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Writing Center Rhetorical Analysis

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riting center may seemingly have no control over most university writing constraints, many rhetorical strategies can be and have been implemented to accommodate to a wider genre of writing and writers. One such method that can prove to be useful without much work on the writing center’s behalf is to have tutors utilize several specialized strategies that tend to be specific for different types of scenarios within consultations.
One aspect that has been suggested and criticized all at once is the notion of having a purposefully diverse cast of writing center tutors. Bethany Davila, a graduate student and writing center tutor at DePaul University, claims, “When writing centers fail to acknowledge or question the power structure within which …show more content…

As a first-generation South Asian American student herself, Anita Varma recollects her own experiences of working at her college’s writing center. “In my college’s writing center, as I can assume is sometimes the case in other writing centers, consultants often perpetuate deeply flawed presumptions about international students by lumping them together with learning disabled students,” (Varma 32). While making this assumption, Varma also writes of experiencing uncomfortable moments while consulting, “The first time a student made an obvious assumption about me by asking me when I learned to speak English, I was taken aback,” (Varma 32). An example of systematic racism (racial discrimination that has become established as normal behavior within a society or organization), it is clear that the client had no ill intentions in asking, yet made assumptions based on Varma’s appearance (Oxford Dictionary). Although in this case, Varma was the one being subconsciously discriminated against as a consultant, writing centers should use this example and reverse it so that it can try to be avoided in the case of a consultant making assumptions. Had a client come in and received similar treatment, the writing center may have faced backlash and lose its ethos. By having this sort of conversation within the writing …show more content…

Within “Rearticulating the Work of the Writing Center” Nancy Grimm asserts that writing centers “be less tuned to helping writers master community conventions and more tuned to developing the capacity of the staff to entertain multiple perspectives, to resist binary alignments, to think in systematic and complicated ways about literacy practices, to manage emotional reactivity, to gather evidence, and to explore the contradictions in literacy work” (Grimm

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