By Eric Camarillo
The goal of this essay is to help the field re-see the value of asynchronous writing center work and to demonstrate why it should be as an innovation rather than a disruption, a valid option for students, rather than a subpar alternative. Especially in a time where so much of our work now must be done remotely for the health and safety of us all, when so many writing centers have struggled to shift sharply into online modalities, writing centers should strongly consider new and different ways of reaching students and empowering them to become stronger, more effective writers.
I’ve argued elsewhere (Camarillo 2019) how writing centers can cultivate antiracist ecologies. While many of the strategies and questions can be helpful for creating antiracist environments, the discussion was framed around face-to-face consultations. In “Dismantling Neutrality: Cultivating Antiracist Writing Center Ecologies,” I argue for critical engagement with key elements of an ecology as identified by Inoue (2015), namely places, people, and power in the face-to-face consultation. In this way, I’m as guilty of leaving out asynchronous sessions from our scholarship as others. My discussion of power, especially, relied upon traditional models of the writing center consultation. I asked, “In a consultation, who has the power and who doesn’t? Who can write on the document and who can’t? Who is talking?” (72). These are important questions for a face-to-face consultation, but the last two aren’t relevant for asynchronous tutoring (the idea of “writing” on a document also assumes the consultant is working with paper, rather than word processing software).
The idea of power, though, remains relevant, especially for asynchronous sessions, and power is how I frame these kinds of sessions as potentially antiracist. In one way, at least, asynchronous sessions distribute power more evenly than face-to-face ones. In a traditional session, as the consultant asks questions or provides feedback, she’s also directing the student’s attention, bringing up issues or ideas that hadn’t occurred to the student before. There’s a pressure in the face-to-face consultation for the student to respond immediately. If a consultant asks them what the main idea of their paper is or what they’re trying to get across in a certain paragraph, the student feels pressured to answer that question then and there. They must similarly respond to any question or comment the consultant poses, even if the student may not feel that the question raised is necessarily pertinent to their paper. While some students might feel empowered enough to direct the consultation themselves, I posit that “some students…want the consultant to be the sage on a stage and to give them useful, easy-to-understand directions” (72).
In an asynchronous session, though, the student can actively choose to come back to certain questions later or even ignore them. If a consultant asks a question about the thesis statement, there’s no pressure to respond immediately. The student can take more time to think through what exactly their thesis is supposed to be doing. There are ways to mimic this aspect of asynchronous sessions in the face-to-face paradigm, but none of them are free of the mild embarrassment of not being able to answer a question. I also know that the idea of students ignoring comments can be, perhaps, controversial. It may even come across as rude to the consultants. After all, the consultants just spent forty-five minutes to an hour working with a student’s writing, so there’s an expectation that the student will somehow respond to most if not all of those comments.
Yet, in this model, students must actively engage with the comments themselves, unpacking what a consultant meant when asking a particular question. This means, though, that as much as the consultant has assessed the student’s writing (Camarillo 2019), the student is now also assessing the consultant’s comments, determining for themselves what changes should be made and which ones shouldn’t be. This determination is part of the revision process and is certainly a feature in the process of more experienced writers, writers who have a sense of agency over the things they write.
We should also acknowledge, though, that this decision making process, for students, is taking into account more than just what’s in the paper. In order for the paper itself to become more effective, and for the writer to gain more familiarity with their writing process, the consultant might recommend a series of global changes. Yet, college students, especially new ones, are not always so interested in making these kinds of larger, time consuming changes. In their usability testing for instructor comments, Still and Koerber found that students chose to “bypass these suggestions for revision that they perceived…potentially more difficult to implement, opting instead just to use those comments that were more discernible or that suggested revisions that were easier to make” (215). While we in writing studies might be dismayed at such a finding, ecological and activity theory remind us that this type of action is perfectly logical.
A student’s actions are shaped by forces we in the writing center or writing classroom can’t see. Due dates are, of course, a critical factor for students. No amount of encouraging notes is going to persuade a student to make sweeping organizational changes when the paper is due in a few hours. Perhaps they only sent their paper to us in the first place because their professor required them to, further complicating their engagement with our comments.
Yet, now, in light of COVID-19, other constraints and pressures, normally invisible, are becoming much more salient. Students, especially poorer students, may not have access to a reliable computer. Or, if they do, it may be a shared computer that their parents need during the day in order to work from home. Or students may not have access to a reliable internet connection. Or, even if they have a computer and internet, they may not be in an environment that facilitates their learning. They might have to help their younger siblings with their own homework or do grocery runs for older relatives and the only time they can get work done is late at night when others are asleep because it’s finally quiet.
My point here is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to predict what kinds of changes, if any, a student will make to a paper based on our feedback and suggestions. As I’ve noted in this section, asynchronous sessions empower students to make these choices on their own based on what they know about their own lives and what can reasonably be done.
In order to arrive at specific features of antiracist comments, I
analyzed comments left on five documents submitted to the UHV Writing Center (one from each writing consultant working that semester). The documents were also all long reports from UHV’s professional writing class in order to draw more accurate comparisons. For example, comments left on a resume would likely be quite different than those left on a long report, so the data might be inaccurate. I began with two starter codes, Local and Global, in order to
begin my analysis, but I used an open coding scheme to further striate the categories. The results can be seen in Figures 1 and 2.
We can see from these tables that the majority of the comments analyzed were made about local or sentence level topics. Some of the topics are unsurprising, such as punctuation and formatting, but some comments could be coded in multiple ways, so the total numbers in the new coding frequency column may not match perfectly with the total comments in the initial coding table. For example, I tended to count comments that specifically referenced clarity because of word usage as belonging to both the Clarity code and the Word Choice code.
It’s also important to take the delivery of comments into account. For instance, Consultants 3 and 5 tended to use modeling when writing their comments. Modeling sentences was particularly useful for
these consultants because they tended to focus on issues of sentence structure or clarity. Rather than simply saying a sentence was unclear or asking a prompting question, these consultants demonstrated either what a stronger sentence might look like or how to implement what they were suggesting. They offered suggestions and concrete strategies for adjusting the part.
Another feature of these comments was the use of modal verbs, particularly “could,” “can,” or “might.” Consultant 1, for instance, often framed her comments about punctuation as potentially beneficial for the student. For example, “You could consider replacing the this comma with a colon to indicate you’re starting a list.” Modal verbs come with some caveats. It’s possible the student could misinterpret the comment as a stylistic suggestion, but this consultant pairs the suggestion with a concrete outcome. This kind of comment helps the student make a choice and decide what they want do with their paper.
Another code that sticks out is Check Instructions. The prompt to double check instructions is one that I wish I had seen more often in this dataset. I typically see this kind of comment when the consultant has either taken the class the paper is for or has worked with a paper like it previously. It’s a prompt to remind the student to double check the instructions or to reach out to the professor and ask for clarification.
There are, though, some shortcomings in this dataset. I wish there were more global comments, suggestions about organization or the main argument. It’s possible that the papers reviewed had no real global issues, but offering the student a big picture perspective of the paper can be valuable. It’s also possible that these global comments were offered in the e-mail sent back to the student, but I did not examine those e-mails for this essay. However, I plan to include the letter in future research.
While this is an admittedly small sample size, I think the results here begin to answer Denton’s (2017) call for more and closer examinations of asynchronous writing center consultations. This kind of analysis demonstrates that asynchronous tutoring is more than just editing—it can be an enriching mode for both students and consultants. When we utilize various theoretical lenses, whether antiracism or activity theory or something else, we can better understand the work we’re doing and what shapes and influences that work.
As my coding scheme above demonstrates, consultants are doing so much more than commenting on punctuation (although they do that, too). The asynchronous mode activates consultants’ creativity to ensure that their comments are as clear and easy to understand as possible. I think once we arrive at a better understanding of this aspect of writing center work, we will also find ways to enrich and extend the field, enabling us to better articulate what it is, exactly, we do in writing centers.
Works Cited
Camarillo, Eric. “Dismantling Neutrality: Cultivating Antiracist Writing Center Ecologies.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019, 69-74.
Denton, Kathryn. “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 2017, 175-203.
Inoue, Asao. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. South Carolina: Parlor Press. 2015.
Still, Brian and Amy Koerber. “Listening to Students: A Usability Evaluation of Instructor Commentary.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 24, no. 2, 2010, 206-233.