The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Situated Acts of Writing and Tutoring
151
Heather Sula
Fall 2009
At this point in the semester, you’ve probably met with several different student writers and,
furthermore, you may have found it useful to adapt your tutoring methods to meet the various needs of
each particular student. For example, you may have played the uninformed reader to a student in a
different major, asking largely content-related questions, or you may have taken a more directive
approach regarding subject-verb agreement issues with an ESL student. You have probably even changed
your style in different sessions with a recurring tutee, depending on which stage of the writing process
they are engaged in – if it is a brainstorming session, perhaps you’re more likely to just let the writer talk
through his or her ideas, occasionally asking problem-posing questions, or if a draft has organizational
issues, you might make more concrete suggestions as to what might ensure clarity. Just as we adapt our
tutoring style to the needs of the student at hand, I think that it can be beneficial to view writing in a
similar way: as an act of adaptation to a particular rhetorical context. With that in mind, we can also view
tutoring as an opportunity to help students recognize, question, and negotiate these contexts.
A way to facilitate this discussion is through the lens of the postmodern conception of writing as
“situated.” Many scholars have discussed this concept, but I think that Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, in her
article on post-process pedagogy, sums up the discussion nicely when she says that “writing must
correspond to specific contexts that naturally vary” (115). In the case of writing, a context is the
rhetorical situation that the writer is working within (or, in some cases, around or against), which includes
but is not limited to: tone, audience, form, language use, and so on. While these issues themselves should
always be considered while writing, the specifics of what they are will always change from writing task to
writing task, from context to context. For instance, in a personal narrative, the tone might be somewhat
casual and personable and the form may follow that of a traditional plot with a climax and denouement,
while a sociology essay might require a more formal tone and a decidedly thesis-based form. There is no
one universal rule in writing. The “rules,” like language itself, are arbitrary, socially constructed,
contextually-bound, and changeable. This broad view of writing is known as “situatedness,” and it
“refers to the ability to respond to specific situations rather than rely on foundational principles or rules”
(115). Writing is not a matter of knowing how to do it “right,” but of determining what is appropriate for
the situation.
As tutors, we can help writers navigate the tricky terrain of situatedness by allowing our own
experiences and knowledge of writing in various contexts to inform, and, conversely, we can allow
ourselves to be informed by our tutees. An example of this is a simple knowledge exchange. If you
happen to be a literature major and are very good a integrating quotes, you might be able to give your
tutee some ideas of when that might be considered appropriate or how it might stylistically be attempted.
Or if your tutee brings knowledge of the way data is often presented in a scientific research paper, he or
she can break that down for you, which serves the dual purpose of adding to your own general knowledge
and reaffirming their own knowledge and expertise. Any new, context-specific knowledge of this sort
adds to a writer’s knowledge of writing in its various forms, and gives a writer a broader knowledge of
writing as a whole. This aggregation of knowledge hopefully makes it easier for a writer to shift fluidly
between disparate rhetorical contexts.
Another skill tutors can bring to this process of discovery is the knowledge of what kinds of
questions to ask. And usually, the questions that are deceptively simply will yield the most complex, yet