University Writing Center

A Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Writing Center Tutoring is refreshingly direct about a regrettable fact concerning writing center tutoring and tutor training: established best practices are difficult to quantify. Before reaching the end of the first page, Rebecca Day Babcock, Kellye Manning, and Travis Rogers outline the impetus of their research, relating Babcock’s difficulty in synthesizing information on the ideologies of writing centers when preparing for her doctoral comprehensive exams. That difficulty prompts the authors to admit that “there was no one common writing center theory, but rather a set of practices and a pattern of taking theories from other disciplines and applying them to writing centers” (1). Babcock, Manning, and Rogers then call upon Linda Shamoon and Deborah Burns’ infamous 1995 essay, “A Critique of Pure Tutoring,” referencing its indictment that writing center research does little to critically examine its preferred tutoring practices, reducing appraisal efforts to little more than hunches. On generally accepted techniques and strategies, Shamoon and Burns write that “these codes and appeals seem less the product of research or examined practice and more like articles of faith that serve to validate a tutoring approach which ‘feels right’” (135). Nearly two decades later, writing center research has arguably diminished old preferences for hands-off, minimalist tutoring. The message of A Synthesis is immediately clear: a unified theory of tutoring practice must prefer researched, verifiable practice and eschew unsubstantiated belief