Reflections on North

Reading North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” and his follow-up article blasted me back to the early 1990s when I first began my education at the University of Texas. As an English major, I read academic articles and essays about the English language and literature daily. A decade later, I moved into the education field. With its emphasis on “learning theories” and “brain-based research” my days of basking in skilled rhetoric were over, so this was a very refreshing read.

I appreciate North wanting to improve his colleagues’ understanding of what a writing center is and isn’t. I have spent much of my career in public school education fighting similar battles (For example, what being an English Language Learner means and doesn’t mean, i.e., being an English Language Learner and needing modified assignments does not mean one is stupid or illiterate).

I was surprised to see that all the way back in 1984 the new writing center “represents the marriage of what are arguably the two most powerful contemporary perspectives on teaching writing: first writing is…a process; and second, that writing curricula need to be student-centered” (p. 49). These two philosophies still abound in public education today. Writing is taught as a process throughout the grade levels, and instruction is supposed to be student centered.

I must admit that I muttered a less-than-mild expletive when I read North’s assertions that writers are “genuinely, deeply engaged with their material, anxious to wrestle it into the best form they can: they are motivated to write” (p. 54). Please forgive me. Remember, I have been somewhat jaded by my 12 years in middle and high schools, so I was relieved to find North himself chuckled at this somewhat over-the-top statement ten years later. The man does have a sense of humor.

That is not to say that helping writers become more excited about writing shouldn’t be our goal. Why not inspire the writer to become this “anxious wrestler” by the time they leave the Writing Center and head back to their "solo ritual"? As North says, “An hour of talk about writing at the right time between the right people can be more valuable than a semester of mandatory class meetings when the timing isn’t right” (p. 67). I couldn’t agree more.

One of the strategies for doing this is described on p. 55 and is what we in education call the “think-aloud”. It is a sure-fire way to help students understand the thought processes of a successful writer. I am fairly certain I will be using this technique when working with our clients. I also like the suggestion of both the consultant and the writer responding to a prompt and then comparing opening strategies.

Finally, I have to share how much I loved the analogy of the university as a lumbering stegosaurus whose brain is so “physically small that it needs a second neural node just to operate its hindquarters” (p. 66). I like, literally, LOL’d!!!*  Thankfully, students at CWI may not feel they have to negotiate such a beast, but if they move on to a larger university campus, it’s often the unfortunate reality.

*How do you write “LOL” in the past tense?