BOUNDARIES IN THE WRITING CENTER

“‘This is a Redneck Argument!’: The Politics of Tutoring Paragraphing.”

This article is about censoring ourselves as tutors. In a country where freedom of speech is one of the most valued rights we have as human beings living in this land and going to a liberal arts school where the first day of class you are told to claim your education and be an advocate, the notion is easier said than done. But as tutors we have to make the environment comfortable for students to learn and explore their writing. They will not able to do that if they are constantly being judged for everything they write on paper. Besides it goes against what I believe is TRUTH when it comes to writing, there are not limitations, and it is fluid. I would be a hypocrite to say that censoring tutees instead of ourselves is appropriate but it is not, and yes there exceptions to every rule but in this case we are not talking about the exceptions but the majority. As tutors we have censor our own beliefs to better help students write to the best of their abilities with THEIR own opinions and not ours.

What was surprising about this article was the fact that the teacher said, “this is a redneck argument! Go to the writing center for help on your paragraphs!” What a difficult position to be in; knowing you should take the teacher’s side but at the same time knowing that the teacher not no right to write something as inappropriate as “this is a redneck argument” on the student’s paper. I think the tutor made the best decision when she decided to not ask him why he thought his teacher wrote that comment on his paper but instead focused on being unbiased and just asked him to support his arguments on generalizations such as “these people”, and get him to think of them as flesh and blood individuals; and other comments that required evidence to just back them up. The student stated in his argument, “everyone in the U.S. and that everybody had to learn English anyway, why publish manuals in Spanish: that “these people” are illegal. And that they don’t do any good for this country anyway… should be sent back where they came from.” Yes this is definitely a comment I would consider to be ignorant but if this is what the student believes then the only thing we as tutors can do is help the student prove their argument even if we do not agree with it. We should not censor someone else’s writing because we do not agree with them and especially because we are tutoring them we do not want to attach them, we much try as hard as possible to remind unbiased to do something similar to the tutor in this article who, read comments to him in the most negative way to get him to see how it sounds to other people in which some cases he agreed that it was pretty bad and he changed that language.

It is our responsible as tutors to be able to: “be able to carve a conversational space where I could talk to him (or any other student with similar cases) in a gentle respectful manner without alienating him through brusque confrontation.” And be very caution when we “[emphasize that he came off as offensive to many] and it was duty as his tutor to let him know about the possible repercussions of what he had written.”