Fun in Philly:  the Writing Center's Trip to Philadelphia

 This February, thirteen of Berkeley's finest Writing Center tutors traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Writing Centers at the University of Pennsylvania and Haverford. 

The Tutorial Process

 The tutoring process at Haverford seems to focus on simplicity. It focuses mostly on the face-to-face, peer-to-peer discussion of writing and turns not its focus onto marginal enhancements.

Like Berkeley, Haverford tutors hold true to the no-pen policy. They believe that the key to the tutorial process is through verbalized discussion as opposed to written corrections. Instead of marking up their peer’s paper like a teacher, the tutor’s goal is to sift through words and get to the meaning and the intent of their peer’s paper. The tutoring process is about what questions the tutor has to ask and what ideas the tutee has to express. Dialogue is emphasized and if any notes are written they are written by both the tutor and the tutee on separate sheets of paper. Of course the tutor’s notes are free for viewing by the tutee so as not to make the tutor appear authoritative. This dialogue between the tutor and tutee is intended to challenge the ideas of the student and to hone in on the issues of organization and clear language. The tutee gets out of it what he or she puts into it. The tutor will read the assignment and the paper before discussing, and then bases his or her comments on questions and requests for clarification as opposed to corrections and statements. The tutor will question the tutee’s ideas and intent in writing ranging from the broadest thesis to the smallest sentence structure. The tutor is looking to see how the tutee argues. How does he or she establish main ideas in a thesis and support these ideas using evidence and logical reasoning? How can this argument be strengthened through the clear and concise use of language? These questions are not only ones the tutors ask themselves when reading a tutee’s paper, but also contribute directly to the discussion of the session.

Haverford may leave some to be desired in the realms of workshops, advertising, and Eat n’ Speaks, but perhaps the services they do provide have near perfected the art of simplicity. The tutors at Haverford get to the point and focus their attention on the writing process and the needs of their tutees as opposed to spreading themselves too thin by putting a lot of emphasis on more peripheral interests.

Fourteen Berkeley Writing Center tutors sat straight-backed in wooden-slat chairs in the Kelly Writers House. The air was stagnant with the tutors inhaling and exhaling five-paragraph essays when Valerie Ross, the director of the Writing Center program at the University of Pennsylvania, gusted in as a breath of fresh air. Her views on the writing process opened the eyes of many of the tutors and encouraged the students to take a look at writing in a whole new manner, to break down the barrier between creative and academic writing, to throw away the mask of conformity and use written voice as a means of interdisciplinary communication.

The writing process at Penn consists of a much more abstract way of thinking than Berkeley Prep students are used to. At Berkeley, most of the writing students do is centralized around the educational idea of the five paragraph essay. They use the three prong thesis format as a cornerstone for organization and structure. One of the first things Valerie Ross said in the meeting on the five paragraph essay was that “it has nothing to do with anything.” She disagreed with the set-in-stone concept and encouraged a focus on the formation of a single paragraph rather than a five paragraph unit. Another important central theme of the writing process taught at Penn is the idea of cross disciplinary communication. The idea that each field (business, nursing, humanities, science, engineering, or law) depended on a different type of writing to function (persuasion, narration, observation, explanation, and application). The writing program at Penn works to make able writers that not only will be understood in their field, but will be understood in many fields. This overlapping ideal was new to many of the Berkeley students who find it hard to notice similarities between their Science and English papers. The last essential point of the writing process at Penn was the concept of voice. Ms. Ross emphasized the maintenance of personal style, something that many high school students lose in their quest for a “good” paper. Valerie Ross expressed a new and motivating method of writing, portions of which (such as voice and paragraph structure) can be applied at the high school level.

To be a part of the Writing Tutor Program at Penn, twenty five undergraduate and the twelve graduate peer tutors all go through a similar application process that includes a writing sample. After they are accepted, the undergraduate tutors take a semester long seminar class that teaches four different styles of writing: persuasive, argumentative, narrative, and descriptive. This broader base of styles allows the tutor to help students in all areas, independent on the topic of the paper. The course also uses the Bruffy Manual for Peer Tutoring by Kenneth Bruffy. The book advocates social learning and uses a collaborative learning model. Valerie Ross believes that ““responding to someone’s writing is a complex process that employs all sorts of skills.” So throughout the year, the tutors come in for progressive development training sessions that concentrate on more focused topics such as how to tutor English Second Language students or how to handle plagiarism. The tutors all seemed to carry with them a basic tool and method for tutoring. They encouraged the use of a descriptive outline to help with clarification. When a student comes in to be tutored, the tutoring session involves the writing of a descriptive outline that rephrases what is stated in the paper. The outline is supposed to pinpoint what the paper is “saying” and what it is “doing.” Valerie Ross reminded us that there is a difference between negative and constructive tutoring, and that a good tutor has skills that will nurture a voice and not pound clay into a mold.

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Organization and Delegation of Writing Center Staff

 The University of Pennsylvania, the prestigious home of the Kelly Writer’s House, upholds its stature by making the process of becoming an esteemed tutor involve going through an interview, taking a class, submitting a sample of work, and applying for the job as well. At Haverford University’s writing center the student must be nominated by a professor, apply, and interview to be a tutor as well. The Kelly Writer’s House has 11 or 10 graduate tutors and about 25 undergrad peer tutors and Haverford’s writing center has 11 tutors in all. These tutors all uphold the organization in the writing center and do not have specific delegation of duties. Our writing center does uphold the delegation of duties with the help of directors and interns because of the amount of tutors we have in our center. Our writing center is involved in advertisements, workshops, which the director of the Kelly’s Writers House is now thinking about doing there because us, and activities outside of just tutoring, which calls for the delegation of duties.

A brilliant idea of organization from Haverford’s writing center is the documentation of the students’ reflection on a session and what their strengths and weaknesses were. The tutors at Haverford explained to us how this helps the tutors or the tutee refer back to what went on in previous sessions if they continued to come back to the writing center. At the Kelly Writer’s House at University of Pennsylvania, the tutors employ descriptive outlines, which is used to clarify what the writer is trying to say and make sure the point is getting across.

Not only does our organization and delegation of duties hold good for our own writing center but it somewhat follows the honorable  path that the universities have set for their own centers. We brought back ideas and even gave ideas to the universities and one thing that all the writing centers have in common is the emphasis in organization in the actual paper. 

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Internet Usage

University of Pennsylvania’s Writing Center has an online writing lab similar to our own, a tutorial service to which the tutees send their papers and receive comments via e-mail.  The UPENN online writing lab (OWL) differs from Berkeley’s in two ways.  Their tutors tutor in the Kenneth Bruffee style; they list what the paragraph says in contrast to what it does.  Also, using a computer program to track the alterations, the UPENN tutors correct and alter the students’ papers.  UPENN also uses the internet to schedule their appointments, but since we do not have appointments, this system is not applicable to the BPS Writing Center.  It is reassuring to know that UPENN’s Writing Center handles online tutoring in much the same way we do.

The Haverford Writing Center does not use the internet in any way. 

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Campus Outreach

The first college we visited was the University of Pennsylvania. Their Writing Center was very structured and more organized than the Writing Center at Haverford. With three different locations, the University of Pennsylvania Writing Centers were all adequately and efficiently publicized. Their central location however, was the Kelly Writer´s House (this is the particular center we visited on our trip).

The Penn facility is also open for longer periods of time on a daily basis. Neatly organized, sessions can be offered through online appointments. Trying to spread writing as a creative process, that when done right, can be successfully implemented to all subjects. She mentioned that they had also recently e-mailed a teacher-basis survey with questions such as: “What’s the most important thing you like to see in students’ papers?” or “What’s your favorite book?”

As the Writing Center visited Haverford we learned about the writing process in collage. At Haverford we meet Faye Halpern, the director of the Writing Center at Haverford, who described the process of writing and the biggest issues that collage students have when they come from high school. Mrs. Halpern stressed to the students that all papers must have an arguable thesis. As our discussion continued Mrs. Halpern stressed that space was a big issue at Haverford. The Writing Center at Haverford is not very well located and Mrs. Halpern believes that if the Writing Center was more towards the center of campus more students would utilize this wonderful tool. Another topic that Haverford focused on was a “no pen policy”. This policy they believe will keep the students active in the writing process and will make the students more aware of their mistakes. The goal of this policy is that hopefully in the long run the student will begin to catch their mistakes and correct them. Overall the Writing Center had a great time visiting Haverford and hopefully we can take some of their ideas and incorporate them into our Writing Center to make the Writing Center at Berkeley more efficient and productive.

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New Ideas Blooming in the Writing Center

Writing Center could extend the tutor session hours to include before and after school hours. This extension would give students an even greater opportunity to get their papers tutored. The Writing Center tutors are also going to create a teacher’s online survey to find out what teachers (in all academic subjects) look for in students’ papers. The session tutorial sheets are also going to include an area where the tutor will utilize Penn’s “Says Vs. Does” theory and outlining method. As for the no-pen rule, this tactic will be left up to the tutor’s discretion. Even though after our recent Philadelphia trip, the University of Pennsylvania did highlight the efficiency of communication between a tutor and tutee with avid note-taking. From now on the Writing Center will also require the tutees to bring in an extra copy of their papers into the sessions. One of the key items that the Writing Center needs to put more emphases on is the thesis. All tutors must make sure that the student understands the importance of an arguable thesis and a weak thesis this will lead to a confused reader. Another topic that the Writing Center needs to review is the “no pen policy.” Although this policy keeps the student active in the correction stage, most students will just write down what the tutor told him or her to write down. The student will not understand why these changes are being made nor will the student catch this mistake in future. That is why the Writing Center should require all students to bring in two papers, one for the tutor to write on and one for the student to write on. This would keep the student active during the time that the tutor is reading the paper and hopefully the student can catch the mistakes that he or she made. If we establish this policy we could get rid of the Session Notes and use the paper that the tutor wrote on as documentation. This documentation would be far more effective because not only could we see the mistakes the student was making but we could also view how the writer’s style of writing has changed throughout his or her Berkeley career.

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