As I consider my development as a tutor and writer over my three years working as at the UCWbL, I can see how much I have come to prioritize global concerns in my own work.
Those who log into WCOnline to make an appointment with me will be welcomed by my staff bio, which features a brief note about how I most enjoy the “big picture” aspects of writing. I think for many people the idea of writing still calls to mind pesky technical issues—comma placement, verb tenses, sentence structure, and the like. These elements no doubt have their important place, but are they really what matters most in writing?
I once thought so.
When I began working for the UCWbL, I was extremely nervous about having to work with writers on grammatical concerns. It wasn’t that I had trouble with grammar myself, but rather, I had no idea whether I could communicate these concepts to others. As a native English speaker, my approach to writing was essentially, “I know it when I see it.”
I had an innate sense of what was “right” and what was “wrong,” but I didn’t have mastery over the terms used for grammatical rules and parts of speech. I simply never had any use for them, and if I couldn’t come up with an easy explanation for the difference between a conjunction and a preposition, I worried I wouldn’t be able to help other writers.
But as I settled into my role as peer tutor, I quickly realized that although these small technical concerns came up regularly in appointments, they were hardly the most important things to prioritize.
Hierarchy of Concerns
In WRD 395—the training course taken during the first quarter of employment at the UCWbL—new tutors learn about John Bean’s hierarchy of concerns. Bean believed that the writing tutor should first ensure that every writer’s paper met global concerns like fulfilling assignment requirements, offering a clear thesis statement, and presenting a strong, developed argument. After these higher-order concerns are met, the tutor can move onto macro and micro organizational concerns, and then finally to smaller sentence-level concerns, such as issues of style, spelling, and punctuation. Following this hierarchy (so it is thought) will allow the tutor to help the writer produce the strongest work possible.
This model was enough to get me started, but it’s not exactly what I mean when I say I most enjoy working on the “big picture.” That part finds its roots in two related experiences.
Academia
Outside of working at the UCWbL, I am a developing academic. As I continued to study at DePaul University (and thus, spent more time working at the UCWbL), I increasingly found excitement in the power of knowledge and ideas. In academia, writing is something of a means to an end; what matters most are the concepts, the arguments, the theories.
While necessary to deliver them clearly and concisely, the written word is merely a vehicle to take the reader down the intended intellectual path. If that was true for my own work, it had to be true for the other student writers I was working with.
COE Writing Group
In my second year working at the UCWbL, I began co-facilitating a writing group for doctoral students in DePaul’s College of Education. Unlike typical one-on-one appointments, sessions of the COE writing group problematize the usual line-by-line focus on local concerns in tutoring appointments. With multiple writers in a room, conversation naturally flows to global, more intellectual concerns.
The COE students are always more interested in talking more abstractly about the writing process, academic genre conventions, writing resources, and broader strategies. I thrive during these conversations, and I find joy in the thought that these conversations are just as much a part of tutoring as pointing out a missing article here or a misspelled word there. Here is tutoring that is as much about approaching writing as a vessel for ideas as my work was.
Generating Dialogue
Over time, I learned to integrate these experiences in my day-to-day tutoring. I never ignore the local concerns altogether, but I found value in shifting the writer’s focus away from them.Yes, an introductory comma has a function, but is it as essential as the fundamental strength of a writer’s argument?
I began talking to writers less about their literal writing and more about their ideas. Often, at the start of an appointment, I tell my writers to put aside their drafts and ask them to, in their own words, tell me what they’ve already written. If a writer can’t tell me what they’re trying to say, I’ve found that they typically can’t quite write what they’re trying to say either. But when a writer can articulate their argument and evidence verbally, suddenly they seem to realize that they only need to put those same words onto the page itself. And if the writer can’t say what they’re trying to say, then we can have a conversation.
Dialogue becomes to first step to a stronger paper.
This conversational approach is somewhat implicit in Bean’s hierarchy of concerns, but I’ve found that it cuts straight to the core of what writing, in a utopia, should all be about. Ideas and arguments are powerful. They shape the world. And while I have always done everything I can to help my writers put together a draft that will allow them to succeed in the classroom, I’ve found the most personal success and fulfillment in treating writing as an exercise in thought.
Helping each writer prioritize the global in their work is one thing we can do as tutors to invest in their autonomy. If the written word is just a vehicle, then we can commit to fostering their ideas and ensuring they reach their final destination.