Examining cultural assumptions in the writing center

For this week's class, I asked my tutors-in-training to respond to two discussion questions:

1. What kinds of cultural preferences do you think you have as a writer? Where did those preferences come from?
2. What do you do when you notice a cultural difference in how a student is writing or responding to an assignment? What kinds of things do you need to be aware of?

I want to take a shot at answering these myself, and also think through what I'm hoping students will get out of our assigned readings for this week, especially Jennifer Staben and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus' "Looking at the Whole Text" and the documentary "Writing Across Borders." So, here goes:

My cultural preferences as a writer run toward linearity, clarity, coherence, and concision. Or, it might be more accurate to say, I perceive linearity as clear, coherent, and concise. Years of training in reading, writing, and teaching academic prose in the field of rhetoric and composition have taught me to define "good writing" as that which quickly and clearly gets to the point and that which clearly and concisely connects all supporting material to a larger, controlling idea (or ideas). I suppose some of these preferences are personal, but in terms of cultural expectations, I suppose our Western culture's idea that "time is money" and "less is more" influence the ways I think about the work writers should do for readers. A writer who doesn't seem to know what s/he is saying, or doesn't seem able to convey that meaning quickly and clearly to readers, is wasting her/his time and her/his readers' time.

Staben and Nordhaus discuss the importance of connecting the process of writing to the product of writing, and I find this essential advice both for writing center tutors and future writing teachers. You see, although I have this cultural preference for linearity, coherence, concision, and clarity, I know that my writing process is anything but neat and orderly - which, I hope, my written products would suggest, in their neatness and orderliness. My writing process begins many times with lists, cluster diagrams, fastwrites, scraps of notes on napkins, bursts of dialogue or intuition scribbled in a notebook or journal, annotations in the margins of journal articles or textbooks. In teaching writing and working with writing center clients, one of my primary jobs is to make visible that process which leads, eventually, to a neat and orderly written product.

I find this an invaluable strategy for NES and ESL writers, but specifically when I encounter a cultural difference between an ESL client's written product and my own cultural expectations for good writing, I think it is essential to "make visible" the cultural expectations American academic readers bring to American academic prose. As Staben and Nordhaus say, this may translate into explaining (and modeling) the process of literary analysis to ESL clients, but I find it also means examining cultural assumptions about what it means to analyze, synthesize, argue, persuade, and respond. Some of my most productive ESL tutorial sessions happened when we pushed aside the text and discussed the cultural expectations my client and I brought to a seemingly innocent, simple assignment; when I engaged in a truly interactive session, as Staben and Nordhaus say, I learned a lot about what American academic readers believe it means to "analyze" or "respond" by contrasting my naturalized assumption (read: American analysis IS analysis) with the assumptions and definitions of another culture.

So what do I hope my students take away from our upcoming class and from their blog posts for this week? Most simply, I hope they take away the realization that writing is a cultural construct, and part of teaching writing, in a classroom or one-to-one, means examining and making visible those cultural assumptions. More importantly, however, I hope that examining cultural differences will help my tutors understand their own writing processes better, that they may begin to pay attention to what they are doing when they analyze, summarize, paraphrase, respond, or argue; I believe being a writing teacher or a writing tutor should always involve growing as a writer oneself.

Furthermore, I hope that this week and next we'll be able to start discussing the false binary of global, higher-order concerns and local, lower-order concerns. I want my tutors-in-training, like the field of rhetoric and composition, to start seeing writing as a whole package: What we say and how we say it should be intrinsically connected concepts, not separated along the artificial line of "meaning" and "grammar." Perhaps by examining our cultural assumptions about good writing, we can begin to see the breakdown of this binary - realizing, for instance, that as a college professor, my definition of "good writing" implies correctness in the seemingly innocent, unloaded terms "clarity" and "concision," and yet I see this surface-level, supposedly lower-order concern as integral to a successful academic product. Hmm.