Ben Rafoth, ed.: A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One.
Scheer, Ron ; Cella, Laurie J.C. ; Donovan, Kim 等
Ben Rafoth, ed. A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One. 2nd ed. Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2005. (184 pp., paperback, $21)
I like this book and plan to put a copy of it on every table in my writing center for consultants to read during down times. There are easy-to-find answers and easy-to-use strategies for dealing with most of the day-to-day issues that come up for them between staff meetings.
As with Rafoth and Bruce's ESL Writers, I appreciate the general absence of jargon and theoretics that tend to plague rhet/comp literature. My consultants (none of them students of rhet/comp) can easily access the plain language discussions of issues raised and benefit from the practical advice given. References to further readings are nicely covered in annotated bibliographies and endnotes.
Rafoth has smartly directed his contributors to reflect on the complexities of their topics by taking on counter arguments and posing their own reservations in a separate section of each chapter, "Complications," which opens the topic to further points of view without muddying it with the ambiguities that typically infiltrate and challenge our understanding of the writing process.
Of the 17 topics covered in the book, I'd characterize 40% as in a basic, need-to-need-to-know category for new consultants, 40% as beyond-the-basics and illuminating for experienced consultants, and 20% as neither of the above.
In the first category, I'd include Macauley (negotiating expectations), Harris (reticent writers), Severino (international ESL writers), Ritter (ESL and correctness), Zemliansky (advanced writers), Trupe (organization and reader-based writing), and Young (proofreading).
For consultants with some experience, I like Munday (consultants who get too confident in their own routine), Agostinelli, Poch, and Santoro (dealing with emotional consultations), Rafoth (critical thinking and analytical writing), Greiner (consulting on unfamiliar subjects), Cooper, Bui, and Riker (online tutoring), and Dossin (plagiarism and techniques for writing up research).
Of those I felt ambivalent about, maybe Briam (business and technical writing) would head the list, and for reasons that have more to do with the scope of the topic. Blurring important differences between workplace, professional, and technical writing, the discussion oversimplifies its subject. Meanwhile a missing topic my own consultants would benefit from would cover the subject of personal statements, which they see a lot of.
If I have a quibble, it's with an issue larger than this book. It has to do with the use of gender-sensitive pronouns. It would seem to the casual reader of this book that writing centers are chiefly staffed by women and used by female students. An obsession, I guess, with grammatical correctness prevents us from using the pronoun "they" in a singular sense, though we are unconfused by its use in nonacademic writing and speech.
I raise the concern in the context of writing centers because male students have to overcome more resistance to voluntarily seeking or offering help as writers. Whenever the literature suggests that males are infrequent users of writing centers, this pattern is indirectly reinforced.
Reservations aside, however, I think Rafoth has put together another useful, readable, essential book that I intend to use extensively in the Writing Center at USC.
Reviewed by Ron Scheer (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA)
Ben Rafoth's A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One, now in its second edition, is still an essential text for a well-rounded practicum syllabus or tutor training. I have used the first edition a number of times, and the students I taught found the articles both useful and practical. When asked to explain, novice tutors say that this book covers the most important issues they face: how to engage reluctant writers, how to avoid proofreading while still valuing this essential element of the writing process, how to effectively address ESL concerns, and how to push students to think more analytically as they write.
In response to my informal survey, tutors remarked that they liked Muriel Harris's "Talk to Me: Engaging Reluctant Writers" best because Harris captures an essential tutoring dilemma: how to get a shy/reluctant/overwhelmed student to open up. New tutors say they often struggle to begin a comfortable dialogue with a student, and Harris's article offers strategies for breaking the ice and establishing a good rapport.
Tutors also find Jennifer Ritter's article on ESL tutoring strategies particularly helpful; her description of global versus local errors and negotiated meaning has become a standard reference at our writing center. The second edition includes Carol Severino's article "Crossing Cultures with International Students," a thorough examination of the way writing assignments are based within American culture and rhetorical expectations. Severino suggests that tutors allow their international students to ground their writing in their own cultural experiences. The addition of Severino's article adds a necessary depth to the discussion of ESL and international student writing.
This tutoring handbook is unique in that its contributors represent a wide scope of tutoring experiences, from well established directors to undergraduate tutors. When my colleague Anita Duneer and I co-taught the tutor practicum class, we noticed that our students loved Alexis Greiner's "Tutoring in Unfamiliar Subjects," not only because she gave them confidence to approach writing from different disciplines, but also because Greiner was an undergraduate tutor herself when she wrote this piece. Tutors like to see their peers in print.
The second edition extends the discussion of generalist tutoring with the addition of Pavel Zemliansky, who argues that writing center tutors should respect the rhetorical conventions of different disciplines. However, Zemliansky emphasizes the importance of writing as a central aspect of the learning process, no matter what the discipline. He suggests that tutors have the capability to assist writers in advanced classes, as long as tutors reinforce a view of writing as "exploratory, experimental, and adventuresome."
Finally, I like the addition of Carol Ellis's article "Developing Genre Discourse: Graduate Student Writing," because her essay is engaging and honest about the difficulties of writing successfully on the graduate level. This essay would be particularly useful for an undergraduate tutor who might be nervous approaching a session with a graduate student writer. Ellis makes plain that all writers need prodding in order to achieve their writing goals.
On the whole, what I appreciate most about these contributors is that they work hard to practice what they preach. Their essays are self-reflective, thoughtful, and enthusiastic about writing and the teaching of writing. Taken together, these essays represent an important component of any tutor training class.
Reviewed by Laurie JC Cella (University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT)
Ben Rafoth's A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One addresses an issue that has perplexed me in my particular professional situation. I am a writing tutoring coordinator housed within a university learning center that serves a tiny liberal arts school and a larger, well-established business program. Hence, tutors are largely business and hospitality majors, with the exceptions of the occasional liberal arts student and the rare English major. Such a situation has created a tension in my recruitment and training of undergraduate peer tutors between three points: (1) balancing an engagement with writing center/composition theory and practice with (2) my tutors limited time and interests and with (3) other tutoring and training in which these Learning Center tutors are often engaged. The approachable, pragmatic approach of the essays in this expanded second edition of A Tutor's Guide will be immediately useful in helping me address this gap in my tutor's training.
Of course, it would have been great to have used the first edition five years ago when I started training tutors at my university. However, it was only after trial and error that I realized how difficult it was to bring writing center and composition literature into training. Stephen North's seminal "The Idea of a Writing Center" left tutors confused--after all, they didn't work in a writing center. Other articles like Patrick Hartwell's important "Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar" did not impress the English major I gave it to, a diligent and open student. Because he was so intimidated by the piece, he never finished it. And so on. Without graduate tutors or other professional tutors, I am my tutors' lone liaison to the world of composition. Unlike their willing adoption of ideas from Neal Lerner and Paula Gillespie's excellent Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring and other pragmatic guides, these tutors have resisted theorizing of their tutoring, which I think has truncated their growth.
Both the length and the structure of the pieces in "A Tutor's Guide" promise to create a more accessible experience for my tutors. These articles can be read before or during training, or during the inevitable slack times that occur in our walk-in tutoring schedule. Chapters all follow a similar organization, with the subtitle "Some Background," "What to Do," and "Complicating Matters" setting up the reading usefully for tutors. Each article is accompanied by an annotated suggestion for further reading, which will serve well to connect pragmatic concerns to theory in a digestible way.
The subjects as well address tangible concerns my tutors have on the job, and promise to help tutors understand that best practices in tutoring need to be tied to theory. Jennifer J. Ritter's chapter, "Recent Developments in Helping ESL Writers," for instance, suggests strategies for tutors to ensure ESL writers' ownership of their papers, and explains how to negotiate directive and non-directive approaches to tutoring ESL students. Ritter grounds her suggestions in theory and offers further readings that will introduce tutors to writing center theory regarding ESL students. Similarly useful to my tutors will be Carol Briam's chapter, "Shifting Gears: Business and Technical Writing," and Beth Rapp Young's chapter, "Can You Proofread This?" (a perennial concern for all writing tutors).
The range of contributors to this volume, from seasoned writing center theorists to current writing center workers and recent peer tutors, contributes to the accessibility of the articles as well. Student tutors will likely welcome chapters such as "Tutoring in Emotionally Charged Situations" written by former tutors Corinne Agostinelli, Helena Poch, and Elizabeth Santoro both for its topic and authorship. A Tutor's Guide will be a particularly apt addition to our tutor training materials--one that will, I hope, inspire our tutors to incorporate more theory into their already admirable practice.
Reviewed by Kim Donovan (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH)
