The Aboutness of Writing Center Talk: A Corpus-Driven and Discourse Analysis (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication)

Writing centers in universities and colleges aim to help student writers develop practices that will make them better writers in the long term and that will improve their draft papers in the short term. The tutors who work in writing centers accomplish such goals through one-to-one talk about writing. This book analyzes the aboutness of writing center talk―what tutors and student writers talk about when they come together to talk about writing. By combining corpus-driven analysis to provide a quantitative, microlevel view of the subject matter and sociocultural discourse analysis to provide a qualitative macrolevel view of tutor-student writer interactions, it further establishes how these two research methods operate together to produce a robust and rigorous analysis of spoken discourse.

Jo Mackiewicz is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University, USA, where she codirects the Advanced Communication program. She earned a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University. Her recent research focuses on tutoring strategies in writing center conferences. With Isabelle Thompson, she published Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors.