Talk About Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors

Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors offers a book-length empirical study of the discourse between experienced tutors and student writers in satisfactory conferences. It analyzes writing center talk, focusing on tutors’ verbal strategies, at the macro- and microlevels. The study details tutors’ use of three categories of tutoring strategies―instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding―with each chapter of the analysis ending in practical advice about tutor training.

The second edition adds to the discussion of research provided in the first edition, maintaining the two previous goals: to provide a theory-based coding scheme for analyzing tutoring strategies according to their potential for instructing and scaffolding student writers’ learning, and to demonstrate that analysis on 10 satisfactory conferences conducted by experienced writing center tutors. New to this edition, the authors expand the previous discussion of the coding scheme with additional details about its development. Along with the expanded Chapter 3 about research methods, this edition features new examples from the corpus of conferences and updates the literature review.

Jo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University, USA. She codirects the Advanced Communication program and, in 2017, published The Aboutness of Writing Center Talk: A Corpus-Driven and Discourse Analysis.

Isabelle Kramer Thompson is an emerita professor of technical and professional communication and former coordinator of the English Center at Auburn University, USA.