Professor and Student Expectations

I remember there was a day where we had staff tutors talk to professors about the writing center’s objectives/goals. I was happy to see that professors attended this seminar because they need to know what exactly they should expect from tutors. The staff tutors that lead the seminar were really confident and secure when they said that they were not going to correct a writer’s paper heavily focused on grammar. I was curious to see if a professor would comment and say something like, “Well, then what do you guys do then?” But, there was no response that was negative in that aspect. On the contrary, there were more questions on how tutors would approach a writer or how they would help writers write a thesis. Now, I have heard many stories of what students expect from the writing center and sometimes this can lead to disappointment. Writers often come into the writing center thinking that tutors will write on their papers and correct it and off they go! Once they realize that this is not the case, they disengage in the session and feel that they could of just done it on their own. This idea needs to be fought by advertising the writing center more appropriately. The notion of tutors being cruel to a writer’s writing also needs to be stopped. A writing center needs to reach out to the audience that shows that peer tutoring works and that they are there to help the students!