[This is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave for the 30th Anniversary of the University Writing Center]
Thank you for this celebration, and thank UT for supporting such an extraordinary place as this Writing Center for thirty years—this is it, at the center of the campus, in the midst of one of the best university libraries in the nation, and part of the prestigious Department of Rhetoric and Writing. There are several reasons that this place exists, and that it’s as vibrant and successful as it is.
In no particular order:
The determination on the part of some Writing Center and some University Library staff to make it exist—they worked for at least sixteen years to have a Writing Center in a Learning Commons in the Library, just pushing and pushing, just a continuous force.
Peg Syverson, who hired well, retained well, trained well, created a community of caring and professionalism, who also went around campus generating goodwill, respect, and enthusiasm for what the Writing Center was doing.
The staff she retained and hired, who are kind, collaborative, creative, problem solvers, who nourished everyone they worked with.
lorraine haricombe, who (like me) had the advantage of taking over a position from an effective and respected predecessor, whose very position as a Vice-Provost shows that UT sees the Library as central to the mission of the University. Her support for the Writing Center has been invaluable, but in line with how effective she is.
The DRW has supported the Writing Center in pragmatic and important ways, having the position of Director a tenured faculty member, providing releases for the Director, including it as crucial for long-term planning, but also in day-to-day assistance in crises and brain-storming.
The College of Liberal Arts also supported in pragmatic ways—such as over half a million dollars—and, when I was Director, I knew that, when problems or questions arose, I could get good advice and support from both COLA and the DRW. What makes this Writing Center so special is the way it is pragmatically, institutionally, financially, and genuinely supported.
Here’s a contrast.
In 1977, when I was a sophomore in college, I applied for a job to work at the Berkeley Writing Center. It was here, in what were called “Temporary Buildings.” They had been built in World War II. A few years after I left, in the late 1980s, Berkeley built a really lovely Writing Center in a central part of campus.
The first UT Writing Center was called a “Writing Lab,” and it was in the basement of Parlin. It went away. When the Division of Rhetoric and Composition was formed, Lester Faigley created the Undergraduate Writing Center, which moved to the Undergraduate Library, and then in 2014 it became the University Writing Center, and moved to spectacular digs in the center of campus and the main floor of the library. That shared narrative of changes in architecture and geography is kind of a metaphor for how people thought about Writing Centers (or Writing Labs as they were also called)—something that was supposed to be a quick fix for a temporary problem came to be seen as central to the mission of the university.
Some of that shift is the consequence of new ways of understanding how universities function, who should attend them, and the relative importance of assessing v. teaching (to put it in simple, if not simplistic, terms, whether we should approach teaching with a fixed or growth mindset). But, I want to suggest something in this talk—that shift also has to do with how we have changed in our thinking about writing, changes that, I’ll suggest, are provocatively similar to changes in how some people argue we should think about democratic deliberation and democracy itself. And both those sets of changes are epitomized in practices in this Writing Centers.
The Berkeley Writing Center, as I was told, originated to serve students who were designated “affirmative action”—that is, students who had been admitted although they did not meet what were supposed to be the minimum GPA or standardized test score critera. When I was there, athletes and affirmative action students (often the same group, for not very good reasons) had priority, but other students could also sign up for tutoring.
Just to hit the point home, the foundational assumption was that there was at that moment a new kind of student who was lacking in something most college students had (or had had up to this point); this was the same time that a new course was created that in credits, name, numbering, staffing, and even department, was very explicitly marked as not really a college course (called Subject A—all other courses had numbers).
The UT Writing Lab, if I understand things correctly, had its origin in a similarly deficiency-based model. The idea was that some students lacked basic “grammar” skills, and so should be drilled in them. The foundational assumption was that methods commonly used to teach English to foreign language speakers would be equally useful for native speakers of English, whose understanding of “grammar” was presumed to be deficient, and that’s why they were “bad” writers.
In other words, there are people who are “Good Writers” and they produce “Good Writing” which uses “Good English,” so, we can transform “Bad” Writers into “Good” ones by drilling them in “the rules of grammar.” But what does that mean?
Look, for instance, at this half-page from a nineteenth century handbook on grammar, when they had that same (false) narrative about “grammar” and “good writing” and college. The dominant pedagogy presumed that people couldn’t produce good writing unless they knew the rules of good grammar, and so students were taught to memorize the rules, through drilling and punishment. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect agreement about what those rules were or are.
There was agreement, however, that people who had “bad” grammar should be shunned and shamed and bemoaned. Doug Hesse directed me to these quotes:
“Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old. –Adams S. Hill, Harvard 1878
“It is obviously absurd that the college—the institution of higher education—should be called upon to turn aside from its proper functions and devote its means and the time of its instructors to the task of importing elementary instruction. —Report of the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric, to the Harvard College Board of Overseers, 1892
I also like this passage, from a 19th century book on correct speaking:
Here’s one more example from another 19th century grammar book.
What you may notice is that most of these sentences seem fine. To the extent that there are errors, they are very minor, and don’t interfere with our ability to understand the sentence—except for the “or” rather than “nor” in the first one, it seems to me that most are about what preposition one should use in an idiomatic expression.
So why did this book make such a big deal about idiomatic expressions? One of the important functions of grammar books in the nineteenth century was to reify and justify the stigmatizing of certain dialects, thereby strengthening and rationalizing various existing hierarchies, especially class, ethnicity, region, and race. That approach to teaching grammar and composition enabled a caste system to pretend it was a meritocracy. Insistence on “grammatical correctness” can be profoundly unethical.
When I was in Kansas, there was a controversy over a notification sent out by a water company, informing its users that there were harmful chemicals in the water. The notice was grammatically correct, but deliberately incomprehensible, so that water users wouldn’t panic and demand changes. Grammatical correctness doesn’t guarantee clear communication.
It often, however, signals in-group membership, as in grammatically correct but meaningless mission statements about leveraging synergy.
Trump’s 2020 January 6th speech is grammatically pretty good—I was surprised by that—but only makes sense to people who already agreed with him. It signalled–and inflamed—in-group membership. Grammatical correctness doesn’t prevent demagoguery.
Here’s my point: there is far more disagreement about the conventions of “correct” English than many people realize, and using “correct” English doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the writing is clear or ethical.
When people in my and related fields make this argument, we’re often heard as arguing that we should abandon all conventions, but that isn’t possible. What we’re advocating is that we not assume that there is a thing—“good English”–, let alone that using that “good” English has necessary and necessarily good consequences. What we’re saying is that it has to be up for argument. A lot of people don’t like that attitude because it means that uncertainty is inevitable when it comes to writing, and teaching writing, even about very specific sentence-level choices.
Take, for instance, citation conventions. In some fields, the convention is to list authors in order of prestige rather than degree of contribution; that convention means that the “First Author et al.” convention obscures the contributions of junior scholars, who are often already underrepresented in academia. That convention makes them invisible, which is not necessarily the intention of the individual who writes “et al.”—they’re just trying to stay within a word limit, or finish the damn bibliography. The convention itself has consequences.
So it’s interesting that the rules of citation in many fields have changed—some journals and citation methods require that all authors be listed by name. That’s a rule that changed for ethical reasons. There is debate right now about the convention of citing authors by first initial and last name, and what it does for people with common last names. That’s a good argument to have. We need citation conventions, and we need to argue about them.
The history of any language, including English, is a history of people disagreeing about what the conventions are and should be—and that’s fine. I don’t think we can abandon prescriptivism; calling for banning all forms of prescriptivism is itself a kind of prescriptivism—prescribing and proscribing certain language. But we can argue about what we want to prescribe and proscribe, and stop talking in terms of proper and good. Conventions have consequences, and so they have to be up for argument.
We can, and really should, argue about these questions at conferences, in journals, at Faculty Council meetings, at workshops on teaching writing, but it’s a question a writing consultant faces every time they see a paper that uses a double negative.
In other words: what this Writing Center teaches is that while there are conventions, they are far more variable than people think—by discipline, genre, region, context, era—they have consequences, they must be up for argument, and we should argue about them in terms of whether their consequences are ethical. And authors can make choices about those conventions.
There are two other points I want to make about what happens in a writing center.
I think the most common thing I hear a writing center consultant say is something along the lines of, “I’m not sure what you’re saying here. What do you mean?” At that point, typically, the consultee says something pretty clear, and the consultant says, “Write that down.”
I think that’s interesting.
A friend and colleague refers to “the narcissistic pleasures of the first draft,” and sometimes that’s what happens. But not always. Here’s an early version of a Robert Caro manuscript.
I don’t think he felt a lot of narcissistic pleasure. Sometimes writing the first draft feels like pulling one’s own teeth with rusty pliers. I’ve often heard writers say that first draft is just trying to get our ideas outside of our own brain; the second is when we try to make it say what we mean; the third is when we think about it from the perspective of a reader. Note that that isn’t the “outline, draft, polish” chain that is often taught as “the writing process.” And I think, for most writers, it isn’t necessarily a linear process, or only involving one draft at each stage. I tend to have a draft, critique, redraft, critique, revise process that loops back on itself.
For instance, here’s a page from a book that was eventually published, and what you can see is that I spent a lot of time fiddling around at the sentence level before realizing my problem was the argument was wrong. The solution to the sentence-level problems was to go back to “higher order concerns” and rethink my argument.
In other words, just as the “rules” for “grammar” are much more context-dependent than many people seem to think, or “grammar” books say, and in many cases there really aren’t rules, but preferences, guidelines, hacks, and canards, it’s the same with writing processes. There aren’t rules, but practices, and we write better when we’re faced with difference.
An idea for a piece of writing can seem so clear while in the shower, or walking a dog, and then we try to put it into words, and it starts to get mucky. Our ideas, when we look at them in writing, often don’t seem quite as brilliant as they sounded in our head, often depending on whether we’re writing for ourselves or imagining an audience. What we say to someone else is often different from what we say to ourselves.
But, sometimes we do fall in love with our own writing, or at least think it’s clear, and then someone says, “I’m not sure what you mean here.” In a way, what Writing Centers provide is what every writer needs—a well-meaning reader who isn’t us, someone who doesn’t already agree with us, but who also isn’t particularly invested in what we’re writing. A well-meaning, but not invested, other person won’t necessarily make the logical jumps or associative slides that we don’t even notice in our beliefs, and so they draw attention to those jumps and slides.
At its best, difference makes us think better because it makes us think about what we take for granted.
This is going on a bit, so I’ll just mention one more aspect of Writing Center practice that’s important. People often want a Writing Center to be a proofreading service, and the good Lord knows I’d love if there were a place I could drop a piece of writing and have someone correct it for me, but that isn’t an educational practice. And, as I said at the beginning, UT is committed in institutional, financial, and geographic ways to a Writing Center that serves the educational mission of the University.
What consultants do is ask questions—that is, instead of telling a consultee about their paper, they’re curious. When asked a question, they’d google the information, show students how to use the library chat function to get help from a reference librarian, get up and check a resource, ask another consultant, get me or Alice—they didn’t present themselves as knowers, but as seekers. They model curiosity.
So, how have Writing Centers changed? They started in geographically marginalized spaces, and at their worst, were seen as temporary fixes oriented toward assimilating deficient people into the good practices of the in-group by teaching and enforcing strict and timeless rules. And they are, and this one is, now central to the University mission, geographically, bureaucratically, institutionally, and financially.
What they teach is that there are conventions, and those conventions have consequences, and they change over time, and we have to think, and argue, about what they do; the uncertainty is inevitable, that difference is not a necessary evil, but an active good—that, as one former director of this writing center likes to say, we think better when we think together–, especially if we think differently. And they teach that curiosity is a virtue, and a skill, that should be nurtured.
My area of specialization is train wrecks in deliberation; what is more formally called “pathologies of deliberation.” And sometimes people have expressed surprise that I would direct a Writing Center, since that seems unrelated to my scholarly interests. But what I believe, and have tried to suggest in this talk, is that the culture and practices of a writing center are the ones that enhance democratic deliberation. Scholars of democracy, and I’m thinking here especially of Jan-Werner Muller, emphasize that “Democratic Rules” as he calls them in his latest book are cultural—they’re practices rather than timeless legal dicta. And crucial for democratic hope are several that I’ve said are part of Writing Center culture: comfort with uncertainty, diversity and pluralism as valued and nurtured qualities, open-ness to new practices and conventions. He favorably quotes Claude LeFort who said that democracy is “founded upon the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate—a debate which is necessarily without any guarantee and without any end” (184). And I’m saying that’s what Writing Centers do. Muller says that “democracy dwells in possibility.”
So does this Writing Center. Because of y’all.