Stephen North's famous tirade against his colleagues' ignorance about peer-tutoring forms the "tip of the spear" in our continued investigation of practical issues that affect college student writers, specifically, and in contrast to professional writers (in this case, college professors assigned to teach students to write). Do you still hear the same misunderstandings about students' writing processes from your teachers at Goucher, or any new ones, perhaps? Lucille McCarthy takes the professors behind the looking glass to the place where you live, seeing writing instruction from an actual college student's experience. Again, does this student's experience reflect your own--if so, how, and if not, how does your experience differ? Finally, Pryor, the Oberlin tutor, takes on the academy from the student' perspective in the 1990s. How well does her picture of power and authority in academic writing describe what you see? What would you change or add or reprioritize? Remember that this coming week's response may be individual or collaborative--your choice.
Goucher's "College Writing Proficiency" criteria
Goucher College Faculty's Writing Center Practices Survey
Mentioned in North: Pike, Becker, & Young (1970): "tagmemic heuristic" [AKA, "particle, wave, field" or "point/event, line/process, network/genre of processes"] (North 443)
Mentioned in McCarthy: Four "maxims" that H. P. Grice, a philosopher of language, claimed were essential for the operation of ordinary communicative language (McCarthy 242)