Inclusive Sentence-Level Writing Support from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol.19 No.3

Writing Centers have struggled historically with the question of addressing sentence-level concerns, caught between opposing obligations to affirm student voices and provide access to mainstream language conventions—a tension that can be particularly fraught when it comes to supporting translingual students. A year of grant-funded research led us to create a series of training modules that explore the history of grammar in the Writing Center, present institutional research about student desires and expectations, consider how language and identity affect our work as writers and tutors, and practice whether and how to address non-standard language usage. This article, like the training we do with our tutors, argues that sentence-level corrections should be approached as an issue of linguistic social justice and provides a heuristic to guide tutor decision-making in ways that are sensitive to the complex relationship between the type of potential error, the writer, the tutor, and the context.