, they appear equally at ease supporting fellow consultants as they are taking on new consulting challenges. The difference between them that had just emerged did not therefore spring from vastly divergent learning dispositions, cultural interests, or even levels of writing center experience. The difference was rather that Jess was a creative writing major, and thus familiar with the fundamental values of the field. Andrea, in

contrast despite her enthusiasm for foreign films and literature, and her two-year stint as an eight hour-aweek consultant saw the idea of supporting a creative writing student with something like pure panic.

Jess, however, should not have been so surprised. A 2020 study of writing center practitioners’ attitudes about creative writing consultations found that more than half of those surveyed felt they needed specialized training to support creative writers, especially writers working on poetry (Ozer). Nor is this a new realization for the field. The writing center studies literature in both its training guides and its scholarship has long attested to, and worked to preempt, the challenge that creative writing consultations can present. Ben Rafoth’s classic Tutor’s Guide (2000, 2005) includes a chapter on tutoring creative writers by the seminal creative writing theorist Wendy Bishop. More recently, Melissa Ianetta and Lauren Fitzgerald’s 2015 Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors acknowledges that creative writing constitutes a “highly specialized” type of writing “that can stump tutors unfamiliar” with its conventions, and provides a brief heuristic for supporting such potentially challenging forms of writing (154-5). In the field’s leading journals, writing center scholars have also periodically taken up the topic, offering an array of best practices aimed, like these tutoring guides, at assuaging the specific anxiety that working with creative writing can inspire in many consultants (e.g., Devet, Pobo, LeBlanc).

Yet even as this scholarship recognizes that working with creative writers merits a kind of special consideration, it also tends to gloss over the fundamental complexity of the challenge. Many recent recommendations advocate a generalizable approach of genre and/or rhetorical awareness (e.g., Ianetta and Fitzgerald; Ozer), essentially implying that the demands made by creative writing are in fact little different from the demands made by any other field-specific genre, whether academic and disciplinary (a literature review, a lab report) or professional (a cover letter, a business memo). For consultants trained as “expert outsiders,” in Rebecca Nowacek and Bradley Hughes’ phrasing (181), consultations about creative writing are thus understood to offer a challenge best met through collaborative discussions about genre, audience, purpose and authorial intention. There nonetheless

remains something unsatisfying about such a tidy formulation, resting as it does on an ethos of soothing reassurance, and the claim that consultants are actually better prepared than they think to provide the support that creative writers will need. This despite the fact that the creative writing studies scholarship of recent decades (e.g., Bizarro; Vanderslice and Manery; Peary and Hunley; Hesse) has worked to articulate the distinctive values and habits that undergird its reading, writing and revising practices. And this also despite the fact that little to none of the creative writing-writing center literature (with the crucial exception of Ozer) emerges from systematic study of the specific learners, tasks, or feedback requests that actually comprise creative writing-focused writing center consultations.

In response to such a gap, I set out in this study (IRB 03454e) to empirically explore what creative writers actually ask of their writing center consultants and consultations. Through an examination of writers’ creative writing-focused bids for support, as expressed in the appointment forms these writers fill out for their writing center consultations, this article seeks to name the precise questions, challenges, and kinds of feedback that these writers in reality request and which consultants, ready or not, are obliged to navigate.

Attending to Writers’ Bids for Support

In attending to creative writer’s real writing center requests, this study also responds to recent calls among writing center scholars for more empirical research into the varied forms of writing support that real students bring to college and their coursework. Roberta Kjesrud’s 2015 meta-analysis of the field’s methodological habits critiques a longstanding tendency to put writing center “practitioners at the center of our gaze,” often to the neglect of the writers whom our practices and policies are purportedly designed to assist (44). Kjesrud’s claim is confirmed by Yanar Hashlamon’s 2018 overview of writing center research focused on the writer’s role in consultations; overall, Hashlamon finds that evidence of such “tuteecentral” research is relatively scant, and that writing center literature generally proves to “rarely address [writers’] perspectives as active participants in testing our pedagogical assumptions” (np). Indeed, Harry Denny, John Nordlof and Lori Salem’s study of working-class college students’ perspectives on writing center support, published the same year as Hashlamon’s review essay, stands as an explicit rejoinder to these observations. As these scholars note, “We pride ourselves on meeting students where they are, without preconceived notions of where they ‘should’ be” (69);

yet, as their study also confirms, many writing center policies and practices do not always align with the reality of student need, much less with the writing center support requests students actually make.

The field is not short on largely speculative recommendations about how writing center practitioners might best support creative writers; we are short, however, on systematic analyses of this population and the type of support they appear to need and want from their writing center visits as Ozer also notes. Instead, therefore, of proposing yet one more preemptive solution to a consultant like Andrea’s panic, this article seeks to better understand such panic’s source the exact nature of the challenge that many of our consultants face. The questions I focus on, then, are questions of problem clarification: not the prescriptive “what should writing center consultants do to better tutor creative writers?” but the more descriptive “what do creative writers come to the writing center wanting and needing to learn and explore?” and “how do these creative writers’ bids for support differ from those made by other writing center writers?”

To begin to answer these questions, at least within the context of one writing center, one institution of higher education, and the specific culture of creative writing that this institution cultivates, I drew data from our writing center’s appointment forms (sometimes called “intake forms”), comparing the support bids made by creative writers to those made by a random sample of other writers. As my below analysis reveals, the bids for support made in these creative writers’ appointment forms did prove distinctive in some crucial ways, related both to the kinds of feedback requested, and to the specific conceptions of task, genre and audience these writers brought to their writing and revising. Limited to one site as these findings are, they are not, of course, entirely generalizable to all writing centers or to all institutionally mediated creative writing cultures. But these findings do offer a suggestive picture of some of the values, habits, freedoms, and constraints that shape one set of creative writers’ approach to writing and revising. These findings thus also lay important groundwork for further research into the writing center practices and policies that may be most appropriate for this population.

After all, this is a field and a type of writing-focused student that writing center consultants should feel reasonably well prepared to support. The numbers of students committed to creative writing continues to grow at many institutions, whether as undergraduate majors or minors, or through increasingly popular MFA and PhD programs. At many institutions, moreover, introductory creative writing courses can count towards

undergraduate students’ general education or advanced writing requirements, on the presumption that such classes can introduce students to practices, dispositions and techniques also applicable to a number of other academic endeavors and genres (see Tassoni 2020 for a potent defense of this position).

Indeed, and despite this study’s interest in more precisely articulating the distinctive kinds of questions creative writers tend to bring to the writing center, I do not want to promote the common misconception that creative and academic writing tasks represent entirely irreconcilable activities and fields of study. I myself am a creative writer, a writing studies scholar, and a writing center administrator all at once, and I do not feel these affiliations to conflict in my day-to-day. As noted in my introduction, moreover, many of the peer consultants I train and employ also identify both as creative and academic writers. Here I concur with Elizabeth Boquet and Michele Eodice (2008) that writing center work is essentially creative, in ways too often unrecognized by academia’s more typical frameworks of assessment; and that, as a number of other scholars have also argued, writing center practitioners are already adept at the highly collaborative, responsive, improvisatory, peerfeedback models that also structure many workshopbased creative writing courses (e.g. Adams and Adams; Conner; Kostelnik; Neff; Sherwood).

Nonetheless, it is also important to note that such affinities will remain difficult for non-creative writing consultants to leverage so long as the actual needs and values brought by such writers remain understudied. Consultants such as Andrea do not need only to be reassured, or provided a patchwork of tips and tricks; they also need, and deserve, concrete and detailed explications of the varied and distinctive demands these writers see themselves responding to, and the expectations they tend to bring to writing center support. Only by exploring the reality of these distinctions can we prepare consultants to work with the flexibility, receptivity, and informed sense of confidence that productive writing center support requires.

I should also note that, in the analysis that follows, I use the terms fiction writer, poet and creative nonfiction writer (as well as “academic and professional writer”) only as shorthand for writers working in these genres at the time they made their writing center visit, not to imply an essentialized view of these writers’ identities. It is only for the purposes of brevity that I identify writers this way.

Research Site and Methods

First, the institutional context from which this data was drawn: this study took place at a mid-size public midwestern university with a strong emphasis on the liberal arts. Here, the English department has long housed a popular creative writing major and minor for undergraduate students (comprising about 180 undergraduate students), as well as, more recently, a two-year MFA program (20-25 graduate students). As to the writing center: we advertise ourselves as open to all writers at the university, working on any kind of writing project, including creative writing. A portion of undergraduate and graduate student consultants also bring to their writing enter work a specific interest in creative writing. One of the writing center’s student-run special interest groups runs two creative writing contests each year, open to the entire university; and creative writers looking at consultant bios on our scheduling system or website will moreover see that a number of these consultants are creative writing majors, minors, or MFAs (around 4-8 each year). Judging from our programming, marketing and the disciplinary backgrounds brought by many of our consultants, we are a center visibly interested in supporting creative writers working at a variety of levels.

Methodologically, I collected, coded and analyzed appointment form data that spanned three years (August 2019- August 2022), drawn from our writing center’s WCOnline platform. I included appointment forms written for the three modalities of consulting that we offer: in-person, live online (synchronous) and written online (asynchronous). To build a collection of creative-writing specific appointment forms, I included only forms in which the writer either referenced one of our university’s creative writing courses, or used the terms “creative writing,” “poem,” “poetry,” “fiction,” “novel,” “short story,” or “creative nonfiction” somewhere in our appointment form’s open text boxes, in which we ask writers to describe their task and audience, and to explain the main kinds of support they would like. (See appendix B for these two open text box questions.) I excluded from this collection appointment forms whose writers had declined permission for their forms to be used for research; and appointment forms that, upon closer inspection, did not request feedback on a piece of creative writing per se, but instead on a reflection, analysis, or peer review about creative writing. I finally excluded appointment forms whose writers were especially spare, using five words or fewer to describe their task and concerns. In the end, this process provided me with 45 creative writing appointment forms, which I anonymized and dissociated from all demographic information except

the class for which the writing was being produced (if applicable).

To provide a point of comparison to this data, I also randomly selected and anonymized 100 other appointment forms from the same three-year span, whose writers had also granted permission for their appointment form data to be used in writing center research. These included appointment forms related to coursework from a range of academic courses, theses and dissertations, as well as job materials and applications. I anonymized this data and dissociated it from all demographic information. Using open coding (Cresswell), I then analyzed these two sets of writers’ answers to our forms’ two open textbox answers, attending specifically to patterns in their descriptions of task, expressed challenges, questions, and bids for feedback.

In adopting this method, I drew on scholarship that has examined writing center appointment forms for the insight they can offer into the questions, challenges, and needs that writers bring to their writing center consultations (e.g., Severino, Swenson and Zhu). Appointment forms, of course, have some limitations as an entirely reliable window into writers’ concerns. Not all writers fill out their appointment forms with the same level of detail. Writers coming to an in-person or live online (synchronous) consultation usually know that they will also have the opportunity, through discussion with their consultant, to further develop the consultants’ understanding of their task and concerns, so the attention they give to their appointment forms can be somewhat cursory. Some writers may also have little ready language to describe their tasks, challenges, and concerns; this may be particularly true for newcomers to a field, or to higher education more generally. Moreover, appointment forms themselves should be understood in context as writers’ answers to the specific questions the appointment form poses about the nature of their work, their audience, and their main writing and revising concerns.

Nonetheless, and especially considered in the aggregate, appointment form data can offer a telling overview of the concerns most significant to a large range of writers at the very moment when they are making their writing center appointments. While retrospective writer interviews and surveys provide room for extended reflection and the scaffolded development of writers’ ideas, such data is also limited for its focus only on participants who self-select into a study, and who are willing and able to make the extra outlays of time and attention these data collection methods require. Appointment forms, by comparison, are completed by everyone who visits the writing

center; and while not everyone grants permission for their data to be used, far more do than not (77% of the forms pulled for this study granted consent). While less nuanced and context-sensitive than other types of writing center data, appointment forms can provide a relatively more comprehensive cross-section of writers’ support requests than surveys or interviews viably could.

Indeed, even the uncoded collection of this data offered some insight into the numbers and kinds of creative writers who use our writing center. First and despite the facts that our university has robust undergraduate and graduate creative writing programming, and that 10-15% of our consultants identify in their bios as creative writers this data showed the numbers of creative writers coming to our center to be notably low (about 5% of all visits over this three-year span). Second, and as table 1 (Appendix A) shows, utilization numbers varied among different types of creative writers. Fiction writers were by far the most frequent visitors (21 of 45); and the writers most likely to bring in “advanced” work (11 of 21): produced for an upper-level course, their MFA program, or not created for a course at all. By comparison, about threequarters of poets and creative nonfiction writers (73% and 77%, respectively) brought work for an introductory course. This data suggests that fiction writers are more apt than poets or creative nonfiction writers to see the writing center not only as a space suitable for creative writing feedback, but also more for feedback on advanced-level or self-sponsored projects. While I do not have space here to speculate about the reasoning behind these tendencies, I can note that our writing center does not appear to be either marketing or tailoring our support as well as it might, whether to creative writers more generally, or to poets, creative nonfiction writers, or advanced creative writers more specifically. More to the point of this article, this data also suggests that our field’s current practice of treating creative writing consultations as little different from all other kinds of consulting may not be as welcoming to creative writers as might be imagined.

Open coding helped me refine my study’s aims. I began with two broadly linked research questions: about the kinds of support creative writers request, and how (and whether) these bids for support might differ from those requested by non-creative writers. Through continued analysis of my data, however, I developed a more granular understanding of what these bids for support might reveal about the specific challenges and questions different writers bring to the writing center. This understanding was gleaned both through codes related to the types of feedback requested (whether “general”

and unspecified, or focused on correctness, or attached to the use of specific techniques) and to these writers’ attendant representations of task, genre, audience, purpose, intention, and the role they ask the consultant to play in providing such feedback. In comparison to academic and professional writers, I thus found these creative writers’ bids for support to prove distinctive not only for the explicit content of their support requests (e.g., “how should I strengthen character development?”) but also for the way they framed their writing and revising tasks, and the way they conceptualized the writing center consultant as support for these tasks. My first research question thus evolved into three more specific sub-questions, all of which were sharpened by a comparison to non-creative writers.

● What kinds of feedback do creative writers explicitly request, in comparison to noncreative writers?

● What kinds of writing and revising demands and challenges do creative writers appear to be facing, as indicated by their representations of task, audience, and purpose, in comparison to non-creative writers?

● What distinctive kinds of responses are consultants thus being asked to provide to creative writers?

My findings fell into five broad categories, around which the following five subsections will be organized. While creative writers shared with academic and professional writers either a tendency to leave appointment form feedback requests somewhat undefined (“I just want a pair of fresh eyes”) or tied to the specific deployment of technique or rhetorical moves (use of evidence, use of dialogue), creative writers nonetheless distinguished themselves from noncreative writers in the following fundamental ways: (1) an overriding interest in holistic feedback unconcerned with correctness; (2) an open-ended conception of task and audience; (3) malleable and still emergent aims; (4) uncertainty about genre boundaries; (5) requests for highly individualized reader response. Not all creative writers’ appointment forms exhibited all five of these tendencies, but all these tendencies did stand in clear contrast to those evinced by academic and professional writers; and, as I will discuss in my conclusion, these findings not only substantiate but help to explain why writing consultants’ usual approaches may not suffice in providing the specific kinds of feedback these particular writers want and need.

Finding 1: “Anything and Everything”: Holistic feedback unconstrained by concerns with error

Creative writers’ bids for support were often notably broad "anything and everything” was how one writer put it. When specified, however, these bids for support almost always centered on holistic elements of revising, concerned with the meaning of a text in its entirety (see table 2, Appendix A). First, a good number (31%) sought guidance in a general kind of whole-text improvement, as when a fiction writer wrote, “I would like another person to review this story and make edits and comments all over it to help improve it,” and a poet requested “fresh eyes” and “any tips, suggestions or critiques of the work I have completed.” Second, and even more frequent (40%), were requests for help with specific issues of technique, albeit as pertained to the writers’ overall production of a general effect. In these requests, writers asked for support on issues that ranged from “dialogue,” “character development,” “imagery,” “tension,” or “pacing.” Some (seven total) also referenced a concern with “word choice,” “style” and “tone,” with one poet requesting feedback even more specifically about “register,” explaining that “I have a tendency to inflate my word choices” and expressing a worry of sounding “pretentious.” The other most frequent topic of feedback centered on the writer’s “development” or “expansion” of the text and its story, characters, images, or main ideas (38%): one fiction writer, for example, asked if they “should add more detail to the ending”; a poet asked whether “there are specific sections that could be expanded on”; and a creative nonfiction writer wrote that “I would like to know if the overarching theme of the piece…is fully developed.”

The vast majority of these bids therefore asked for support with a whole-text form of meaning production and development. This tendency is underscored by the fact that strikingly few (2 total) requested help with issues of correctness, or the fulfillment of sentencelevel rules (e.g., proofreading, grammar, mechanics, or formatting). Those who did ask for support in error correction, moreover, did so only in passing: both of these requests were embedded in and made implicitly subordinate to the kinds of “whole-text” questions described above, concerning the development of meaning (as when the same writer not only requests help “formatting my dialogue correctly” but also requests “feedback on my ideas”).

In this, creative writers stood in contrast to academic and professional writers, 23% of whom not only requested help with corrective issues, but frequently positioned such support as the sole kind of support they wanted or needed. Often to the exclusion of more holistic matters involving the content or structure of their texts, these writers requested help only

with formatting headers, with citation styles, with grammar, spelling, or “checking for mistakes.” This random sample also showed very few academic and professional writers seeking help with exploratory development of themes or ideas (only 8%). Creative writers’ bids for support, by contrast, were almost entirely unconcerned with error, concerning themselves instead with the development of meaning and deployment of technique. At one level, of course, this suggests that writing consultants might benefit from at least a passing familiarity with some of elements of creative writing craft (dialogue, pacing, imagery, et cetera). At another level, however, this finding also suggests something more fundamental about the values these writers brought to their peer-supported composing processes: an interest in discussing the themes and associations that a text in its entirety accrues as it is revised, rather than discussing that text’s adherence to some predetermined set of rules.

Finding 2: “This is just supposed to be a poem”: Open-ended Tasks and Sense of Audience

Coding of this data showed that creative writers further differed from academic and professional writers in the ways they represented, and thus implicitly conceptualized, both their tasks and their audience. Indeed, and in striking contrast to non-creative writers, my data shows this population to be both writing and revising with few pre-determined constraints or reader expectations, at least that they felt they could or should describe in their appointment form.

First, and whether requesting help with broad improvement, uses of technique, or development of content, these creative writers showed an overarching tendency to describe their genre or assignment in strikingly open-ended terms (see table 3, Appendix A). Indeed, the majority (80%) described their task or assignment only as “creative nonfiction,” “short fiction,” or “a poem”: the three loose categories of writing what we might consider the meta-genres of creative writing around which their university's creative writing program is organized. One’s poet’s somewhat dismissive explanation of their assigned genre is typical: “this is just supposed to be a poem for my English portfolio final exam.” Such representations of task suggest that these writers were working with few predetermined conventions or aims, whether formal, structural, or rhetorical, to which their texts are expected to cohere.

To be sure, there were some exceptions: One fiction writer, who asked for help on how to handle the “the general climax” of a central scene, described their larger project as an “historical” novel for “young

adults.” Another fiction writer one who asked about “pacing” framed this as a question pertinent to genrespecific conventions and goals, explaining that “I want to know how I handled the mystery elements of my piece.” A third fiction writer described their flash fiction piece as an attempt at a “fractured fairy tale”; a poet, as a final example, described their draft as a “visual forms poem.” Notably, however, this constituted only a small portion of creative writers; of all creative writers’ bids for support, in fact, only one fifth (20%) represented their writing task with this level of genrespecificity. The vast majority, in response to the appointment form’s request that they describe their task, assignment, or purpose for writing “in detail,” used the broadest terms possible: the academic equivalent of describing a course assignment as only a paper or essay.

What’s more, almost a quarter of these creative writers (24%) took the time in their appointment form to explicitly state that they were approaching their revisions lacking both an assignment and any sense of the criteria by which their finished work would be assessed (again, see table 3, Appendix A). One writer highlighted this by writing in all caps (in an appointment form that was otherwise not all caps): “THERE IS NO RUBRIC,” echoing in another part of their form, “there is no rubric for this.” Another explained, “there are no specific guidelines except for the genre being creative nonfiction.” A third wrote, “there was no prompt of any other requirements, including length” and a fourth explained, “very broad instructions and all we really had to do is write a poem.”

This lack of genre-specificity contrasts sharply with the professional and academic writers from my random sample, almost all of whom (95%) provided within even the most general bid for support a specific description of their task, and using terms that offered a fairly precise picture of the genre norms that typically constrain that task. Academic and professional writers asked for support revising genres that ranged from a “rhetorical analysis,” to a “case study,” from an “annotated bibliography” or a “business report” to a “personal statement” for a “graduate school application”: task descriptions that each carry specific connotations about the point of view, argumentative mode, kinds of evidence and even formatting conventions that writers will be typically expected to deploy.

If creative writers’ representations of task were broad, their representations of audience tended to be even broader (see table 4, Appendix A). Very few creative writers’ bids for support distinguished a specific audience for whom they wrote. Some presumably in direct response to the question about

audience asked on our appointment form outright stated that they brought no sense of audience to their work of writing and revising: as one put it, in a classically expressivist vein, “I didn’t have a main audience in mind, it’s more of a piece for me.” Those that did name their audience, moreover, most often defined this audience merely as their classroom instructor and peers, and without explicating any functional expectations these readers might bring to the text (about what that text should do, or how). Indeed, only four writers (9%) described their audience as constituting a population who would read their text through the lens of somewhat specified identities, as when one wrote that a text was intended for “young adults” and another for “other mothers.” Yet even when these writers did define their audience, they gave no indication of the particular genre expectations or kinds of knowledge this audience would bring to such a text.

Far more typical was an appointment form in which a creative writer explained that they were composing for a wide and deliberately undefined spectrum of readers. As one writer put it, “I want to make sure that it’s engaging to a broader audience”; as another explained, “My main readers consist of anyone who likes to read in general, especially poetry.” Indeed, a main challenge these writers seemed to face was not to write to a specific audience but to produce a text that some undefined range of readers should presumably be able to access and enjoy, without any previous familiarity with the topic: as one creative nonfiction writer explained of their piece, “I hope anyone would enjoy reading it,” even “a reader who doesn’t share the experience.”

Academic and professional writers’ descriptions of audience again provided a telling contrast, arguably because of the more constrained genres and tasks with which they were working. A few (9%) non-creative writers asked consultants to help them make sure their work was “readable,” “clear” or “professional” for a “general” or unspecified reader or audience. A

by a more specific sense of the genre conventions and audience expectations to which their work should adhere. This is not, of course, to suggest that these writers are operating without genre or audience constraints. It does suggest, however, that these writers’ sense of genre and audience remains notably openended for much of their writing and revising process. Compared to academic writers, very few creative writers appeared to bring to their writing center appointments an already defined sense of what sort of writing their final product could or should constitute.

somewhat larger number of non-creative writers (22%), however, explicitly specified not only a particular type of audience, but unlike all creative writers studied here with a degree of particularity that also indicated some of the values and knowledge-sets by which this audience would read their texts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the writers working on career or application documents showed an especially high level of audience-awareness: “The audience is the graduate committee,” wrote one; and another explained, “I am asking for feedback on… meeting the expectations of the person receiving my personal statement …I am currently applying to graduate school (Arts Administration).” Other academic writers described an intended audience baked into their assignment, as when the writer of a business memo explained that the “main readers would be Apple” and, more specifically, its “communications team.” To be sure, and like many creative writers, academic writers did sometimes name their instructor as their primary audience; unlike creative writers, however, these academic writers also suggested that their instructors would be bringing very specific expectations as they read student work, expectations that many students appeared to know ahead of time: as one writer explained, they were revising in order to “meet the criteria my professor put forth.”

These creative writers’ bids for support, then, were not only aimed at holistic improvement and meaning development, but were undergirded by few predetermined constraints, such as might be provided by more specific sense of the genre conventions and audience expectations to which their work should adhere. This is not, of course, to suggest that these writers are operating without genre or audience constraints. It does suggest, however, that these writers’ sense of genre and audience remains notably openended for much of their writing and revising process. Compared to academic writers, very few creative writers appeared to bring to their writing center appointments an already defined sense of what sort of writing their final product could or should constitute.

Finding 3: “I’m more than willing to change up as needed”: Malleable and Still Emergent Aims

These creative writers further tended to ask for support revising texts whose aims they represented as extremely malleable and often still emergent. Just as few described their work as shaped by a precise task or genre, very few also made statements about their intentions. Indeed, only about one eighth of creative writers’ requests for feedback referred to intended meaning (see table 5, Appendix A). The exceptions to this trend the 13% who did attribute a specific,

already articulable intention or meaning to their text shared with academic and professional writers an abiding interest in making sure their aims were clear: as one poet wrote, “I am hoping that the emotion of the past of the [poem’s main character] comes through as well as the message that he has been left behind.” But the great majority of creative writers (87%) asked for feedback without specifying any specific meaning or effect they hoped to achieve, instead explaining that they merely wanted help revising work in order to make it broadly “good,” “compelling,” or “readable.”

The open-endedness of their given tasks, in fact, seemed to make it particularly difficult for some creative writers to define their “purpose” as requested by our writing center’s appointment form in anything except circular terms: one creative nonfiction writer explained that “the purpose of this piece was to explore non-fiction,” and another wrote that “the purpose of this writing is creative writing.” Indeed, creative writers most often elided the issue of purpose altogether. Many simply asked for feedback that would help them achieve some generalized sense of improvement or to deploy specific creative writing techniques that were yet dissociated from any sense of meant effect. When one creative writer wrote “I’m looking for feedback on anything that doesn't flow,” or another asked, “should I go more extreme in terms of creative elements, like adding more specific characterization?” neither attached these bids to any representation of the specific aims that might guide these revisions. A few creative writers even asked for explicit help achieving a more precise sense of purpose. As one fiction writer explained, they understood the components of their draft as “actually very flexible and I’m willing to change up as needed.” This writer’s bid for support was essentially a request for help determining their own aspirations, support that would then help them structure their text more deliberately: “I feel a bit like [the characters] are just sprinting from setting to setting…but there’s nothing particularly intentional or motivated to why.”

This tendency is also reflected in the number of creative writers who openly represented their intentions as still unformed: as noted above (see table 2, Appendix A), more than a third (38%) asked for help with “developing,” “expanding” or “enhancing” texts whose potential meanings the writer was apparently still undecided about. Especially in comparison to the pragmatic, particularized and highly directive terms that academic and professional writers used in their bids for support (e.g., “I would like help with making all the evidence I have flow paragraph to paragraph”), the language in these creative writers’ requests for feedback

is significantly indefinite and open to a range of responses. As one creative nonfiction writer explained, “I would like to know if it feels like there’s anything missing or something should be added…are there themes or ideas you feel should be highlighted more?” Another creative nonfiction writer asked, “Are there any sections or narrative threads that you want more of?” A fiction writer inquired about “what I can do to expand on some of the ideas in the plot of the story.” A poet requested “general feedback about…what you recommend I change” and “if I should continue to add on to the piece.” Like creative writers’ representations of task, these requests cast a remarkably wide net. Without the rhetorical or formal guidance provided by more constrained genres of academic and professional writers, these creative writers appeared to understand their texts as revisable in an infinite number of as yet unexplored directions.

As the previous section showed, academic and professional writers grounded their bids for support in far more consistently precise representations of task and genre; relatedly, these writers also provided a far more definite sense of the intentions and rhetorical aims that would help determine the direction of their revisions. In one academic writer’s explanation, for example, that they were “hoping” to produce “a fact sheet that is satisfactory for business research presentations,” there is nothing to suggest that the writer is at all undecided or unclear about the rhetorical purpose driving their task. More generally, academic and professional writers also far less frequently requested help developing ideas (8%) than creative writers; and further framed such bids for help with far more precise statements about the predetermined aims that guided their writing and revising. The challenge these writers brought to the writing center, then, appeared less to involve the pure development of meaning, ideas, or arguments, than they involved improving their clear and comprehensive communication of meaning, ideas, or arguments that the writer had already formulated. As one academic writer explained, “I…need help developing ideas so that my argument is clear,” suggesting that their argumentative intentions were already well in hand. Another similarly requested help making sure that their “organization” as well as use of “evidence and source material complements the development of the paper’s main ideas.” In none of these cases did writers present themselves as still vague about what they hoped their text would present, or the purpose that such a text should serve. Creative writers, however, approached their intended meanings very much as a work still in process a process they seemed

to want a consultant to engage in genuinely exploratory ways.

Finding 4:

“I’m honestly not even sure if this counts”: Uncertainty about Genre Boundaries

Some creative writers’ bids for support implied a degree of familiarity, if not outright comfort, with the open-ended nature of creative writing tasks and aims. Others, however, appeared more unsure about this quality, and looked to their writing center consultations as an opportunity to clarify what exactly constitutes the field and its main text-types. My next finding illustrates this concern vividly, wherein a portion of these writers expressed a deep uncertainty about how to define and realize for themselves the kinds of creative writing they had been assigned to produce. As table 6 (Appendix A) shows, in fact, 20% of creative writers requested support in better understanding the boundaries of these creative writing genres and their constituent features. These bids for support are especially poignant for the window they offer into novice creative writers’ sometimes deep apprehension about what actually comprises these different creative writing genres, as well as the formal features that would justify such discernments. One poet explained, “I would like feedback about if this fits what a poem is expected to be and if it makes sense to fall under that category.” A creative nonfiction writer asked if their piece “works” as an example of its type, and moreover if it was sufficiently distinctive from other text-types, such as a “news story, for example.” Yet another creative nonfiction writer, who explained that “I have been struggling with writing creative nonfiction,” explicitly requested “suggestions for what I can do to meet the criteria of creative nonfiction.” This writer's struggle lay in their incomplete understanding of how this genre could be differentiated from other historical reports; as they explained, “This story is an account of my past, but I don’t know if I portrayed it ‘correctly’.” Their scare quotes arguably stand as an acknowledgement that such a “corrective” framework might not be appropriate for describing the norms that shape such unconstrained genres. But this bid for support also suggests that the writer still lacked alternative frameworks for discussing the “criteria” by which this genre might be defined. Poets were particularly uncertain about how specific aspects of poetic form and structure function, and how these features could help identifiably define their work as indeed belonging to this loosely defined genre. One poet wrote, “I have no idea [how] line breaks work and when I should do them as well as how I should format the lines following a break….I also feel like my division of stanzas is weird and idk if each one

is equally relevant.” Another poet’s questions center on poetic form: “is my poem set up properly? I do not know anything about setting them up…” A third poet explains, “I am not a poet and I feel like I don’t really understand poetry…I am hoping to discuss what determines flow specifically in a poem.”

Again, a comparison to academic and professional writers’ support bids brings creative writer’s boundary uncertainty into even sharper focus. Compared to the 20% of creative writers discussed above, only five (5%) of academic and professional writers requested help approaching and understanding the exact requirements involved in their task. Even more crucially, every one of the academic and professional writers who requested help with genre expectations introduced these bids with a detailed description of the assignment they were working towards, which is to say that not a single one (0%) described genre in the broadly unconstrained terms (“poem” or “short story”) used by creative writers. Questions about how best to approach writing in their genre, then, had more to do with procedural execution than conceptual uncertainty about either the boundaries of their given genre or the function of its varied features. An academic writer who requested help with “how to get started on the essay and what kind of information to put in and not put in” also provided a detailed description of their assignment (“a reflection”) and its constituent expected elements (accounts of the writer’s “demographics,” “community,” and “experiences”). Another, who asked for support in “better understanding the essay and what I am supposed to be doing,” described their essay topic and purpose with similar precision: as focused on “why students should be attending in-school classes for their own mental health.”

Overall, then, these academic and professional writers’ bids for support with understanding their task were bids for help in how best to meet some set of pregiven genre and task expectations. Creative writers’ bids for support with understanding their task, by contrast, requested help understanding a task whose boundaries and constituent elements many of them were still unsure how to define. For this portion of creative writers, these support bids most essentially involved questions about the “criteria” that make creative writing genres what they are, especially as such “criteria” compare and more crucially, contrast with the more familiar, and often rigid, norms, aims, and reader expectations by which academic and professional genres are often understood. As the previous findings show, moreover, these support requests cannot be met by the writing consultant’s usual questions about the writer’s rhetorical purpose, or through an consultants’

explication of the expected rhetorical moves that structure more predictably constrained genres. Indeed, these are questions about creative writing that could also stump writing consultants, like Andrea, who themselves remain unfamiliar with this field’s distinctive values and practices. Yet, as I will explore more in my conclusion, such uncertainty about genre boundaries also shows these students intuitively beginning the grasp one of creative writing’s most essential qualities, and which distinguishes it from so many other disciplines and attendant forms of expression: its commitment to constantly playing with, prodding, and even deconstructing its own genre boundaries, norms, and reader expectations. As I will argue, consultants would benefit from recognizing this as a fundamental value of the field, to alleviate both their own and fellow students’ frustration in trying to ask and answer closed-ended questions of such a determinedly open-ended field.

support also suggested a strong, field-specific understanding of the kinds of support most beneficial for such open-ended tasks and processes, as illustrated by a consistent interest in their real readers’ more specific and personal impressions of their texts. Indeed, my data showed that the most frequently requested form of feedback (62%) constituted an account of the reader’s response to a piece of writing: an account, more precisely, of whatever significance and value the reader found in what a writer had produced (see table 7, Appendix A). For many creative writers, in fact, the only feedback they requested were these purely descriptive accounts of engagement their consultants’ sense-making experience as a singular, often highly subjective reader. Indeed, this aligns with the highly individuated peer response model that structures so many creative writing classes, even as it contrasts with the kind of more rhetorically sensitive, less personally inflected responses many writing consultants are accustomed to providing.

Finding 5: “Do you like it?”: Requests for highly individuated consultant response

As illustrated above, most creative writers requested support developing new forms of meaning that were unconstrained by any expectations that a specific audience might bring to their texts. These writers represented their tasks, their potential readers, and their aims in strikingly open-ended terms. Some articulated this open-endedness as a core challenge to their revising and asked for support in defining the genres they were being asked to produce. As my fifth finding shows, however, most creative writers’ bids for

Some writers asked for an account of their reader’s affective engagement with the text: whether, as one poet put it, the “emotion…comes through,” or, in another case, if a text is successfully “scary”; another poet wondered if they had successfully fulfilled their “purpose…to convey and express various feelings.” Other writers wanted an account of the reader’s production of coherent and logical meaning: whether a given draft “makes sense” or was “believable.” A poet working on a poem laid out in a non-linear form asked to know about the sequence in which the reader’s experience unfolded: “I am curious to know where you began to read the poem.” For many of these writers, therefore, the question at stake was about the specific experience their text might have inspired, perhaps independent of the writer’s own intentions: whether their work, as one poet asked, actually “accumulates meaning,” and what that meaning might be.

These bids for a reader’s responsive feedback sometimes also contained a request for more explicitly evaluative reactions: the “interest,” “pleasure” or positive assessment that a text might have inspired in the reader. More than one fifth of creative writers (22%) asked in their appointment forms some variation on the questions “was it enjoyable?” was it “interesting enough?” and/or “is it any good?” “I want to make sure that it’s engaging,” explained one writer. Another asked if their writing was “compelling.” Yet another explicitly positioned the reader’s pleasure as fundamental to the disciplinary field, writing that “Since this is creative writing, I want to know this: do you like it?” Many also suggested that the reader’s mere “liking” of a piece of

writing provided sufficient grounds for whether and how it should be revised, as when one creative nonfiction writer asked, “I would like to know if there’s anything that jumps out at you that you either like or that should be changed.” By contrast (see table 2, Appendix A) no single academic or professional writers from my sample requested this form of subjectively evaluative feedback.

Particularly striking about these bids for response, then, is the highly personalized kind of feedback they request, and the attendant implication that for these creative writers such personalized response constitutes the main kind of consultant response that counts. Indeed, these bids for responsive feedback show a notably frequent use of second person (36%), as well as an often-intimate tone: one wrote, “I would just like to see what your thoughts are,” and another, “I am curious to know what you like.” Like so many the other request types already explored, this tendency sharply diverges from the conceptions of audience and reader implicit to academic and professional writers’ bids for support. As

noted above, academic and professional writers’ appointment forms often appeared at pains to explain the specific expectations an audience would bring to their texts expectations that the consultant was presumably being asked to adopt as they read. Only one writer from this academic-professional sample (1%) made a direct second person request for the consultants’ personal experience as a reader. By comparison, creative writers regularly requested a form of feedback that was constituted only by their consultant’s raw and unvarnished perspective, as when one fiction writer requested “some brutally honest feedback on my ideas, … basically whether or not this story is any good.”

Conclusion

As this data shows, creative writers distinguish themselves from academic and professional writers for bringing to the writing center strikingly open-ended tasks and a notably malleable sense of intention. These writers tend to request help generating ideas and developing meaning, through the deployment of varied creative writing techniques; yet they also bring to these projects few of the predetermined rhetorical constraints that, in the case of more traditionally academic and professional kinds of writing, can help consultants tailor their guidance to a writer’s given purpose and situation. Indeed, these tendencies sit somewhat uneasily with the more rhetorically minded questions that our appointment form requires students to answer. Finally, and instead of asking for help navigating specific audience expectations or already established criteria for assessment as most academic and professional writers did creative writers largely asked for individuated, often quite personal responses to their texts, to aid them in their exploration of new avenues for development, and in the homing in on as yet unrealized forms of meaning.

These findings should not suggest that the work of creative writing is somehow free of genre conventions, purpose, or sensitivity to audience. But this data does show creative writing students taking a distinctive processual approach to how such rhetorical exigence is determined. As their support bids show, these students approached writing and revising with a radically unrestricted, even emergent sense of what might constitute their eventual aims and constraints implying that writers knew that their aims and constraints might develop and change quite dramatically as these they continued to write and revise. Such bids for support can arguably pose a significant challenge for writing consultants more

accustomed to conceptualizing both the activity of writing and their role as consultants through the framework of most other school-based writing tasks. After all, consultants who are habituated both as writers and writing center practitioners to more constrained academic and professional writing assignments often use details about task, genre, audience, intention, and situation (whether concerning macro issues of structure and argument or micro issues of what counts as “error”) as the foundation for their subsequent feedback and revising suggestions. Indeed, most writing center guides recommend that discussion of these issues form a central feature of the “agenda setting” that is then used to guide the session’s main work. But when a writer’s rhetorical aims are as malleable as many creative writers’ appear to be, these consultants’ usual operations will be significantly destabilized.

In this, these findings challenge the efficacy of some of the scholarship’s recommendations about creative writing, writing center consultations. Ianetta and Fitzgerald draw on the work of Hans Ostrom to argue that tutors can and should take to the same approach to creative writing that they take to any academic task: “by asking if there is an assignment and what the writer’s goals are,” including the “kind of writing” the writer “is aiming for,” and the “conventions” or “audience expectations that are typically associated with this genre” (155). Yet the cases described in this study suggest that a consultant’s further inquiries into a creative writer’s intended genre, audience or intentions may prove ineffectual. Especially compared to academic and professional writers, few creative writers brought to their consultations a clearly bounded, already decided upon sense of either their purpose or the generic constraints that would best help them meet such purpose. Some writers, in fact, were outright confused about how to define the boundaries and constituent features of the open-ended tasks they had been asked to complete. Yet all seemed in agreement whether implicitly or explicitly that the field itself operates by a kind of resistance to predetermined rules: that creative writing privileges experimentation, idea development, and the unpredictable “accumulation of meaning,” as one writer put it, over the achieved adherence to formal norms and pregiven aims and expectations.

The work of Doug Hesse is particularly useful on this point, especially regarding the different processes and values by which these distinctive kinds of writing are produced and revised. As he argues, creative writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, composition that field that has shaped so much of current writing center

pedagogy, and so many of our contemporary conceptions of academic writing support possess “dissimilar orientations and aspirations,” dissimilarities which require “respect” (50). For Hesse, these differences comprise “move[s] in a Burkean parlor constituted differently.” As he goes on to explain, “in familiar if reductive terms”: “the former [composition, or writing studies] is a Bartholomaen parlor where rhetors are heard by developing given topics along approved trajectories; the latter [creative writing] is an Elbovian parlor where writers gain the floor by creating interest, through the arts of discourse” (40-41).

This study substantiates Hesse’s claims, showing that creative writers come to the writing center looking for support in how to “gain the floor by creating interest” rather than “developing… along approved trajectories.” Indeed, this study’s final finding particularly underscores this feature of creative writers’ writing and revising process: that what creative writers want most is an account of such “interest,” as an individual reader feels it, rather than as an imagined audience would expect it.

To be sure, a good deal of the writing center scholarship has recognized the value of reader response feedback for creative writing consultations. Yet writing center administrators and scholars should also acknowledge or “respect,” to use Hesse’s terms the extent to which these kind of reader response feedback requests will also represent for many writing consultants a significant departure from their usual conceptions of writing and the roles they should play as consultants. Indeed, and as my findings show, strikingly few academic and professional writers ask consultants to base their feedback on the kind of intimately individuated, affective, or evaluative responses to a text that creative writers consistently request. Many consultants, in fact, working in the “Bartholomean” framework that Hesse describes above, may, in their more typical consulting practice, feel obliged to actively suppress such personal responses, and to instead privilege the guidance offered by a given rhetorical situation and set of readers to which the consultantreader often has no personal relationship of their own: imagining themselves, as it were, into the writer’s Burkean parlor. Yet creative writers present no such Burkean parlor. Their requests that consultants instead respond only personally, individually, and often evaluatively, will understandably make many consultants feel disarmed and unmoored.

The question that remains, of course, is how consultants can be better prepared to navigate the facts of such field differences. One solution commonly offered in the scholarship is to recommend that

administrators provide more training in genre awareness (Ozer; Pobo) and in creative writing’s specific craft elements (LeBlanc; Devet). But I would argue (as this data confirms) that administrators or well-intentioned tip sheets cannot reasonably provide consultants with a crash course in creative genres or meta-genres and its technical conventions (e.g., the poem, the logic of line breaks) the same way they might with most other academic or professional genres, whose conventions, aims, and sense of audience are far more stable and constrained (e.g., the literature review, an academic introduction’s rhetorical moves). I would recommend, instead, that consultants be introduced to some of the foundational characteristics that structure creative writing as a field: the deliberate openendedness of its tasks or prompts; the capacious nature of its forms; and the emphasis on exploratory processes, in which a sense of authorial meaning and purpose develops over time and through feedback from creative readers. Armed with this information, consultants can first and foremost commiserate with writers about what makes creative writing so challenging for those new to the field, and commiserate with each other about how creative writing requires such a distinctive a kind of consulting. More specifically, consultants can also be prepared to more deliberately provide writers with the kind of experiential descriptions of meaning-making that reader response feedback requires. They can practice articulating for writers the themes, associations and emotions that a text calls up for them; and they can practice helping writers to develop ideas in multiple directions at once. Consultants should moreover be persuaded that creative writers are a population of college writers whom writing centers are not only obliged to support, but whom writing center consultants and writing center research will benefit from supporting more mindfully and more often. After all, and as this study shows, these writers’ requests for feedback can challenge some of our field’s most persistent presumptions that a rhetorical, “Bartholomean” line of questioning will be best for supporting all writing, revising, and consulting challenges.

Yet also crucial for writing center and writing studies training and research will be the continued exploration of why reader response remains, for these open-ended tasks, the feedback request of choice; and how such responses can be provided ethically and productively, and without making either writer or consultant feel unduly vulnerable. It is my hope that future scholarship can take these questions up: what constitutes useful “reader response” feedback during creative writing consultations, and the extent to which

such feedback indeed meets the needs of creative writers of all sorts, and working at all levels.

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STEMM STUDENT WRITING CENTER USAGE AT A HEALTH SCIENCES UNIVERSITY

Alison O’Keefe Augusta University alison.e.okeefe@gmail.com

Abstract

Writing is central to the academic and professional success of STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) students, yet there is little writing center scholarship examining how STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. This article presents quantitative findings from a mix-methods survey study examining STEMM undergraduate students’ usage of university writing centers. The study was conducted at a mid-sized, public health sciences research university in the Southeast. Findings from the survey suggest that STEMM students are likely to visit writing centers, but their visits overwhelmingly focus on coursework in the core curriculum rather than coursework within their majors. These students tend to view disciplinary writing as formulaic and content-driven, which affects writing center usage. They also express concerns about the ability of writing center staff to assist with scientific and technical genres. Throughout the presentation of results, the authors offer insight into practices they plan to implement to provide better outreach and support to STEMM students at their university. While study results are not generalizable to other institutions, they still provide insight into usage behaviors of STEMM students that can be useful to a variety of institutions as they work to support STEMM writers.

Augusta University is known as Georgia’s Health Sciences University, so it is not surprising that the majority of its approximately 5,000 undergraduates major in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) disciplines. When I (AO), an English major, began working as an undergraduate writing consultant in the Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence, I was excited, if a bit intimidated, to work with these students. I expected to see lab reports, scientific research proposals, and research posters. I was looking forward to growing my expertise in scientific style and genres. However, I was surprised that scientific genres were a rare sighting in our writing center. I wondered why we didn’t see more scientific writing. Similarly, when I (CB) began my position as director of the writing center at Augusta University, I expected to see a deluge of STEMM students coming through the door seeking assistance with disciplinary writing assignments. Augusta University does not have a WAC/WID program the writing center is the primary support for writers across and in the disciplines and I had heard there was great demand for scientific and technical writing support. Consequently, I set to work further developing my expertise in this area and familiarized myself with common STEMM genres. I

Candis Bond1 Augusta University cbond@augusta.edu

modified our consultant training program to focus more on rhetorical genre analysis and scientific style so that our undergraduate staff, who often major in the humanities and social sciences, would feel prepared to work with STEMM students. But then something odd happened: we rarely saw STEMM writing. This raised many questions: Was this writing not being assigned? Was it being assigned but students were not coming to the writing center for support? If the latter, why? Were they going someplace else? Did they perceive the writing center to be a non-STEMM space? What, exactly, was going on?

As we talked about this phenomenon together, we wondered if writing centers at other institutions with high STEMM enrollments had noticed similar trends, and if so, what they had done to better support STEMM students writing within their majors. After reviewing writing center scholarship, we realized that, although studies on undergraduate student usage exist (Colton; Salem; Savarese), none focus specifically on STEMM students. Since writing centers aim to serve all students and the number of STEMM majors enrolled in United States higher education institutions continues to increase (National Science Foundation National Science Board), we felt it was important to learn more about this population’s usage and perceptions of writing centers. We developed the following research questions to guide our mixed-methods survey study:

1. Do undergraduate STEMM students use the writing center at rates comparable to nonSTEMM students? Are there differences in the usage rates and perceptions by STEMM major?

2. When STEMM students do use writing centers, how do they use them? Do they use writing centers for core requirements? For major requirements? For both? What kinds of assignments do they bring to writing centers, and do they trust writing center staff to assist them?

3. When STEMM students do not use writing centers for disciplinary writing tasks, what is their rationale?

Our findings showed that STEMM students, especially those with minoritized backgrounds, were more likely to use the writing center than non-STEMM majors at our institution, but the majority of these students sought assistance with writing assigned in the core curriculum rather than writing assigned in their majors. Survey data suggests this is related to a lack of writing being assigned in STEMM programs as well as students’ perceptions that STEMM genres are formulaic, content-driven, and do not qualify as “writing.” STEMM students were also ambivalent about the ability of writing center staff with non-STEMM backgrounds to help them with disciplinary writing tasks.

Taken together, our results have challenged us to rethink our approach to branding and outreach. They have also provided data to support the need for WAC/WID programming at our institution, including more professional development opportunities for STEMM faculty who want to learn how to integrate writing into their courses. Although our study is limited to one university and our findings cannot be generalized to other institutions, we hope writing center practitioners can use our data to gain insight into STEMM students’ use of writing centers in order to improve their support for this student population. We also hope other institutions will consider replicating our study, or others like it, within their own institutional contexts.

The Importance of Supporting STEMM Writers in the Writing Center

Learning more about STEMM students and writing centers is important if writing centers want to support the next generation of scientists and health professionals. Over the past several decades, the US education system has placed increasing emphasis on STEM and health sciences education, and undergraduate and graduate students are declaring STEM and health science majors at increasing rates. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of US higher education degrees awarded to STEM majors nearly doubled, increasing from approximately 560,000 to more than one million (National Science Foundation National Science Board). Although the number of higher education degrees awarded to non-STEM majors also increased during this period, growth in STEM notably outpaced that of other disciplines. Similarly, health science degrees awarded showed a 98% increase between 2010 and 2020 (Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics). In 2019, the US labor market reported that over 36 million

people, or approximately 23% of the total workforce, required STEM expertise for their jobs. This number is higher if health sciences are included, and it is expected to increase within the next decade (National Science Foundation National Science Board). Writing centers can play a pivotal role in the development of these students’ communication skills and writing expertise.

In addition to content knowledge and lab and clinical skills, the ability to write clearly for a variety of audiences is critical to STEMM students’ future professional success. In Lisa Emerson’s book-length study of more than 100 faculty scientists’ perceptions of writing, one interviewee an established physicist went so far as to claim, “The fundamental discriminator between those who are successful in science and professionally is their ability to write” (Forgotten Tribe 59). The foundational studies and chapters included in Michael J. Madson’s book Teaching Writing in the Health Professions present a similar argument for the health sciences. As Madson writes in his introduction, writing is “prominent” in the health sciences: “health professionals need to learn a variety of written genres while in the classroom or on the job and often produce them under tight constraints” (Madson 1). Because learning disciplinary genres, rhetorical moves, and stylistic conventions is part of learning to write science, writing center practitioners are beginning to recognizing the need to train staff in STEMM genre and rhetorical knowledge (Madson; Shome; Siemann; Walker). However, training staff may not be enough if STEMM students are not assigned writing or do not view the writing center as a viable support option. It also matters what kinds of writing STEMM students are assigned by faculty and how they are taught to perceive the role of writing in their respective fields.

In his national study on writing assignments across the curriculum, Dan Melzer examined 2,101 assignments from 400 courses offered at US higher education institutions, 100 of which were in the natural and applied sciences, and found that undergraduates were most frequently assigned informative writing tasks intended for an “audience of teacher-as-examiner” (223, 28). Only 17% of writing assignments asked students to consider the exploratory or rhetorical dimensions of writing by addressing texts to the self, peers, or wider audiences (Melzer 22-3, 28). Students were rarely assigned writing-to-learn activities or asked to consider writing as central to their identities as researchers and communicators (Melzer 22-3, 24-5). While this is detrimental to all students’ growth, it can be especially limiting for scientists, whose careers depend upon the ability to push the limits of knowledge through creative thinking and address varied audiences. Scientists need

opportunities to develop as rhetorical agents and can benefit immensely from training in using writing as a means of learning of knowing and doing in their disciplines, to use Michael Carter’s terms. Several scholars have noted the importance of writing to learn in the sciences. For example, M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin argued that language and writing are imperative for constructing, not just reporting, scientific knowledge. In Emerson’s more recent study, several scientists mentioned the role of writing within their scientific process, noting the importance of writing to make new discoveries and connections. For example, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology stated:

I think writing is part of science. It’s not just there to communicate of course it is there to communicate what you’ve done but… there’s an element of discovery to the writing as well…you make connections between findings or the data that you’ve collected, the interpretation of that, and the work other people have done. I think only through writing do you make those discoveries and connections. (Forgotten Tribe 136)

Although writing is important in science, the teaching of scientific and technical communication is not always integrated into STEMM curricula, even with the growth of WAC/WID programs over the last several decades.2 Since the early 2000s, several WAC/WID and STEMM studies have tested curricular interventions for improving students’ scientific writing skills,3 and WAC/WID programs have added writing requirements into many STEMM curricula. Despite these initiatives, STEMM students still do not always get explicit instruction in scientific and technical communication, and many scientists claim they did not gain writing confidence as writers until after graduate school (Emerson Forgotten Tribe). Research suggests this is because some STEMM faculty do not feel equipped to teach writing, some feel writing instruction is not their responsibility, and still others feel pressured to subordinate writing instruction to get through course content.4

Thus, it is not surprising that many undergraduate STEMM students fail to see how writing is central to their careers, and students and faculty alike may not identify as writers (Emerson “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe; Poe et al.; Siemann). Emerson notes this paradox in the conclusion to her study. In response to the question of whether scientists identified as “writers,” mostly the answer came back, in some form, “no, I’m just a scientist.” Over and over, I noted this odd discrepancy: scientists were concerned about their students’ writing, the majority saw themselves as (sometimes reluctant) teachers of writing, but

many hadn’t recognized the extent to which their professional identity revolved around their writing, until they began to talk about it. Only a few, acknowledging their professional identity as inextricably tied to writing, made writing central to their work with the next generation of scientists.

(Forgotten Tribe 180)

While Emerson’s conclusion may seem disheartening, she suggests STEM faculty have seen the value of writing as part of their professional identity when “they began to talk about it.” Similarly, in their study of STEM faculty conceptions of writing and how it impacts undergraduate teaching, Moon et al. found STEM faculty and students often do not get chances to think about writing as central to science, but when they do, they are more likely to embrace a writing identity. As sites that encourage talking about writing, writing centers have great potential to help STEMM writers develop their writing identities. Writing centers, either on their own or in partnership with WAC/WID programs, can also be sites for faculty to have these conversations and receive training they need to integrate writing more fully into the curriculum.

In her chapter on tutoring STEM majors, Catherine Siemann aptly notes that “as STEM programs move ever further to the forefront of higher education, writing centers are not immune to the effects of shifting student populations and curricular emphasis” and may need to make changes to accommodate the “sometimes complicated tutoring situations that are typical of STEM programs and STEM students” (111), an idea Rachel Shome takes up in her recent article on training writing center tutors to work effectively with STEMM writers. We agree that writing centers must be responsive to STEMM writers and meet them where they are, but we feel that in order to do this well, more research is needed about how these students perceive and use writing centers. Most writing center scholarship on working with STEMM students focuses on developing specific interventions, such as boot camps, workshops, embedded consultant programs, and writing groups (Blake; Blake et al.; Bond; Hambrick and Giaimo; Rollins et al.) or developing staff training (Shome; Siemann). Very little scholarship examines how STEMM students perceive writing centers, what motivates them to visit the writing center, and what kinds of tasks they tend to work on if they do visit the writing center. We hope our study can contribute new insight into connections between undergraduate STEMM students and writing centers.

Methods: A Mixed-Methods Survey Study

To learn more about undergraduate STEMM students’ perceptions and uses of writing centers, we designed and distributed an anonymous, web-based, mixed-methods survey to Augusta University undergraduates aged 18 or older with a declared STEMM major.5 We obtained a list of all declared undergraduate STEMM majors from college deans and sent an email invitation to take the survey to all 2,947 students on the lists. Our Qualtrics survey contained 38 quantitative questions and two open-ended, freeresponse questions. We received 409 responses. After eliminating the responses of participants who did not complete at least 33% of the survey, we had a final total sample of 377 students. Table 1 provides a breakdown of the sample by STEMM major.

In order to parse results for meaning, it is important to know if the sample is representative. Universities that replicate our methods can look at respondents overall, but also respondents by major, in order to see if results are representative of STEMM enrollments across and within disciplines and whether trends exist by major. We found that our sample was representative of STEMM majors at Augusta University. As Table 1 shows, the most commonly selected majors were kinesiology, psychology, biology, and cell and molecular biology. These reflect some of the most common majors among STEMM undergraduates at our institution. Although only 13% of STEMM majors responded to the survey, the percentage of respondents by major was similar enough to STEMM major enrollments by discipline (+/- 5%) to suggest results are representative of STEMM majors’ views and behaviors. Students from all ranks participated (freshmen (n=72, 19.1%), sophomores (n=65, 17.2%), juniors (105, 27.9%), and seniors (135, 35.8%)). The majority of respondents were between 18 and 24 years of age (n=207, 83%). The sample was also representative of the gender and racial demographics of our university’s students. While the sample was representative of STEMM students at our university, results may not be generalizable to other institutions with different student enrollments and cultural contexts.

Although our survey contained two open-ended questions, this manuscript focuses primarily on quantitative data. We analyzed quantitative data using the SPSS 27 software. We used frequency rates, standardized rates, cross-tabulations, and chi-square tests to make sense of data and determine whether the findings were statistically significant.6

Results and Discussion: STEMM Students’ Writing Center Usage

Do STEMM Students Use Writing Centers?

According to our survey results, the simple answer to our question about usage was yes: STEMM students did use the writing center. In fact, survey results showed STEMM students’ usage rates were much higher than the general population of students. Approximately 30% (n=113) of STEMM undergraduates stated they had used the writing center during their undergraduate career, while 70% (n=264) stated they had not; this usage rate exceeds the 5 to 10% of Augusta University undergraduates who use the center annually according to WCOnline statistics. While this trend is encouraging, it is most likely due to the high number of STEMM majors at our university rather than STEMM students’ valuation of writing center support. Since the majority of Augusta University undergraduates major in STEMM, higher-than-average usage rates among this student population are to be expected. While this finding may not tell us much about STEMM students’ usage motivations, it does suggest that universities who enroll large numbers of STEMM students can expect these students to seek writing support. However, as we discuss later, writing centers may need to dig deeper than usage rates to determine if STEMM students’ disciplinary writing needs are being met.

We also found that upperclassmen were more likely to have used the writing center than underclassmen. This is not surprising given that they’ve had more time to make use of the center during their academic journey. A limitation of our study was that we did not ask participants to identify when they used the writing center (e.g., freshman, sophomore, junior, and/or senior year). Thus, we were unable to determine if it is more likely for STEMM students to come to the writing center earlier, later, or in multiple stages of their degree programs. We were also not able to see if early usage made it more likely for STEMM students to return to the writing center later in their career. We recommend that other institutions who conduct similar studies ask questions about usage over time.

We also wanted to know if there were patterns in usage behavior by major. Is it more likely, for example, that computer science majors will use the writing center than biology majors? We were not able to run crosstabulations or chi-square tests to identify statistically significant usage patterns by major because we allowed students to select more than one major on the survey and some majors had five or fewer respondents. Instead, we calculated and compared standard rates by dividing the total number of “yes” and “no” responses to the question “Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in any of your Augusta University courses?” by the total

number of respondents by major. We then multiplied each dividend by 100. After calculating usage rates by major, we realized some major populations were still very small, which skewed the data; for example, it is a leap to suggest that radiologic science majors have a standard usage rate of 0 based on only one respondent in this major category. Consequently, we decided to group majors under wider disciplinary umbrellas: biological sciences, physical sciences, computer sciences, and health sciences. Surprisingly, we found that these disciplinary umbrellas had similar writing center usage rates per 100 majors (+/- ≤5). Results can be seen in Table 2 below.

This data surprised us because WCOnline usage statistics consistently show that majors such as nursing, kinesiology, and biology make more appointments at our center than other STEMM majors. Converting usage frequencies from the survey into standardized numerical rates, however, shows these patterns are most likely due to higher enrollments in these major programs rather than to predictable patterns of major-specific usage behaviors. A limitation of standardized rates is that they make predictions for larger populations based on a limited, smaller sample. Despite this limitation, these rates have changed our outlook on specific majors and influenced our plans for STEMM outreach. For example, we originally feared computer science majors may be less likely to use writing centers than other STEMM majors based on low frequency rates of use. We wondered if this had something to do with the discipline itself its perceptions of writing and/or the amount and types of writing assigned. As a staff, we discussed how to make ourselves more visible to students in our School of Computer Sciences. We spent numerous hours developing tailored outreach to make our services more visible to faculty and students in this school, but this may not have been time well-spent. Since finishing our study, we have shifted our focus. While we still spend some time identifying ways to increase our visibility within specific disciplines, we now prioritize a more holistic STEMM-focused brand, learning about disciplinary curricula, and designing discipline-specific trainings and resources. By adjusting our approach to branding and how we spend our time, we can be better equipped to support writers in specific disciplines when they do come through our doors, which, in turn, earns writers’ trust. Other writing centers can use standardized rates to identify patterns of usage by major to develop more strategic outreach plans and STEMM writing supports.

Beyond usage by major and umbrella disciplines, we also wanted to identify correlations between usage and student demographics. As sites committed not only to

writing instruction, but to socially just educational practices, writing centers must consider how they contribute to or resist systemic educational and professional inequities that affect STEMM students. According to a recent report published by the Pew Research Center, there continues to be underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic STEMM majors at the undergraduate and graduate levels, a trend that leads to underrepresentation in the STEMM workforce after graduation. Similarly, although women fill many careers in the health professions, they are under-represented in higher-earning STEMM fields such as computer science and engineering (Fry et al.). On a panel on demographic gaps in STEMM jobs, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Bridget Long, pointed out socio-economic, race/ethnicity, and gender gaps are formed long before students arrive at college. In our study, we were curious about the ways demographics affected STEMM students’ writing center usage.

To identify correlations, we ran cross-tabulations and chi-square tests between writing center usage and several demographic variables, including race, gender, first-generation college student status, Pell Grant eligibility, first-generation American status, and native language. While we did not find statistically significant patterns of usage related to gender and race, our findings overall align with Lori Salem’s earlier study on writing center usage behaviors: minoritized students were more likely to use the writing center. Students who reported being first-generation American, nontraditional/returning, Pell Grant eligible, and English Language Learning/multilingual were most likely to seek support at the writing center (p = 0.002, p=0.036, p=0.037, and p=0.004, respectively). Echoing Salem’s findings and the words of Dean Long, studies by Emerson have also found that STEMM writers’ early childhood and K-12 experiences with writing significantly shape writing identity and perceptions of writing (“‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe). She found that early, negative writing experiences made STEMM students less likely to enjoy writing and see it as central to their career and disciplinary identity.

If STEMM writers’ perceptions of writing are influenced by early experiences and demographics, writing centers need to consider what they can do to form positive relationships with students who have had negative pre-college experiences related to writing and education. Writing centers can also do research within their institutions to determine why certain subpopulations of STEMM students are seeking writing center support more frequently than others: are faculty encouraging use due to perceptions of deficit or implicit

biases? Do minoritized students feel inadequate or underprepared? Do higher usage rates by minoritized STEMM students contribute to their further “Othering'' within the academy to use Salem’s words, is writing center usage by minoritized STEMM students a “downwardly mobile choice” that does more harm than good (162)? Or, conversely, are these students finding a safe space and a sense of belonging within the writing center? Does writing center usage by minoritized STEMM students make it less likely other STEMM students will use the center due to perceptions of stigma? How should writing centers go about providing direct instruction in scientific and technical communication in ways that empower minoritized students? Several writing center scholars have taken up these social justice questions in recent years, but it could be of value to think about how these issues affect STEMM students, who already face many systemic inequities and barriers in their chosen fields. As STEMM major enrollments increase in the United States and beyond, writing centers have a pressing responsibility to think about usage in connection to linguistic and social justice.

How do STEMM Students Use Writing Centers?

Our survey also sought to learn how STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. Do they use writing centers for coursework in the core curriculum? For courses in their majors? For both? What kinds of assignments in their majors do they bring to the writing center? Do they trust writing center staff to help them with coursework in their major? Survey results showed STEMM students were more likely to use the writing center for courses in the core curriculum than for coursework in their major. If students responded “yes” to the question, “Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in any of your Augusta University courses?,” they were taken to two follow-up questions:

1. Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in a non-major course? (For example, a nonmajor course in the University core curriculum could be English 1102: English Composition.)

2. Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in a course required for your STEMM major? (For example, a required course in the Biology major course could be BIOL 4100: Principles of Biology.)

One hundred and twelve students responded to these follow-up questions. Of the 91 students who

responded “yes” to question one, 82.4% (n=75) used the writing center for a non-major course, while only 17.6% (n=16) used the writing center for a major and non-major course. Of the 21 students who responded “no” to question one, 38.1% (n=8) had used the center for a major course, while 61.9% (n=13) reported using it neither for a major or non-major course (See Figure 1).7 Findings were statistically significant (p=0.039).

Using the writing center as a site of non-disciplinary support is a trend consistent with past research conducted by Laura Hazelton Jones et al. Although they had a very small sample, Hazelton Jones et al. reported that of 11 engineering majors, only three students had used the writing center prior to the study, with only one of the three using it for a major course. The researchers suggest this usage behavior “could imply that the students in this sample did not see the connection between their first-year composition courses and the writing in their engineering courses” (64). They recommend that consultants focus on genre awareness and transfer of knowledge to improve sessions with STEMM majors, something the current study would also support. The cross-tab analysis also suggests that seeking writing support for projects outside of the major does not necessarily lead to students returning for support with writing in the major. To address this trend, our center plans to implement a return visit campaign for STEMM users using WCOnline usage records and enrollment data in the software EAB Navigate. At strategic points each semester, we will generate a list of STEMM majors who have visited the writing center in the past. We will then send past users a personalized email inviting them back, along with ways we can assist with writing in the disciplinary courses in which they are currently enrolled. We are hopeful that outreach campaigns like this one will encourage STEMM students to see the writing center as a space that supports them within their major as well as within the core curriculum.

We were also interested in finding out why STEMM students chose not to use the writing center. The students who responded “no” to the question, “Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in any of your Augusta University courses?” were directed to a multiple-choice question asking them for their rationale (see Table 3).

STEMM students who did not use the writing center for either major or non-major coursework reported a variety of reasons: “I didn’t need to do so” and “I’m satisfied with my grades already” were the most frequent responses. Another common response was “I don’t have many writing assignments.” Taken together, these three responses show STEMM students’ usage

behaviors are motivated by need; if their grades are satisfactory, they may not see the need to use the writing center. Similarly, if they are not being assigned writing, they are not likely to use the writing center.

Based on survey responses, we might conclude students don’t use the writing center for major courses because writing is not assigned in these courses. This conclusion makes sense considering Augusta University’s lack of writing-intensive curricular requirements. However, although “I don’t have many writing assignments” scored high on students’ reasons for not using the writing center for courses in their major, this may not paint the whole picture of STEMM disciplinary writing at our institution. This high score may be related to how STEMM students and, by extension, their faculty, define “writing.”

We asked students if faculty in their disciplines assigned writing and, if so, what kinds of writing were assigned. Students were asked to score how often faculty assigned discipline-specific writing on a four-point scale (1=never, 2=occasionally, 3=somewhat frequently, 4=very frequently). Table 3 shows the mean frequency score by assignment type.

As Table 3 shows, despite several students reporting that they did not have many disciplinary writing assignments, they were, in fact, assigned a variety of writing tasks in their STEMM courses, with mean frequency scores falling between “occasionally” and “somewhat frequently” for most genres (excluding posters, which were assigned less frequently). Although Melzer’s study of writing assignments across the curriculum is almost a decade old, students’ responses to our survey show essay exams and research papers the two genres most frequently assigned by faculty according to Melzer’s study were most common, along with lab reports. If STEMM students are assigned writing in their disciplines, why are they not bringing these assignments to the writing center at higher rates?

In a qualitative study on high-achieving STEM students, Thomas Deans noticed a telling theme: these students were dismissive of disciplinary genres such as lab reports and did not view them as writing. When he asked students why, “they would reply that those [lab reports] were ‘just, like checking boxes’…most did not see such tightly constrained reporting and discussion of results, or collaborative writing, as ‘really writing’” (164). Students in Deans’s study also noted that their performance in common genres was usually based on reporting “information” rather than on the quality of writing or using writing as a mode of discovery (164). Deans’s qualitative findings echo Melzer’s earlier quantitative results. Melzer’s analysis of assignment prompts revealed that the most frequently-assigned

genres in higher education are information-driven, and prompts for the most ubiquitous genres, such as essay exams and research papers, often do not provide enough information about the rhetorical situation and disciplinary expectations for students to move beyond regurgitating content (41-52). Within this kind of framework, writing is simply a means to an end a container for factual information. It is not a skill connected to self-reflexivity, knowledge-making, audience engagement, or innovation, and thus is not noteworthy or prioritized by students (or faculty). Our survey results tell a similar story. Like Melzer’s and Deans’s findings, our study suggests STEMM students may not perceive disciplinary writing tasks as “real writing,” and they may have limited experience using writing to learn or as a rhetorical act intended to persuade audiences beyond their teacher as examiner. Students’ qualitative responses also suggested they perceived disciplinary writing assignments as formulaic and content-focused, and they connected this view of writing to their decision not to use the writing center for disciplinary writing tasks. For instance, one student responded, “I don’t have many opportunities to write in my major outside of exams and lab reports, so I never felt the need to use the writing center (especially because lab reports are so professor specific as far as formatting and requirements),” while another explained, “the only writing assignments I receive are lab reports and professors provide a format that students must strictly follow.” Comments such as “the actual writing isn’t even considered, it’s just the information itself;” “the writing assigned in my major focuses on accurate information…the emphasis is not really put on stuff like transition sentences;” and “[scientific writing] follows a very strict format with little room for flexibility” were common among respondents. Overall, STEMM students perceived writing in scientific and technical genres to be an exercise in translation a means of proving their recall of facts to the professor rather than an exercise in creativity, rhetorical agency, or discovery.

STEMM students’ view of technical genres as formulaic and content-driven also seemed connected to their view of the writing center as a place for “larger” and “new” tasks, such as longer research papers, rather than for “small” and “familiar” tasks, such as lab reports and discussion boards, another survey finding. These themes together suggest STEMM students may not see the value of using writing centers for more mundane, day-to-day writing assignments in their disciplines, even though these writing tasks are foundational to their growth and work as scientists. Furthermore, even if students are assigned larger projects in their STEMM

courses, such as a research paper, they may be unsure how to ask for help, since this may be the first time they are engaging with writing as a mode of discovery or argument and disciplinary expectations for the genre may be unclear.

To learn more about STEMM students’ helpseeking beliefs and behaviors, we also asked them to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements related to staff expertise and the writing center’s capability to assist with disciplinary writing tasks (see Table 5). Agreement was ranked on a four-point scale (1=strong disagree; 2=somewhat disagree; 3=somewhat agree; 4=strongly agree).

Students offered mixed responses about the writing center’s ability to help them with disciplinary writing tasks. Quantitative responses showed some trust in staff expertise. Most respondents “somewhat agreed” that writing center staff can help them improve their disciplinary writing. While quantitative responses suggested writing center staff expertise may not play a role in usage behaviors, qualitative responses told a more complicated story. Eleven respondents expressed doubt about staff members’ ability to help with STEMM writing. One student wrote, for example: “Biology majors do not write much aside from lab reports. Someone who understands the experiments and can interpret the data to formulate a report could help write it, but I doubt many workers at the writing center have the background to do so. I do not see myself using the center at any time in the future.” Another wrote, “If I do need help, I go to the professor since they can tell me exactly what they expect of me and can help guide me accurately on their assignment. I would be more likely to use the writing center if they knew the expectations of the professors on specific assignments. I feel like I could be misguided by using the writing center if they do not know what the professors are expecting of the students.” Several respondents expressed a desire to see more STEMM majors working in the writing center or for there to be a scientific writing “section/division” of the center specifically for STEMM users.

These responses paired with survey results overall have pushed our center to reconsider WAC/WID partnerships at our institution as well as the way we approach writing center staffing and training. Melzer found that being connected to a WAC program significantly increases the likelihood that students will engage with the exploratory and rhetorical dimensions of writing (24). To begin this work, our center launched a WAC Speaker Series that provides STEMM faculty with training for integrating writing-to-learn and learning-to-write activities into their courses. We have

also begun to offer more workshops and consultations for faculty focused on writing assignment design and assessment. While we have begun an embedded consulting program in our university’s Honors thesis sequence that supports STEMM students’ writing development, we hope to pilot embedded writing consultants in STEMM major courses in the future. We have also created a five-year plan that lays the groundwork alongside faculty and program partners for developing writing-intensive course requirements in the core and disciplines.

Since conducting our study, we have also hired three full-time professional staff members with expertise in scientific and technical communication to support STEMM students and faculty and provide more specialized training in scientific style writing to undergraduate and graduate peer consultants. Catherine Siemann makes the convincing argument that professional tutoring staff are “particularly well suited to work with STEM subjects and STEM students” because they “bring a confidence to working with writing outside their own academic field” (111-112). Our professional staff also have contractual effort allocations devoted to researching STEMM genres and disciplines so that they can bring nuanced writing expertise to their sessions with STEMM writers. Siemann argues, “genre and rhetorical knowledge can guide writing center staff to useful positioning with regard to lab reports, personal statements, and papers in scientific and technical fields” (114). Similarly, in her article on training undergraduate tutors to work effectively with STEMM writers, Ashna Shome points out the importance of providing tutors with STEM-specific genre and rhetorical knowledge as well as training in scientific style conventions.

In addition to expanding our services and staffing, our center revamped its website, social media, and outreach to feature more STEMM writers, genres, and disciplines so that STEMM students see the writing center’s ability and commitment to working with STEMM writing. This is part of our holistic STEMM rebranding approach mentioned earlier. We added a full page on our website devoted to scientific and technical communication. This page provides definitions of genres and audiences as well as internal and external resources for STEMM writers. It also lists all of the STEMM-specific genres our staff can assist with, including genres survey respondents dismissed as formulaic, such as lab reports. Our website changes might help STEMM writers see these genres as substantial that is, rhetorical, bound up in the scientific process, and connected to discovery-making. We also realized many of our outreach materials, such as social media posts, flyers, and posters, focused on

humanities and social sciences writers/staff and often featured non-STEMM genres and concerns. In addition to adding the scientific and technical communication page of our website, we have also diversified our materials to feature images of STEMM activities, such as students working in labs or presenting scientific posters, and we make explicit mention of scientific and technical genres. Images of scientists doing scientific work and presenting scientific texts are now front and center on our website’s homepage and on our social media posts. Although it is still too early to quantify impact, since implementing these changes, we have seen an increase in the number of appointments focused on STEMM disciplinary writing. Other writing centers might consider ways they can rebrand themselves to earn STEMM students’ trust.

While earning STEMM students’ trust is one of our center’s continuing priorities, we also realized we needed to rebrand to convince high-performing STEMM students that seeking writing support is worth their time. Encouragingly, our survey revealed that STEMM students who did visit the writing center for both major and non-major coursework reported high rates of satisfaction for both types of usage. For both major and non-major-focused consultations, approximately 70% of students scored the writing center a 6 or above on a satisfaction scale of 1 to 10, with one being “not at all useful” and 10 being “extremely useful” (see figure 2).

But, unfortunately, we just weren’t seeing enough students for major coursework to build on this momentum because most STEMM students felt the writing center was a remedial space that would not serve them well. Forty-five quantitative responses indicated STEMM students did not use the writing center because they were “making good grades already.” Similarly, we received many qualitative responses such as “I’m generally satisfied with my own work,” “I consider myself a good writer, and my grades often reflect that,” and “I trust my ability enough to avoid using the Augusta University Writing Center.”

To get more STEMM students in the door, writing centers may need to emphasize their ability to support and benefit advanced STEMM writers. Since distributing this survey, we have renamed our center “The Center for Writing Excellence'' as part of our attempt to appeal to high-performing STEMM undergraduates. Our staff training prioritizes both directive and non-directive instruction and we aim to support students of all ability levels. We felt all students, regardless of their background or level of preparation, might be inspired by the idea that a writing center is about cultivating excellence. We have also revised our mission, vision, and

value statements to reflect our university’s focus on research, especially STEMM research, and we have begun highlighting testimonials from STEMM users on our outreach materials; these students often speak about reasons their visit was helpful that resonate with other STEMM students.

Our center has also pushed the narrative that all advanced writers get feedback on their writing it is a normal part of the writing process and reflects the sociality of writing. To support this and meet faculty and graduate student needs, our center has expanded to work more with faculty and graduate students in oneon-one consultations. We refer to high usage rates by these populations when working with undergraduates (approximately 50% of our consultations each year are held with graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, most of whom are in STEMM disciplines) to show them that experienced professionals in their fields value the writing center and a collaborative approach to the writing process. Our orientation leaders have also updated their campus tour script about the CWE to focus on the center’s support for research and advanced writing. These changes, paired with initiatives such as our embedded consulting program in the Honors thesis sequence, connect writing support with research, publication, and grant funding activities. STEMM students are beginning to see how the writing center is woven into the tapestry that professionalizes them as respected researchers in their disciplines.

Future Directions

Our survey provides insight into how undergraduate STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. Our data led to several changes within our writing center that we hope serve as inspiration for other centers looking to better serve STEMM student populations. While our survey provided useful information about STEMM students, we believe more research is needed to identify ways writing centers can meet these students’ needs, especially for courses in their major. We encourage researchers to replicate our study to see if they reach similar conclusions; we also encourage cross-institutional research on STEMM student usage. Future research studies could also focus more on the timing and sequencing of STEMM undergraduate writing center visits, something our study did not account for: do STEMM students visit early in their academic careers? If so, is this a strong predictor they will continue to use writing centers as they move through their degree programs? If STEMM students use writing centers for core courses, does this make it more

likely they will use writing centers for major courses? Why or why not?

Another valuable area of research would be learning how STEMM students perceive consultations for core versus major courses: do they see these consultations as connected, and do they thus transfer general writing skills to disciplinary contexts? If so, how does this transfer occur, and what can consultants do to facilitate it? If not, what barriers or rhetorical situations keep STEMM students from transferring more general writing skills to disciplinary tasks within the context of writing consultations, and how might this affect writing center administrators’ approaches to staff training? Overall, more qualitative research on STEMM students and writing centers is needed to better understand their perceptions, needs, and motivations for using or not using writing support.

As the literature discussed in this article shows, most scientists and STEMM faculty realize writing is central to their disciplines; however, most undergraduate students, who often lack explicit instruction in scientific and technical writing, have yet to come to this realization. Writing centers can play an important role in helping STEMM students develop writing identities earlier. Writing centers are places that normalize talk about writing and learning through writing, invaluable skills for novice scientists. We look forward to seeing the creative ways writing centers will adapt to better serve increasing numbers of STEMM students.

Notes

1. The authors thank Drs. Melissa Powell-Williams and Candace Griffith for their instruction in SPSS and statistical analysis. The authors also thank the Augusta University Honors Program, Department of English and World Languages, and Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences for their support throughout this project.

2. There is a wealth of scholarship in WAC/WID and the disciplines discussing the lack of writing in STEMM curricula. For good overviews of this scholarship that connect STEMM writing curricula to composition studies, see Emerson, “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe; Madson; and Moon et al.

3. Research on improving STEMM students’ scientific writing ability abounds. For a few examples of this scholarship, see Brownell et al. (biology); Clark and Fischback (health sciences); Davies et al. (computer science); Finkenstaedt-

Quinn et al. (chemistry); and Poe et al. (engineering). See also Hendrickson et al.’s special issue of Across the Disciplines on STEM and WAC/WID, as well as Bazerman and Russell’s foundational edited collection, Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum, especially the chapters in section 4, “Writing in the Disciplines” and Herrington’s chapter, “Writing in Academic Settings.” Much of the scholarship on integrating writing into STEMM disciplines is published outside of WAC/WID and rhetoric and composition journals. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) journals in the STEMM disciplines are generative sources of STEMM writing curriculum research.

4. For composition studies’ scholarship that reviews the extant literature on STEMM faculty barriers to teaching writing in the undergraduate classroom, see Bean; Emerson, “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe; Lane et al.; Poe et al.; Moon et al.; and Thompson et al. Also see foundational studies by Beaufort, Mallette, and Windsor that show how writing is often viewed separately from and subordinated to content in STEMM education and practice.

5. This study was approved by Augusta University’s Institutional Review Board (#1696275-2).

6. Statistical significance was set at <~p=0.05

7. Students who responded “no” to both questions point to limitations with the survey. Since students were only prompted to answer these two questions if they had been to the writing center before, but 13 responded “no” when asked if they used it for a major or non-major course, it implies some students responded to the earlier question about usage inaccurately or that these students were using the writing center for projects outside of coursework something our survey did not consider.

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Appendix A: Tables

*Six students did not respond to this question. The total frequency is 379 because eight students selected more than one major.

Table 1: Sample by STEMM Major

*The total selections exceed the total respondents. This is because this question was “select all that apply,” so students could choose multiple responses.

Table 2: Standardized Usage Rates by Discipline

Table 3: Reasons STEMM Students Choose Not to Use the Writing Center

Table 4: Disciplinary Writing Assigned to STEMM Students

Table 5: STEMM Students’ Beliefs about the Writing Center

Appendix B: Figures

Note. The numbers on each section of the bar graph depict the number of students who gave each ranking for instance, when asked to rank their writing center visit for a non-major course, 16 students responded with a 7. Only one student ranked their visit for a non-major course with a 1 and zero students gave this ranking for a major course visit.

Figure 1: STEMM Majors’ Usage Behavior

Figure 2: STEMM Students’ Satisfaction with Writing Center for Major and Non-Major Coursework

EFFECTS OF WRITING CENTER-BASED PEER TUTORING ON UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS’ PERCEIVED STRESS

Matthew Grendell Brigham Young University mgrendel@byu.edu

Brooke Overly Brigham Young University bkc2000@byu.edu

Abstract

Brynn Pyper Brigham Young University bpyper2@byu.edu

In a writing center, we often hear about the relief a student feels following their session. However, there is little empirical data to support this claim. To address this gap, we conducted a survey in the Brigham Young University Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Writing Lab (BYU FHSS Writing Lab). The survey was completed by undergraduate students who brought their writing to our writing center, both before and after a writing center tutoring session to measure the effects of writing tutoring on the highly applicable and relatable emotion that college students experience: stress. More specifically, we wanted to better understand perceived stress in conjunction with other variables, such as year in school, familiarity with the assigned citation style, whether the student had a plan for their paper, and whether they had visited the BYU FHSS Writing Lab in the past. We wanted to see how each of these variables were affected by a visit to the writing lab and particularly how students’ perceived stress levels were affected in turn. We discovered that visiting the BYU FHSS Writing Lab did significantly reduce perceived stress levels, and that many other factors play into this such as a student having a plan after their writing session or what year the student was in school. This research is important to writing labs across the country because by implementing our findings, writing centers may be able to maximize the help they provide to students and contribute to their stress relief.

Introduction

“I need help with my paper! It’s due at midnight, and I only have three of the required ten pages written. I can’t write it by myself, and I’m lost on what to do.” This issue has plagued almost every undergraduate student throughout college. Some students make a plan when writing papers, brainstorming and jotting down details early so they can get ahead. However, this is often not the case. The average student will push off their paper to the last minute, expecting to miraculously finish it in the last few hours until its due date. In an attempt to help these students reduce their stress levels, most universities have resources like writing labs in place.

Stress levels among undergraduates are currently extremely high (Cheung et al.), which could be a concern because of many negative outcomes linked to stress in students. High levels of perceived stress among undergraduates is linked to academic procrastination (Fincham and May) and poor academic performance (Grimes and Binder). Casuso-Holgado et al. also found that undergraduate stress can negatively impact

Julia Elmer Brigham Young University jse52@byu.edu

Marinne Hammond Brigham Young University marinnek@byu.edu

students’ health due to its correlation with exhaustion and sleep disorders as well as overall health symptoms. This impact can also carry over into later life, leading to significant future health issues. Stawski et al. examined whether daily stress processes daily stressors that adults experienced and their subsequent coping reactions were associated with individuals' health later in life. The results showed that stressors are a large contributor to later cognitive health, and a negative outlook on stress often leads to poorer health outcomes. Due to these negative outcomes, it may prove useful to be aware of different ways that society can help improve adults’ stress levels in order to improve adult health.

In an attempt to relieve undergraduate stress, peer tutoring is a valuable resource provided at many universities. Peer tutoring is directly related to peerassisted learning, which is a process in which one student helps teach fellow students through active support (Cameron et al.; Hernandez Coliñir et al.). Peerassisted learning is also often seen as a mutual benefit, as peer tutoring benefits both the tutor and the tutee (Abbot et al.). Not only is the student able to gain tools to improve, but the act of tutoring also helps the tutor better understand what they teach. This mutual benefit is one reason why peer tutoring can be valuable in the lives of undergraduates. With an understanding of how profitable peer tutoring can be in providing assistance to students, researchers can look at different ways to relieve undergraduate stress through peer tutoring strategies.

Limited research has been conducted regarding the effects of peer tutoring on undergraduate stress; however, research has shown several other positive outcomes that result from peer tutoring or peer mentoring efforts. One study showed that assisting students by sharing helpful academic suggestions correlated with the students’ improved academic scores (Asgari and Carter). This suggests that the assistance of peers can possibly lead to better academic performance, perhaps lowering students’ stress levels as well. Another study that tested mentoring results on emotional regulation showed counteractive results, suggesting that

emotionally restricted tutors or mentors do not promote mental well-being (Le et al.). This research suggests that peer tutoring students on a closer level instead may promote improved stress and emotional health.

Important to keep in mind is that tutors at writing centers are not exempt from stress themselves. Being a writing tutor can be emotionally taxing (Costello; Im et al.). Costello explains that tutors can experience role strain between being students themselves as well as being mentors to other students. Tutors may find that the expectation to maintain professionalism is emotionally burdensome (Costello; Im et al.); for example, tutors may suppress their own emotions that arise as they are trying to attend to tutees’ demands (Costello). In addition, they may feel they are not fit to be effective tutors or that no one validates the work they are doing (Costello). Based on tutors’ self report measures, possible coping strategies for tutor stress include reaching out to other tutors, setting firm expectations with students at the beginning of sessions, engaging in deep breathing, and reminding themselves that they cannot fix all of a student’s problems (Im et al.).

Stress is not only a large concern in general academia, but can also apply to specific areas, such as writing. Writing apprehension has been studied in the past to discover its connection to other stressors (Daly and Miller), and research has discovered a slight correlation between higher acknowledgment of responsibility and lower writing stress (Atkinson). However, there are gaps in the writing center literature concerning how well writing centers help alleviate stress and improve writing ability (Jones), although the peer tutoring interaction has proven to be the most influential part of the writing center process (Abbot et al.; Jones). These gaps in the literature could imply the need for additional research to be conducted on writing stress and the efficacy of writing centers.

The Family, Home, and Social Sciences (FHSS) Writing Lab is a writing center at Brigham Young University (BYU) created to assist undergraduate students with writing papers for their classes within the FHSS College. The lab is designed to help students become better writers, but another related goal of the BYU FHSS Writing Lab is to assist students in understanding their professors’ expectations about assignments and becoming comfortable with various citation styles. Many students who come into the BYU FHSS Writing Lab are experiencing a variety of stressors, some of which are often related to writing. The FHSS Writing Lab has an elaborate training program which teaches writing tutors not only to assist

with writing concerns, but also to engage in some of the peer-assisted learning that Abbot et al. discuss as being influential. Following their appointments, students often communicate to us that they feel much better about their assignments and they feel less stressed. In order to verify these feelings and measure the effectiveness of peer tutoring in alleviating undergraduate students’ perceived stress, we decided to administer a survey to tutees in an attempt to understand the potential effects of the BYU FHSS Writing Lab on students’ well-being and the effectiveness of our tutoring methods.

By creating a survey to measure students’ outcomes of a writing session, tutors can understand the different factors of students’ stress and further improve their advising abilities to best reduce this stress. Instead of measuring long-term perceived stress relief, creating this survey in a pre- and post-test format would hopefully provide us data on more direct perceived stress relief experienced within the time period of a single writing appointment. We predicted that perceived general and writing stress levels would go down among undergraduates after attending the BYU FHSS Writing Lab. We also expected that students would have more perceived stress relief when they left the lab with a plan for their paper, were more comfortable with citing research, and were not required to visit the lab.

Methods Survey Construction

With this in mind, we sought to create a survey that would capture both a student’s perceived general stress and perceived writing stress; our survey would also record data on possible factors that could influence a student’s perceived stress levels. These factors included: whether there was a required citation style, how comfortable the student was with the assigned citation style, whether the student had a plan for their paper, and whether the student was required to visit the BYU FHSS Writing Lab, came for extra credit, or came by choice. We also collected relevant demographic information such as age, gender, ethnicity, year in school, and major. It is important to note that no names nor any other identifying information were collected in an effort to maintain participants’ confidentiality.

Pre- and Post-Session Stress

In order to measure the students’ perceived stress levels, we used rating scales to capture both their perceived general stress and perceived stress about the papers they were bringing to their appointments that day. This consisted of a blank space where students were

asked to rate their corresponding stress level on a scale of one to ten. To measure change in the student’s perceived stress levels, it was necessary to collect this information both prior to and following their BYU FHSS Writing Lab appointment. We did this by using the same rating scale questions on both a pre-session and post-session version of the survey. We decided that this would give us the data needed to see if there was a statistically significant difference between the pre- and post-session perceived stress levels for both general and writing stress. In addition, the difference between preand post-session levels of perceived stress could be used to calculate perceived stress relief, which could then be used to compare with our other measured variables to see if a student’s perceived stress relief was influenced by the other factors surrounding a writing center appointment.

Adjacent Variables Affecting Perceived Stress

One of these related factors that we measured in our survey was whether or not the student had been assigned a citation style to use in their paper. In the BYU FHSS Writing Lab, nearly every appointment addresses at least some aspect of using APA 7th, MLA 9th, or Turabian/Chicago citation styles. Knowing this, we assumed that some portion of stress could have been caused by the student’s comfort level with their assigned citation style. If so, there should have been a negative correlation between one’s comfort with their assigned citation style and their perceived stress levels concerning their paper. To capture this, we used two questions on our survey: a yes or no question on whether or not they had been assigned a specific citation style for their paper, and if so, another question with a rating scale from one to ten, asking how comfortable they were with the assigned citation style. To measure how this variable changed , these same questions were repeated in both the pre- and post-session surveys.

In addition to citation style, we have noticed that a student will often express relief when they leave our writing center with a plan for their paper. This may take the form of either knowing what they need to write next or understanding how to further revise their draft. We decided it would be important to include this variable in our analyses to understand if leaving the BYU FHSS Writing Lab with a plan could significantly improve a student’s perceived stress relief. To measure this variable, we asked students a simple yes or no question about whether or not they knew what to do next with their paper. We also wanted to know if a student had a plan to begin with when they entered the writing center. This would allow us to compare and recognize if they

developed that plan while in the BYU FHSS Writing Lab or if it was a preexisting plan that they brought to their appointment. This was accomplished by again repeating the question on both the pre- and post-session surveys.

The final adjacent variable that we sought to measure was students’ level of external pressure to visit the BYU FHSS Writing Lab. At our writing center, many students choose to come simply because they need the help and guidance, but a large portion also come to the BYU FHSS Writing Lab either because their professor offered them extra credit points for coming in or strictly required them to visit the writing center with their paper. The latter is most common at our writing center in the case of courses specifically designed to teach the students how to write within their major. Requiring a tutoring session is popular not only at BYU but also at writing centers throughout the country (Babcock and Thonus; Morillas and Garrido; Smith). Ideally students would take advantage of university resources on their own accord, but according to a study conducted by Morillias and Garrido only 29% of university students took initiative and voluntarily took tutoring sessions. Due to this lack of enthusiasm, we predicted that whether a student was required to visit the lab would influence their level of perceived stress relief, because we suspected that those who were required to visit the lab would have less personal investment in their appointment. Thus, these students might rush through the appointment, wanting to finish as soon as possible, preventing them from receiving any real feedback or assistance from their appointment. This hypothesis led us to include a question on the presession survey that asked the students if they had been required to visit the writing center, were to receive extra credit for their appointment, or if they were not required to come in.

Survey Administration

After including these variables along with the applicable demographic information mentioned earlier in our survey, we sent our pre- and post-session surveys along with our application to the IRB here at BYU. Following a review, our study was granted exempt status and we were cleared to begin gathering data from a convenience sample of students who visited the BYU FHSS Writing Lab. Once we were granted approval, we immediately printed copies of our pre- and post-session surveys and, upon gathering verbal consent from each participant, started to give these paper surveys to students at the beginning of their writing center

appointments. Students would first fill out the presession survey and then begin their session.

Each writing tutoring appointment lasted 15–30 minutes, during which each student sat one-on-one with a BYU FHSS Writing Lab advisor and went over any questions or concerns that they had about their paper. Together, the student and advisor worked through the paper paragraph by paragraph, encouraging the student to read their writing aloud. The advisor focused feedback on the concerns specifically mentioned by the student as well as key aspects of the paper such as the thesis or its global organization. Because advisors focused on both the students’ concerns and the needs of the paper as a whole, every writing appointment was tailored by the advisor to best fit the needs of the student.

Following their writing tutoring session, the advisor left the student alone to complete the post-session survey. It is important to note that the advisor always allowed the student to fill the survey out in private in order to prevent any influence the advisor could have on the student’s answers and to encourage the student to be as honest as possible. Once the student completed the post-session survey, they then deposited their survey into a collection box as they left the writing center. Once several surveys had accumulated in the collection box, surveys were removed, coded into Qualtrics for easy access to data, and stored in a secure, locked location. When the data collection was complete for the study, the data was then exported from Qualtrics to SPSS 27 for data analysis.

Participants

In total, 381 participants took part in our survey, ranging in age from 18–57 with an average age of 22.03 years. Our study consisted of 31% males and 69% females. When looking at the ethnicity of our sample, 85.3% were Caucasian, 6.3% were Latino or Hispanic, 2.6% were Asian, .5% were African-American, .3% were Pacific Islander, and 4.2% of the sample pertained to two or more ethnicities. In terms of year in school, 12.9% were freshmen, 36% were sophomores, 28.9% were juniors, and 22.3% were seniors. Of these students, 79% pertained to a major in the FHSS college such as psychology, family studies, economics, or history. The other 21% were either undecided or had majors in other colleges. Finally, of all the participants, 75.6% of the sample reported being required to visit the BYU FHSS Writing Lab by their professor, 4.5% received extra credit for their visit, and 19.9% came into our writing center for their own reasons.

Results

Perceived General Stress

The first variables we compared were the pre- and post-session survey responses for perceived general and writing stress to determine if there was a significant change in stress levels following a BYU FHSS Writing Lab appointment. We found that there was a significant decrease in perceived general stress between pre-session surveys (M = 5.96, SD = 1.88) and post-session surveys (M = 5.43, SD = 1.92), t(380) = 9.76, p < .001. This difference signals a significant amount of stress relief following a writing center appointment, a variable we later used for further analysis. Upon analysis of this relief in perceived general stress, we found that there was no significant difference between men and women. For significant perceived general stress relief, it did not matter if the student’s major was within or outside of the FHSS college.

Perceived Writing Stress

When comparing survey data for perceived writing stress, we found that there was also a significant decrease in perceived writing stress between the presession surveys (M = 5.80, SD = 2.05) and post-session surveys (M = 4.50, SD = 1.88), t(380) = 17.92, p < .001. Again, this difference was quantified to use in further analysis. Similarly to perceived general stress, there was no difference in perceived writing stress reduction on the basis of gender nor having a major within the FHSS college. However, there was a significant difference in writing stress relief based on year in school, F(3, 377) = 3.02, p = .03 (see fig. 1, Appendix A). The data revealed that freshmen showed significantly more writing stress relief than juniors, t(157) = 2.72, p = .007, and seniors, t(132) = 3.21, p = .002. Freshmen also reported having significantly higher perceived writing stress during the pre-session survey than seniors, t(132) = 4.31, p < .001. Additionally, perceived writing stress relief and perceived general stress relief appeared to be interrelated. Relief of perceived writing stress was significantly and moderately correlated with one’s relief of perceived general stress, r(381) = .34, p < .001. Using regression analysis, we also found that one’s perceived writing stress relief predicted 11.5% of the variance in one’s perceived general stress relief (R2 = .115, F(1, 379) = 49.06, p < .001). This increased to 14.5% when we added change in comfort level with citation style as an additional predictor (R2 = .145, F(2, 363) = 31.89, p < .001), signaling that comfort level with citation style accounted for an additional 3% of the variance in perceived general stress relief.

Comfort with Citation Style

When examining the data collected on comfort levels with citation styles, we found that there was a significant increase in students’ comfort with citation style between the pre-session surveys (M = 5.80, SD = 2.15) and post-session surveys (M = 6.42, SD = 1.98), t(365) = 7.92, p < .001. This improvement in comfort with citation styles had a small, significant correlation with perceived writing stress relief, r(366) = .16, p = .002, and a moderate, significant correlation with perceived general stress, r(366) = .23, p < .001. Those who were not FHSS majors saw a stronger increase in their comfort level with citation style than those who were an FHSS major, t(364) = 3.51, p = .001.

Having a Plan for the Paper

To test our hypothesis that having a plan coming out of a writing center appointment would allow for greater perceived stress reduction, we performed independent sample t-tests with our collected data. We found that students who left their session with a plan showed significantly more writing stress relief than those who left without a plan, t(378) = 2.02, p = .044 (see fig. 2, Appendix A). However, this finding was not seen in perceived general stress relief. Using a chisquare test of independence, we also found that whether or not a student left their writing center appointment with a plan was significantly related to gender identity, X2 (1, N = 380) = 4.31, p = .038, but not a student’s year in school nor whether or not their major was within the FHSS college.

Writing Center Visit Requirement

Finally, we found no significant change in either perceived general stress relief or perceived writing stress relief based on if the student was required, offered extra credit, or not required to come into the BYU FHSS Writing Lab. However, one of our findings about requirements was significant. We did find that those who were not required to have a writing tutor appointment saw a stronger increase in their comfort level with citation style than those who were required to visit the writing center, t(348) = 3.84, p < .001. Whether or not a student was required to visit the BYU FHSS Writing Lab or received extra credit for their visit was significantly related to their year in school, X2 (6, N = 381) = 23.23, p = .001, with freshmen being the least likely to be required to visit the BYU FHSS Writing Lab (see fig. 3).

Discussion

As hypothesized, we found that the BYU FHSS Writing Lab’s appointments could help students experience a reduction in stress, signaling both perceived writing stress relief and perceived general stress relief following a writing center appointment. This aligns with the current literature on peer tutoring benefits in other aspects of student life other than academics (Abbot et al.; Asgari and Carter). Our collected data allowed us to identify other factors that appear to influence the amount of stress relief a student experiences following a visit to the writing center.

Ultimately, the conclusions drawn from our study imply that tutoring generally has a positive effect on stress levels. As aforementioned, we distributed a selfreport measure before and after the student’s writing session with a peer tutor. When comparing survey data for perceived writing stress and general stress, we found that there was a significant decrease in both types of perceived stress between the pre- and post-session surveys. This would imply that when a student attends a writing center appointment, they will experience a decrease in their stress both in a general sense as well as specifically concerning their paper. Due to the correlation between the decrease in perceived general stress and perceived writing stress, it is possible that the perceived writing stress relief contributed to the perceived general stress relief that we observed in our writing center. This possibility is convincing, especially considering that perceived writing stress relief was found to be a significant predictor of perceived general stress relief.

It is unclear, however, the exact nature of why these changes in perceived stress occurred. Because we cannot prove causation and our study did not isolate the specific writing impacts of tutoring, it is possible that external factors or the simple act of meeting with a tutor may have caused these changes. When a student visits a writing center, it is highly unlikely that their sole source of stress is the assignment on which they are currently working. When examining common stressors among graduate students, El-Ghoroury et al. found that while academic load pressures were primary, many other significant stressors co-existed in students' lives such as finances and debt, mental or physical health issues, poor life balance, and family struggles. This would suggest that the perceived stress level of a student is much more complex than what might be addressed in a tutoring session, which could be why there was less general stress relief than writing stress relief in our data. Additionally, it is possible that meeting with a tutor could have contributed to this lower stress simply because it gave the student a distraction from their larger, more systemic

stressors or that the opportunity to meet with a peer provided some aspect of social support and a safe environment. Without being able to isolate actual writing changes from other potential sources of stress relief, it is impossible to know exactly why students were likely to experience perceived stress relief following a writing tutoring session.

Nonetheless, we believe it is important that writing centers are aware of the different writing factors that can potentially play into a student’s perceived writing stress so that they can make their appointments more effective and helpful. One such factor we discovered was a student’s year in school. We found that freshmen benefitted the most in terms of perceived writing stress relief when compared to their upperclassmen. A variety of factors could account for this, such as less writing experience, additional stress from life changes, or other stressors that occur during this transitionary period. This is supported by the fact that freshmen tended to report higher pre-session levels of perceived writing stress than seniors. Understanding this, the data imply that freshmen are the most likely to benefit from a writing center appointment in terms of perceived stress relief. Writing centers should focus their outreach efforts on classes that are most commonly taken by freshmen such as entry level courses and general courses required by the university to better accommodate the needs of freshmen writers. By doing so, writing centers could reach more freshmen and be a helpful resource in lowering the stress experienced by these students. In addition, professors and faculty could encourage the freshmen in their classes to take advantage of assistance offered in a writing center to help alleviate these higher stress levels. This could be especially useful considering that in our study, freshmen were the least likely to be required to visit the university writing center.

Along with the decrease in perceived stress, the tutoring sessions also appeared to provide students with opportunities to become more comfortable with their assigned citation style. As hypothesized, increased comfort with citation style was also correlated with students’ perceived stress relief both generally and concerning their paper. Furthermore, improved comfort with citation style was a significant predictor of perceived general stress relief, signaling that citation concerns may be significant in students’ perceived stress. With this information, writing centers should ensure that they are aware of the citation styles they will frequently encounter at their university (e.g. APA 7th , MLA 9th, Turabian, Chicago) and ensure that their peer tutors are properly trained to use and teach these

citation styles. This would allow for tutors to best answer students’ concerns and questions about their assigned citation style, facilitating a more effective, stress-reducing writing center appointment. Additionally, when students left their writing tutoring session with a plan, they experienced an even greater amount of perceived writing stress relief than those who did not have a plan. Because developing a plan for future writing during a writing session is a practice that could be implemented into any writing center appointment, these results could be particularly significant. If writing center advisors can assist students in creating a plan for how to tackle the next steps in their paper, whether that be finishing a draft or starting revisions, our findings imply that the student would experience a greater amount of stress reduction when it comes to their paper. Students that may feel they have no direction for how to move forward with their paper may also experience greater writing stress to begin with, indicating greater stress relief when they develop a plan with a writing advisor. To help students feel less stressed about their writing, writing centers should specifically train their advisors on how to guide a student in identifying their next steps in the writing process, particularly as enabling the student to work on their own could help the student become more proactive and confident in their writing. These trainings may include creating worksheets or similar tools that allow for students to have a concrete visualization of their plan.

In spite of the factors we identified, whether or not a student was required to visit the writing center was not significantly related to their perceived general and writing stress levels. We had hypothesized that this variable would be important in understanding the students’ perceived stress due to their intrinsic motivation allowing for better engagement in the appointments, but this did not appear to be the case. This may be because regardless of a student’s reasons for coming to the writing center, advisors may still suggest improvements and provide helpful feedback, allowing students to feel less stressed about their paper. In retrospect, this aligns with Runciman and Gordon, who found that requiring writing center visits did not negatively affect the majority of students’ views of the writing center. Further, most students, regardless of their motivation, believed that the writing center could help them and had similar levels of stress reduction. Another potential reason for stress reduction could be that those who have writing center appointments report significantly less procrastination, so requiring these appointments could be the push that students need to get assignments done early (Young and Fritzsche). This

would imply that professors could be more open to requiring their students to visit the university’s writing center, as it could be beneficial for the student regardless of their motivation, increasing the odds that they feel at least some amount of stress relief. In addition, by pairing this finding with the previously discussed finding of the greater stress relief experienced by freshmen, universities could include an incentive program for first year students to encourage them to visit their university’s writing center. Because it would appear that being required or incentivized to visit the writing center does not diminish the effectiveness of an appointment, if universities were to include incentives to visit the writing center as part of first-year programs, then they could help contribute to the stress relief felt by new university students, thus helping ease the transition into this new phase of life.

Considering our study as a whole, we are able to identify several strengths of this research. One of these strengths was our large sample size which allowed us to minimize the chance of errors or inaccurate findings. Along with this, our pre/post design allowed us to accurately measure individual change in each student in terms of stress, allowing us to quantify one’s perceived stress relief. We were also able to successfully identify important factors in understanding a student’s perceived stress levels, which helped us understand how to maximize the effect of a writing center appointment on students’ perceived stress.

While we believe our study adds beneficial knowledge to the body of research on undergraduate stress and tutoring services, the experiment contained weaknesses important to note. For example, our lack of a control group leaves the question of whether it was attending a writing center appointment that influenced students’ perceived general and writing stress or simply the act of sitting down to work on the paper itself. We also used a convenience sample which inhibited complete experimental control over our groups; in turn, the external validity of our study was limited. Furthermore, our sample was predominantly Caucasian young adults. Due to our lack of ethnic diversity, generalization may be restricted further as one’s own culture could influence the effectiveness of a writing center's services. Also, while our sample did include some non-traditional students, our findings may not fully generalize to the experience of those returning to universities later in life. There also exists the possibility of a positivity bias in which students did not want to admit to experiencing little to no change in their perceived stress levels. This could have inflated our data due to the self-report nature of the survey.

Implications

In order to address these weaknesses and build upon our findings, further research is necessary. For example, investigators could replicate our study on other campuses or in a writing center with a broader focus than the BYU FHSS Writing Lab. This would build upon the external validity of our findings, which could also be accomplished by replicating our study with the addition of a control group where students spend 30 minutes working on their paper alone as compared to working with a writing center advisor. Further, tutoring sessions in different disciplines, such as mathematics or music, could be studied to see if there is a similar effect in students’ perceived stress levels. Investigators could replicate this study generally in other writing centers to allow the results to be more nationally relevant. Researchers could also investigate the replicability of these findings among a population with more demanding writing assignments, such as graduate level students. It could also be beneficial to explore these findings through more objective measures of stress with the hope of negating any potential positivity bias present in the data.

Although our findings indicate that all writing centers could have a positive impact on students’ stress levels, BYU students in particular have unique writing concerns that the BYU FHSS Writing Lab seeks to alleviate. While limited research has been conducted on overall stress levels of students at BYU in comparison to other universities, it is hypothesized that BYU students may experience unique religious expectations that cause high stress levels in conjunction with the academic rigor of a college education. Additionally, many BYU students serve a church service mission before/during their college education and are not in school for 18-24 months before attending/returning to BYU, and these recently returned missionaries express insecurity in their writing that is often compounded when they have major writing assignments. Many of these recently returned missionaries attend the FHSS Writing Lab and are part of the writing lab’s clientele, in turn experiencing these same reductions in stress as reported in this research. Likely with some of these considerations in mind, many writing classes within the FHSS college at BYU require their students to attend the FHSS Writing Lab to solidify writing techniques and styles specific to the social sciences. BYU has created a place for the FHSS Writing Lab to exist and thrive that also helps students in their writing pursuits within the FHSS College.

While the FHSS Writing Lab is a crucial part of the FHSS College, efforts could be made to encourage more students to attend and for the writing lab to become involved in more classes and with more professors, particularly in light of this research. The BYU FHSS Writing Lab could seek additional funding to hire a greater number of writing advisors to sponsor more slots for appointments. Advertising efforts could also focus on some of these studied areas of writing concerns (e.g., citation style, developing a plan, younger writers) because of what has been found to indicate their effect on stress and the writing lab’s approach to alleviate stress. BYU should also continue encouraging, if not requiring, students to attend these tutoring sessions as they could provide valuable tools to students who would otherwise not attend. Professors could also have more interactions with FHSS Writing Lab advisors in training for their assignments and following up with how their students have been doing in sessions. There could be many opportunities moving forward to help the FHSS Writing Lab reach a bigger audience and assist more students who could gain benefits from attending. Overall, among the many benefits of peer tutoring, our findings illuminated the additional positive effects writing tutoring has on perceived stress levels. Given the major role that stress can play in an undergraduate’s life, small steps towards reducing such stress should be taken. Our study shows that attending a writing center may be helpful in that process. To support this goal, writing centers should focus on maximizing the help we can provide to students by implementing strategies such as developing a plan. By doing so, we can help ease the stress undergraduate students experience during this critical transitionary period in their lives.

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Figure 1: Pre-Session vs Post-Session Stress Relief by School Year

Figure 2: Mean of Writing Relief by Plan Status Post-Session

DEVELOPING PURPOSEFUL PRACTICES FOR WRITING CENTER INTRODUCTORY PRESENTATIONS

Katie Garahan University of North Carolina at Charlotte kgarahan@uncc.edu

Abstract

Justine Jackson Stone Radford University jjackson134@radford.edu

Marketing writing center services is an important task for Writing Center Professionals (WCPs), and a common promotional strategy is the introductory presentation, which WCPs often facilitate in individual classes. Our project assesses methods namely an introductory talk and a mock session used in introductory presentations we facilitated in 25 freshman classes. We surveyed students before and after our presentations to examine the effect these two methods had on shaping their perceptions of writing center services. A qualitative analysis of the results of our openended survey questions suggests that our introductory presentation, particularly the mock session, was successful at communicating our practices, but there is room for improvement. We explain how we use participating audience feedback to revise our presentation. Namely, we construct a conscious conceptual framework for our introductory talk and integrate meta-language throughout our mock session. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to propose purposeful or evidence-based practices for facilitating introductory presentations. We present methods of data collection and analysis that other WCPs could use to assess their introductory presentations.

Introduction

When Katie began directing a young (3-year-old) writing center at Radford University in 2019, she was immediately concerned with marketing the Center’s services across campus. Marketing is a common task for new directors, but it is one that can cause pressure and stress (Bowles; Gellar and Denney; Caswell et al.). A common Writing Center promotional strategy is the introductory presentation, which Writing Center Professionals (WCPs) often facilitate in individual classes. Like many writing centers, we at Radford spent significant time facilitating introductory presentations in classes to spread our mission, get faculty buy-in, and convince students to use our services. In 2021, we facilitated 37 introductory presentations virtually or in person, interfacing with over 400 students. We wondered, are these presentations worth our time? Our project assesses an introductory presentation we facilitated in 25 freshman classes. We surveyed students before and after our presentations to examine the effect our methods had on shaping their perceptions of writing center services.

A few writing center scholars have developed projects focused on introductory presentations (see Bowles; Ryan and Kane). Bruce E. Bowles points out

Brynn Miller Radford University brynnmiller96@gmail.com

that while promotion is often part of a WCP’s job, our scholarship does not feature much research on marketing. He argues, “directors are left with an exhausting everyday task that while potentially rewarded institutionally is frequently not a part of their formal education and is commonly seen as separate from their formal endeavors” (Bowles 11). In his 2019 WLN article, Bowles focuses on developing content for introductory presentations, pointing out that previous research about content mostly relies on lore. Drawing from Muriel Harris, Bowles highlights the importance of “creating an effective frame” and describes his writing center’s use of the frame of practice audience (12). Bowles argues for the importance of classroom visits: After significantly increasing their Center’s introductory presentations, he saw a 276% increase in number of appointments over two years.

Like Bowles, Holly Ryan and Danielle Kane posit that “while classroom visits are a mainstay of writing center practice, virtually no scholarship has examined their effectiveness” (146). Ryan and Kane’s 2015 study of classroom visits tests three interventions presentation, podcast, and demonstration against a control group to determine effective methods for shaping student perceptions of the writing center. They found that students who received a presentation or demonstration reported higher likeliness of visiting the Center in the future as compared to the control and podcast groups. Moreover, 20% of students who received the demonstrations actually visited the Center as opposed to 12% in the control group. Ryan and Kane’s results informed our presentation methods, as we will describe in the next section. Both Bowles’s and Ryan and Kane’s studies suggest that introductory presentations are an effective method for promoting the Writing Center, and our study aims to contribute to this scholarship. Our project seeks to both assess the effectiveness of our introductory presentation and explain how we use student feedback on our surveys to revise our presentation materials. Ultimately, we propose purposeful or evidence-based practices for facilitating introductory presentations.

Methods

We focus on presentations facilitated in one specific freshman course, University 150: Achieving Academic Success a course that freshman with a GPA below 2.00 take in the spring semester of their freshman year. In the spring of 2021, we facilitated an introductory presentation in 25 sections of UNIV 150 via Zoom. We received approval from Radford’s Institutional Review Board, and our research was conducted in accordance with Radford’s human research guidelines. Though we conducted introductory presentations in other courses in the spring of 2021, this project focuses on these 25 presentations. Most of our presentations at Radford are facilitated in first-year courses, so the participant group made sense for our purposes.

Our UNIV 150 presentation was scheduled for an entire 50-minute class period, giving us time to administer surveys prior to the presentation and following it. Our presentation proceeded as follows:

1. We administered survey #1

2. We gave a 15-minute introductory talk using PowerPoint.

3. We facilitated a 10-minute mock session.

4. We administered an easy 5-question quiz using Kahoot

5. We administered survey #2

We used two main presentation methods: an introductory talk and a mock session. We included both methods based on Ryan and Kane’s results in which they found a presentation and demonstration to be effective methods of shaping student perception of Writing Center services. The introductory talk lasts for about 10 to 15 minutes and has three goals. First, we provide logistical information including our hours, location, and appointment preparation. Second, we briefly introduce our tutors by explaining their background, expertise, and training. Last, we explain that writing is a process (that is individual for every person), and we go over the common topics we see in the Center based on our client surveys, which include organization, development, planning, mechanics, and citations.

After our introductory talk, the presenters demonstrate what a writing center session looks like. Ryan and Kane’s demonstration features a live writing center session during which the presenter asks for a student volunteer to act as a client while the presenter acts as tutor. Since our presentations were facilitated by director, assistant director, and graduate tutors, we created a scripted mock session to create continuity and ease our graduate tutors’ presentation nerves. Through this mock session, we aim to give students a glimpse of

what to expect when they schedule an appointment and show the collaborative nature of a writing center session. The script begins with the tutor asking the student if they have questions or concerns and prompting the student to identify areas in their writing they would like to focus on. Additionally, in accordance with writing center scholarship (Mackiewicz and Thompson; Nordlof), the tutor in the mock session uses strategies to scaffold student learning. The script was written with the findings from Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson’s study of “the tutoring strategies of experienced writing center tutors” in mind: The tutor uses instruction strategies, such as explaining and exemplifying; cognitive scaffolding, such as pumping and prompting; and motivational scaffolding, such as praising and being optimistic. Following our mock session, we facilitated a simple 5-question Kahoot game with questions about logistics like writing center location, preparing for a visit, and scheduling a session.

We surveyed students before and after the presentation. Survey #1 included two open-ended questions. The first question was: Do you like to write? Why or Why not? We posed this question for two reasons: One, to get to know our audience; and two, to encourage students to generate ideas and access prior knowledge and experiences related to writing. As we discuss below, the responses to this question were more fruitful than we anticipated. The second question on survey #1 was: What happens during a writing center session? Survey #2 included 1 open-ended question: Based on this presentation, what happens during a writing center session? Our data set consists of the written responses to these three questions.

To analyze our surveys, we used methods of grounded coding following Cheryl Geisler’s Analyzing Streams of Language. We segmented our data simply we kept each survey response to each question as one segment. To create coding schemes, the three of us read through the data separately and made notes about emerging themes. We then discussed common themes together and developed initial coding schemes for each question. We separately coded our data, discussed, and revised our schemes. Ultimately, we developed two coding schemes one for the responses to question #1 (Do you like to write? Why or why not) and a second for questions #2 and #3 (What do you think happens during a writing center session). We include a brief description of each coding scheme in the next section and provide a more robust description in Appendix A.

Results and Discussions: Do you like to write?

In this section, we first present the results of survey #1, question #1: do you like to write? Then, we discuss and interpret our results.

Results

We had 199 responses to this question. We first coded all responses as either yes, no, or conditional (see table 1, Appendix B). We coded responses “no” when respondents shared only negative opinions of writing, “yes” when they shared only positive opinions, and “conditional” when participants said their like/dislike of writing was dependent on a condition.

Beyond these initial three codes, we developed a 5element coding scheme (see table 2, Appendix B and Appendix A). Table 2 (Appendix B) indicates the breakdown of codes for all 199 responses. The “other” category is fairly high but does not constitute adding another code because most of these responses were too general to analyze. To better understand why students like, don’t like, or remain ambivalent about writing, we discuss our results based on our original three categories (no, yes, conditional).

Only 26% of respondents said they did not like writing. Most “no” responses were coded either enjoyment, ability, or translation (see table 3, Appendix B).

Almost half of the students (47%) who responded “no” explained that they do not find writing to be enjoyable; in other words, writing is not fun. Common themes throughout this lack of enjoyment include writing being boring, time-consuming, and tedious. About 25% of the respondents who said “no” connected their dislike of writing to their ability. That is, they do not like writing because they are bad at it. One wrote that teachers often “take writing very seriously,” and the student “feel[s] like whatever they write is not good enough.” Another said they “can’t think like a writer.” Most hinted towards just “not being good” or “being bad” at it. The third most popular reason (14%) for responding “no” relates to translating thinking to writing. One respondent laments, “it sounds right in my head but when I put it on paper it never makes sense” and another explains, “I have a hard time putting into words what I want to say.”

Sixty respondents or 30% hold solely positive views of writing with no caveats. Not only does this group like writing; they love it. Most “yes” responses were coded either expression, ability, or other (see table 4, Appendix B).

Overwhelmingly (67%), students in the “yes” category like writing because it is a form of selfexpression, creativity, or catharsis. One writes, “it helps

me express my thoughts and keep myself in the best mindset I can be in.” Another says, “it gives me a canvas to put my thoughts and feelings on.” Others say writing helps them “let [their] emotions out,” “get ideas out,” “clear [their] mind,” and “relieve stress.” A smaller group (15%) of students in the “yes” category mention natural ability. These students say writing “comes naturally,” “is one of [their] strengths,” “comes easier to [them] than other things.” Others simply find themselves to be “good” or “decent.” Notably, a higher percentage of “no” responses (25%) referenced natural ability than those (15%) who said “yes.” The sample size here is small, so a generalizable conclusion cannot be made. It would be interesting for future research to examine if students who do not like writing view it as an innate or natural ability; whereas those who like writing view it as a skill to be honed.

A small majority or 44% of respondents have ambivalent feelings about writing. That is, their like/dislike is conditional. Conditional responses were more difficult to code than “no” or “yes” because answers often included more detail explaining students’ ambivalence. Whereas almost half of the “no” responses were coded as “enjoyment,” and nearly three quarters of the “yes” responses were coded as “expression,” the conditional responses varied (see table 5, Appendix B).

Like the “no” responses, the conditional ones highlighted enjoyment more than any other code. Many respondents explained what they enjoyed about writing, namely engaging interesting topics and learning new information, while some reference obviously unpleasant previous experiences, citing feeling pressured by time constraints and topics that do not interest them.

On the other hand, 19% of conditional responses were coded as expression: students said they liked to write when they felt they had the opportunity to express their thoughts. For instance, one said: “I do like to write sometimes. Sometimes when I need to vent out or let any emotion go I can write it down and feel better.” Several in this category highlighted specific types of writing like “ideas for movies,” “creative writing,” “research papers,” “journals,” “fiction stories,” “music,” and “poetry.” It makes sense that conditional responses would pinpoint specific genres or types of writing because they were identifying instances where they do like writing versus instances when they do not.

Discussion: Adopting a Positive Conceptual Framework for Our Introductory Talk

These results did not align with our assumptions of student perceptions of writing. Upon analyzing our results, we realized that we assume students dislike or

even hate writing, and we unconsciously built our approach to our introductory talk on this assumption. For instance, we took a negative approach when explaining the common topics students seek help with based on our post-session surveys. These topics include organization, development, planning, mechanics, and citations. Prior to this research, when the director, Katie, introduced these topics to students, she asked questions like, do you ever feel that your writing is disorganized, do you have a difficult time reaching page limits, do you get nervous when it’s time to sit down and write? She had students consider these questions and even share if they wanted and followed up with; the writing center can help! These questions come from a lens of deficit, an assumption that students have negative feelings about writing. Our results reveal that such an approach only targets a quarter of our audience, as only 26% of respondents did not like writing. To borrow terminology from Nancy Grimm–we were operating under an “unconscious” (11) conceptual framework that students generally do not like to write. Grimm argues that “when we understand student writers as active designers who are both capable of and interested in learning about the options they have for making and interpreting visual, oral, and printed texts, we work with them in more positive and productive ways” (21-22). Our results provide us a glimpse into how our target audience actually feels, allowing us to speak to them as “active designers” with nuanced ideas of writing. Throughout this section, we explain what a “conscious” (Grimm 16) conceptual framework for our introductory presentation based on our survey responses looks like. As Grimm reminds us, “conscious frameworks profoundly alter assumptions about students, about language, and about literacy learning” (16). Our conscious conceptual framework works from three tenets based on our codes (enjoyment, ability, expression, translation):

1. The Writing Center encourages students to engage what they enjoy about writing.

2. The Writing Center supports students’ increased writing self-efficacy.

3. The Writing Center guides students’ expression of original ideas in writing.

Let us first consider the responses coded “enjoyment.” The reasons students do not enjoy writing are not entirely surprising. Most folks have at some point found writing to be boring, time-consuming, or tedious. This sentiment is difficult to combat, but hearteningly only a small portion of the total responses focuses solely on writing being unenjoyable. Indeed, the conditional responses coded “enjoyment,” while ambivalent, include aspects of writing that they do

enjoy,

like engaging with topics they find “interesting.”

As one explains, “if it’s [a topic] that I enjoy then I love to write.” Our conscious conceptual framework, thus, addresses the enjoyment of writing from this positive perspective with phrases like, “Writing can be fun, and the writing center supports what you enjoy about writing, like engaging with subjects that interest you and learning about unfamiliar topics through writing.”

Another important group we considered when developing our new framework are those whose feelings about writing depend on their perceived writing ability or lack thereof. Self-efficacy or an individual’s belief in their ability to effectively perform a task (Bandura) is an important construct to consider when promoting writing growth (Schmidt and Alexander; Mitchell et al.). Pam Bromley, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg found that frequent writing center visits resulted in increased writing self-efficacy. Anecdotally, our clients at Radford often mention increased confidence in their writing skills on their post-session surveys something we did not explicitly mention in our presentation. Our revised conceptual framework draws from the literature on writing self-efficacy and includes client testimonials of increased confidence.

Lastly, respondents frequently write about the act of expressing ideas. “Translation” is similar to “expression” both relate to articulating thoughts into writing. Expression which for our participants signifies personal writing, personal thoughts, and even catharsis is a familiar concept to the field of Writing Studies and brings to mind expressivist theories and pedagogies espoused by folks like Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Donald Murray. In the past couple decades, expressivism has “lost status and respect” among writing scholars in higher education (Goldblatt 438). Despite this, Eli Goldblatt calls expressivism a “tacit tradition” and argues that "commitments traceable to expressivist concerns” are reflected in contemporary composition scholarship (460). Importantly for us, participants who like writing as well as those who feel ambivalent about it find joy in writing when they are able to express their thoughts and emotions. As such, self-expression is a key element in our revised conceptual framework for our presentation.

Overall, respondents describe having an oftenconflicting relationship with writing. Their ambivalence, however, should not be mistaken as indifference they feel passionate about the topic of writing. For instance, one student writes: “contrived writing about something I don’t care about or am forced to do in a certain amount of time in a certain way frustrates and irritates me because I don’t believe good writing comes from that

and that in [sic] drones our personal voices because it’s ‘unprofessional.’” This respondent, though espousing some negative feelings, clearly feels passionate about writing and astutely points out the false dichotomy between personal voice and professional/academic writing. The more time we spent on our analysis, interrogating our own assumptions, the more we understood that student perceptions of writing in general are crucial to effectively marketing our services. While these results may not be directly applicable to students in other institutions, our study highlights the need for other WCPs to examine their assumptions through empirical research. We hope our relatively simple methods provide a way to do so.

Results and Discussion: What happens during a writing center session

In this section, we first present the results of survey #1, question #2 (What happens during a writing center session?) and survey #2, question #2 (Based on this presentation, what happens during a writing center session?) Then, we discuss and interpret our results.

Results

One hundred and ninety-nine students responded to survey #1, and 144 students responded to survey #2. In analyzing the 343 responses to the first and second survey, we developed a 5-code scheme (see table 6, Appendix B and Appendix A). Though Geisler’s method dictates researchers code segments with only one code, we decided to code for both tutorcentered/collaborative and general/specific. That is, a segment could only be tutor-centered or collaborative but could potentially be tutor-centered and general or specific. In this section we first provide results for the general versus specific codes and then the tutorcentered versus collaborative codes.

General v. Specific

As shown in table 7 (Appendix B), more responses were coded “general” in survey #2 than in survey #1. By “general,” we mean that the respondents did not mention a specific writing topic (organization, format, grammar, style, etc.) or part of the writing process (brainstorming, revision, etc.).

In survey #1, 32% of students mentioned a specific writing topic or part of the writing process, whereas 58% do not. Respondents mention the word “grammar” 30 times. Other specifics from survey #1 are included in table 8 (Appendix B).

The mention of specifics decreased slightly in survey #2 to 29% (see table 7, Appendix B). Differently than survey #1, only 3 participants mention grammar in their responses. Fewer specific topics were mentioned in survey #2 (see table 9, Appendix B). Respondents mentioned new topics, including analyzing or understanding a prompt, organization, development, and writing paragraphs. These additions make sense in relation to the presentation. As mentioned previously, the presenters include the specific topics of organization and development, as ones that often arise on postsession surveys. Additionally, the mock session begins with the tutor and client analyzing a prompt.

We also saw an 11% increase in responses coded “general,” meaning respondents did not identify specific writing topics or parts of the writing process in survey #2.

Collaborative v. Tutor-Centered

We saw a significant shift in how students described the role of the tutor from survey #1 to survey #2 (see table 10, Appendix B). We will begin by discussing the results of survey #1.

In survey #1, 46% of respondents characterized tutors as teachers able to fix mistakes. Fourteen respondents used the word “teach” in their responses: for instance, “you teach about proper writing techniques,” and “teach us better ways to write.” Respondents also use words that indicate students’ lack of ability. One wrote, “They fix your writing and stuff you’re weak on” and another said, “I think you write and they correct.” A third responded “someone tells you how to fix your writing.” Others specifically highlighted tutor knowledge: “a person that is smarter than me helps me with something I don’t understand” and “good writers tutor people who aren’t as good at writing.” These responses harken to the image of a writing center that our field has long combated–a remedial place for bad writers to be fixed.

The number of collaborative-coded responses on survey #1 is similar to tutor-centered: 43% of respondents held a collaborative view of writing center sessions, referring to tutors as guides or helpers. Admittedly, we were surprised to see that this number was so high we expected first-year college students to hold a tutor-centered view of the writing center before the presentation. Upon examination, we realized these collaborative numbers are deceiving. The word “help” is used 73 times throughout these responses, and the grammatical structure of the responses coded “collaborative” are often the same. Table 11 (Appendix B) provides examples of this sentence structure.

Even in positioning the tutors as “helpers,” the respondents often privilege tutor knowledge over student needs, goals, interests, etc. Grammatically, tutors (“they,” “someone,” “experienced writers,” etc.) are the subject of these sentences (see table 11, Appendix B). The tutors and the writing center and not the needs of the client are the focus.

As mentioned above and seen in table 10 (Appendix B), respondents describe the relationship between tutors and clients much differently in survey #2. Only 17% of responses were coded tutor-centered; a 29% decrease from survey #1. Additionally, the tone of survey #2 tutor-centered responses is much less harsh and condemning of the writer than the tone of survey #1 tutor-centered responses. None of the responses in survey #2 focus on the client’s lack of ability. While some respondents still refer to tutors as teachers, they use collaborative language to do so. For instance, one writes: “The instructor and yourself will review a paper that you have written,” and another says, “Talking to a teacher to learn how to write a better paper.” Neither of these responses condemns the writer. A few respondents refer to fixing mistakes, but they are less harsh than survey #1 responses (re: “a person that is smarter than me helps me with something I don’t understand”). One respondent on survey #2 writes, “They don't fix everything for you but tell you what is done wrong so you don't make the mistake in the future,” and another explains, “The tutors help you to pick out any mistakes in your writing.” Thus, the responses while tutor-centered have a more collaborative tone than the tutor-centered responses to survey #1.

Notably, we saw a shift in the number of survey #2 responses that referred to writing center sessions as collaborative. On survey #2, 79% of respondents described the session as collaborative, a 36% increase from survey #1. The nature of these responses were also different from the collaborative-coded responses in survey #1. While the word “help” is still used frequently the responses are more descriptive and specific (see table 12, Appendix B).

Unlike the collaborative responses from survey #1 (see table 11, Appendix B), these responses indicate a conversational, nuanced approach to tutoring evidenced by words and phrases, like “conversational,” “pushed to think for yourself,” and “guide you.” Additionally, respondents more frequently used adjectives and adverbs throughout their responses on survey #2 than they did on survey #1 to vividly describe writing center sessions (see table 13, Appendix B).

Discussion: Making the most of the Mock Session

Our survey results particularly the responses coded collaborative or student-centered suggest that our presentation was successful at communicating that Writing Center sessions are collaborative, conversational, and student-centered. On the other hand, our results for the general v. specific coding were somewhat puzzling. We found the 11% increase in “general” responses from survey #1 to survey #2 to be surprising since we spent time in our introductory talk explaining writing process(es) and identifying the common topics students typically receive help with (organization, development, planning, and mechanics). The respondents write about the relationship between the tutor and client in a specific and descriptive manner on survey #2; however, they discuss writing and the writing processes more generally. We speculate that given the short amount of time students had to respond to surveys, they chose to focus on what stuck out most to them: the collaborative, conversational nature of writing center sessions.

Our results suggest, then, that the mock session not the introductory talk made the biggest impression on students. We decided to recode our survey #2 responses specifically for session parts. We coded a segment as “introductory talk” if it addressed writing process(es), writing topics, language from PowerPoint, tutor education/background. We coded a segment mock session if it addressed student needs or goals, conversation, collaboration, motivation, or steps of a session. Of the 144 responses, 21% were too general to code and 13% were coded other. For session parts: 49% of responses were coded mock session and 17% were coded introductory talk. In what follows we explain how we revised our introductory presentation to make the most of the mock session.

The mock session allows students to see a session unfold in front of them, so not surprisingly several respondents on survey #2 detailed the steps of a session (see table 14, Appendix B). Though responses shown in table 14 (Appendix B) identify steps like setting goals or an agenda, examining the prompt, reading the paper aloud; they do not directly name them as such. Thus, some respondents were able to glean certain steps by watching the session. In our updated approach to the mock session, the presenters directly identify the steps as they progress. For instance, a presenter begins by asking, “first, the tutor will introduce themselves and ask the client to explain their assignment and identify their questions, concerns, or goals.” Later, the presenter says, “now, the tutor will invite the client to read their paper out loud and explain why doing so is a useful strategy in

a writing center session.” This guided approach allows presenters to directly bring the audience’s attention to important aspects of the mock session

Since our results suggest that our mock session was more effective than the introductory talk, we wondered if any student responses aligned with scaffolding strategies. As we mentioned previously, we wrote our script with the findings from Mackiewicz and Thompson’s study of “the tutoring strategies of experienced writing center tutors” in mind: The tutor uses instruction strategies, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding. Table 15 (Appendix B) includes responses that align with cognitive and motivational scaffolding strategies.

We found that six responses aligned with the openended approach of cognitive scaffolding. These responses highlight the empowering nature of cognitive scaffolding the tutor gently guides the student to take an active role in their learning and gain new skills. As Mackiewicz and Thompson explain, cognitive scaffolding strategies lead “students to find their own solutions to composing or content problems” (34).

According to the responses shown in table 15 (Appendix B), “while tutors are not “book[s] of answers,” they actively engage with students by asking “various questions,” providing “tools” to help students “find the aspect of writing to make it really good,” and helping students “open their mind to question parts of their writing.” Three responses shown in table 15 (Appendix B) align with motivational scaffolding strategies; that is, the tutor “encourage[s] student writers by building and maintaining a sense of rapport and feelings of solidarity” to “increase student writers’ motivation” (Mackiewicz and Thompson 39). According to the responses in table 14 (Appendix B), tutors will not “judge,” “criticize,” or tell you “NO YOU’RE WRONG.” Instead, they use “constructive and mindful” methods to “guide you along.” Not many responses easily aligned with scaffolding strategies, though we prioritize such strategies in our mock session script.

In our updated presentation, we integrate metalanguage into the mock session to highlight scaffolding strategies. Presenters do not necessarily need to use the words “cognitive” or “motivational” scaffolding, but can explain the process to the audience so they can recognize the strategies being showcased. Presenters explain, for instance, “During this mock session, you will observe a tutor using strategies to motivate the client, like praising their work and being optimistic.” Additionally, presenters say of cognitive scaffolding: “You will see a tutor use strategies to encourage the

client to think critically about their own work. For instance, in this session, you’ll hear the tutor asking open ended questions to engage the client in a conversation about the best way to address revisions needed in the first body paragraph.” Once the mock session is over, the presenters facilitate conversations with the audience about specific strategies they noticed. Using metalanguage to talk about scaffolding strategies provides the audience with language to understand and talk about the writing center. Giving the audience time to reflect allows them to solidify their learning.

Our findings allow us to see how our methods shape the audience’s perceptions of our work and provide us with insight on how we might sharpen our methods for greater impact. We hope our results in conjunction with the findings of Ryan and Kane encourage WCPs to include session demonstrations in their introductory presentations and guide audience understanding using meta-language and reflection.

Limitations

Our study has several limitations. First, we conducted research at one university, so our results are not directly applicable to other institutions. Second, our participants are academically homogenous: They are all first-year college students taking UNIV 150, a course designed for students at risk of attrition. Our results are not generalizable across all groups of students. It is possible that students more familiar with campus life or in better academic standing could have different views of writing and the writing center. Third, we conducted all 25 presentations via Zoom due to the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person presentations might yield a different level of engagement with the introductory presentation.

Conclusions and Future Research

Ultimately, this project allowed us to assess our current marketing strategies and develop introductory presentations that directly target our audience and carefully construe our mission to future clients. Our results suggest that our introductory presentation is successful at communicating our practices, but there is room for improvement. We revised our presentation by constructing a positive conceptual framework for our introductory talk based on three tenets: the Writing Center encourages students to engage what they enjoy about writing, the Writing Center supports students’ increased writing self-efficacy, and the Writing Center guides students’ expression of original ideas in writing. Additionally, we revised our mock session by integrating

meta-language that directly guides the audience through the steps of a session and the scaffolding strategies tutors employ.

This project contributes to the growing body of RAD research (replicable, aggregable, and datasupported) in Writing Center studies. As we mentioned in the previous section, our results may not be directly transferable to Centers in different universities. As Dana Lynn Driscoll and Sherry Wynn Perdue point out, however, “While each institution and individual writing center is certainly unique, [...] [w]e believe we have much shared practice across centers, and additional RAD research in a variety of centers may aid in our understanding of how to best engage in these shared practices” (121). As WCPs continue to share their research and assessment practices, our field develops a nuanced understanding of effective marketing strategies. The methods we used to collect and analyze our data are fairly simple and thus easily usable by other WCPs seeking to assess their introductory presentations.

There are opportunities for further Writing Center research into effective marketing strategies. Anecdotally, our presentations were effective in shaping instructor perceptions at Radford. We found in the coming semesters that UNIV 150 instructors often complemented our methods, continued to ask us for future presentations in their courses, and referred us to other instructors across campus. We did not empirically study how instructor perceptions might be shaped by introductory presentations, but that is certainly an area of future research. As we mentioned previously, we conducted our study solely on Zoom presentations; future research might compare results from Zoom and in-person presentations. Additionally, we learned through this experience that a mock session requires two presenters, and Centers are not always able to divert resources from tutoring to presentations. A future study could examine the effectiveness of pre-recorded mock sessions. Lastly, as argued elsewhere (see Garahan and Morrison), assessment methods, like Ryan and Kane’s and those used in the present study can potentially be adapted to assess other writing workshops, as workshop practices remain understudied (Garahan and Morrison). We hope this study has contributed to other calls (see Bowles; Ryan and Kane) for research focused on effective marketing strategies.

Bandura, Albert. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W. H. Freeman, 1997.

Bowles, Bruce. “Coffee’s for Closers!: The Pressures of Marketing a New Writing Center.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 43, no. 7-8, 2019, pp. 1017, https://www.wlnjournal.org/archives/v43/43.78.pd

Bromley, Pam, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg. “Transfer and Dispositions in Writing Centers: A CrossInstitutional, Mixed-Methods Study.” Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, : https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2016.13.1.01.

Caswell, Nicole, et al. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors. Utah State UP, 2016.

Driscoll, Dana Lynn and Sherry Wynn Perdue. “Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 2012, 11-39, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442391

Garahan, Katie and Rebecca Crews. “Educating Tutors to Engage in Writing Center Workshop Purposeful Practices.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol 43, no. 9-10, 2019, pp. 18-25. https://www.wlnjournal.org/archives/v43/43.910.pdf

Geisler, Cheryl. Analyzing Streams of Language: Twelve Steps to the Sytematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data, Longman, 2003.

Gellar, Anne Ellen and Harry Denny. “Of Ladybugs, Low Status, and Loving the Job: Writing Center Professionals Navigating their Careers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 2013, pp. 96-129. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442405.

Goldblatt, Eli. “Don’t Call it Expressivism: Legacies of a ‘Tacit Tradition.’” National Council of Teachers of English, vol. 68, no. 3, 2017, pp. 438-465. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44783576

Grimm. Nancy. “New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 29, no. 2, 2009, 11-27, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43460755

Mackiewicz, Jo, and Isabelle Kramer Thompson. Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors, Routledge, 2018.

Works Cited

Mitchell, Kim M., Dianna E. McMillan, Michelle M. Lobchuk, Nathan C. Nickel, Rasheda Rabbani, and Johnson Li. “Development and Validation of the Situated Academic Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (SAWSES). Assessing Writing, vol. 45, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2021.100524.

Nordlof, John. “Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and the Role of Theory in Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, 2014, 45-64, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43444147

Ryan, Holly and Danielle Kane. “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Writing Center Classroom Visits: An Evidence-Based Approach.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2015, pp. 145-72, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442808

Schmidt, Katherine M. and Joel E. Alexander. “The Empirical Development of an Instrument to Measure Writerly Self-Efficacy in Writing Centers.” Journal of Writing Assessment, vol 5, no. 1, 2012, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dp4m86t

Appendix A: Coding Schemes

Survey #1, Question #1: Do you like to write? Why or why not?

Expression (E)

- Refers directly to expressing oneself (“it helps me express my thoughts,” “I can express how I feel about a topic”)

- Refers to creative or personal writing (“It’s one of the creative outlets I use,” “I like to write creatively”)

- Refers to writing being cathartic (“Sometimes when I need to vent or let any emotion go I can write,” “it is a relaxing method to help clear your mind”)

*Note: when deciding between expression and enjoyment, consider that expression is related to the action of writing (express, create, etc.). Enjoyment is related to the emotions or the way writing makes students feel (bored, having fun, etc.).

Enjoyment (EN)

- Refers to writing being boring (“if its boring then I’m stuck,” “it can feel a little boring”)

- Refers to writing as time consuming (“it takes up too much time,” “it takes a long time”)

- Refers to not enjoying writing (“I do not enjoy it,” “it is tedious”)

- Refers to writing being enjoyable or interesting (“I like to write when it’s something I can easily relate to or a subject I like,” “I like writing when it’s a topic that I enjoy”)

Natural ability (G)

- Refers to being good at writing (“I am good at it,” “I can write a decent paper”)

- Refers to being better at writing than other assessment methods or subjects (“I would much rather write essays than take tests,” “it’s easier than math”)

- Refers to being bad at writing (“I never was to good at writing papers,” “I don't feel like my writing is good enough”)

Translation (T)

- Refers to putting their thoughts into words (“I have a hard time putting into words what I want to say,” “it’s difficult for me to express myself through writing)

- Refers to having trouble making their thoughts sounds good (“I have a hard time putting my thoughts together and making sure they sound good,” “it sounds right in my head but when I put it on paper it never makes sense”)

- Refers directly to writer’s block or not knowing what to write (“I hit a roadblock and can’t figure out what else to write,” sometimes I can’t come up with things to say”)

www.praxisuwc.com

Other (O)

Definition: Code as other (O) any response that does not fit into one of the above categories or are too general to categorize.

Survey #1, Question #2: What do you think happens in a writing center tutoring session?

Survey #2, Question #1: Based on today’s presentation, what do you think happens during a writing center tutoring session?

Tutor-centered (T)

- Refers to tutors as teachers (“they teach you how to brainstorm” “They teach you how to write”)

- Refers to tutors correcting, critiquing, or fixing mistakes (“look over things I’ve written and tell me how to fix them,” “you write and they correct”)

- Refers to tutors’ knowledge (“a person that is smarter than me helps me,” “Good writers tutor people who isn’t as good at writing”)

Collaborative (C)

- Refers to the tutor as a guide, helper, or coach (“they are not an editor, but can guide you in writing your paper,” “they sit with you and work through your paper to help you figure out what you need”)

- Describes the session as conversational (“as questions to see how you write and what you do when you write,” “its a simple talk through with advice and help,” “a conversational approach to help better the student’s writing ability”)

- Refers to student needs and goals (“The tutoring session is tailored to the students specific needs,” “Explaining and assisting with any problems you may have”)

General (G)

- Refers directly to non-specific writing tips (“They most likely give you writing tips,” “tips on how to use things that have to do with writing”)

- Refers to non-specific writing help (“Help with writing,” “help with writing assignments”)

- Refers to non-specific writing improvement (“give you suggestions on how to improve your writing,” “help with writing skills and ways to write”)

Specific (S)

- Refers to the writing process (“revisions or trying to put an outline together,” “help proofread your work,” “show us how to brainstorm”)

- Refers to grammar or mechanics (“grammar modifications, sentence corrections,” “help with spell checking,” “review your work for grammar”)

- Refers to organization, format, or structure (“help format papers,” “structure of your work,” “set up an essay”)

Unsure (U)

- Directly states being unsure or not knowing (“I am unsure,” “Not sure,” “Don’t really know,” “No idea”)

- Asks a question (“You get tutored?,” “Helps you write papers?,” “my best guess is they tutor us on how to make a college paper?”)

Other (O)

Definition: Code as other (O) any response that does not fit into one of the above categories.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 20, No 3 (2023) www.praxisuwc.com

Appendix B: Tables

Table 5: Conditional Responses

Table 6: What happens during a writing center session? Coding Scheme

Code

Description

Tutor-centered referred to tutors as teachers and focused on tutors correcting, critiquing, or fixing their mistakes

Collaborative referred to tutors as guides or helpers and referred to sessions as collaborative or conversational

General did not mention a specific writing topic (organization, format, grammar, style, etc.) or part of the writing process (brainstorming, revision, etc.).

Specific mentioned a specific writing topic (organization, format, grammar, style, etc.) or part of the writing process (brainstorming, revision, etc.).

Unsure said they didn’t know what happened in a writing center session

Other could not be coded as any of the above

Table 7: General v. Specific Coding Results

Table 8: Survey #1 Specific Writing Topics

Structure Getting started

Proofreading Research

Brainstorming Formulate ideas

Spelling Arrangement process

Format Citation

Flow

Sentence structure

Plagiarism

Sentence corrections

Editing

Outlining Tone Style

Punctuation Word choice Revision

Table 9: Survey #2 Specific Writing Topics

Structure Following guidelines or rubrics

Editing Development

Format Proofreading

Analyze or understand a prompt Citations

Organization Writing paragraphs

Revising Brainstorming

They help you improve on how to start an essay.

They help you with your essays.

They help you write better.

They help give tips on how to write better.

They help format our writing better

A tutor will help you with grammar/editing.

Someone helps you write a paper the correct way.

Experienced writers help students.

Table 10: Collaborative v. Tutor-Centered Survey Results

Table 11: Examples of Survey #1 Collaborative Responses

Table 12: Examples of Survey #2 Collaborative Responses

A conversational approach to help better the student’s writing ability

An informational conversation to help the student enhance their paper

You find ways to help improve your writing when you are unsure about it, or have question about it. You gain knowledge and the help needed to become a better writer, with a tutor. You don't get straight answers are instead pushed to think for yourself with help.

The tutor will read over your assignment and help you through the writing process by making sure the student follows the guidelines and stays on topic. The tutor will help you in any aspect of the writing process. They are not an editor, but can guide you in writing your paper and give you feedback.

Table 13: Examples of Survey #2 Descriptive Language

Truly help help you with your essay very deeply beneficial assistance

a simple talk through help make you a better writing in a way that's constructive and mindful help us in detail to truly succeed help you and improve you in your writing in the long run and that is really helpful great feedback

Honest feedback

helpful information

informational conversation very well detailed talk about what help you need in writing a session could be very student-driven overall help that's cooperative conversational approach

Table 14: Responses that Detail Session Steps

During a session, you will provide a copy of your paper and identify what you are struggling with. The tutor will give input. The session is more of a conversation than completely deconstructing your writing.

You first talk about what you want to accomplish during this session and what your assignment is, then go through each paragraph and talk.

When arriving you will be asked questions, you present your writing piece and you both work together to make it great.

You sit down with someone and discuss your paper. Someone will look over your paper make changes and tell you why they made those changes.

Tutor and student analyze the prompt, identify the problem, and then fix the problem. They ask what you would like to go over and cover during your session, then they help you with what you are needing help with and try to help you understand what you talked about. The tutor will read over your assignment and help you through the writing process by making sure the student follows the guidelines and stays on topic.

I know that when you go to the writing center for tutoring they like to go over what you came there for and also maybe something else you need to work on. They don't edit your papers they just give you some tips and strategies that will help you write a stronger paper.

Table 15: Responses that Align with Scaffolding Strategies

Cognitive Scaffolding You don't get straight answers are instead pushed to think for yourself with help.

Cognitive Scaffolding The tutor seems as if they are the teacher but its on a one on one scale. So they can help you individually. So they are there as a resource and not a book of answers.

Cognitive Scaffolding The tutor asks various questions to help me with my writing assignments.

Cognitive Scaffolding

That the tutor helps the student learn and get a grasp on what their paper lacks, and how they can approach issues more critically, or perhaps at all, that they didn't think about. They allow them to have all the tools available so they can potentially find the aspect of their writing that can really make it good.

Cognitive Scaffolding The tutor will assist in helping one open their mind to question parts of their writing

Cognitive Scaffolding A tutor asks questions to make your writing better

Motivational Scaffolding they wont judge us on how we work but instead they'll help us to better our selfs.

Motivational Scaffolding

I'd say a writing center tutoring session consists of constructive work and constructive criticism that isn't there to necessarily criticize you, but is there to help make you a better writing in a way that's constructive and mindful.

Motivational Scaffolding

They look at your paper with you and instead of telling you NO YOURE WRONG they just help guide you along.