Perhaps I stand in a unique position, having worked at several Writing Centers, but I found the following video especially revealing of the disconnects between Writing Centers and assumptions about Writing Centers from students and instructors alike.
Instructors oftentimes think that Writing Centers are “sanitizing centers” or “correctness centers” or (gasp!) “proofreading centers.” Instructors will oftentimes send students there in the belief that the student will turn in a “readable” paper. When the paper is turned in and there are grammatical errors, instructors will conclude, quite mistakenly, that the tutors at the Center are inept.
Students, unfamiliar with Writing Center pedagogy, think that their errors will be corrected for them. I can still see quite clearly the very shocked faces I would get from my tutees when I would tell them, “Let’s just work on your thesis. After we get a good thesis, you’ll go home and rewrite your paper from it.” “But I want to work on my grammar,” the student would say, “because it’s due in fifteen minutes.”
There is a strange culture in our classrooms that equates correctness with success; the culture of Writing Centers equates improving over time and self-efficiency as routes to success. When we tell our students that an error-free paper will earn them an A, we forsake critical thinking, creativity, and eloquence.
Disclaimer: The views stated here are not the views of any Writing Center at any institution. The views are of the author’s and the author’s alone.
I think some faculty members often operate on a wavelength similar to the MTA's: if you see something, say something. So when instructors are grading/marking/correcting student papers–and which term instructors choose is often indicative of their views on grammatical accuracy vs. critical thinking–they believe it is imperative to say something about each ungrammatical offense. We've spent a good deal of time in our faculty development seminars talking about responding to student writing, using various models for marking that emphasize content concerns over surface-level errors. Two that I always find myself returning to are Peter Elbow's "High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Student Writing" (click on the link to the PDF for the full-text article) and Richard H. Hasiwell's "Minimal Marking" (available in JStor with username and password)–among many other useful resources on the topic.
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