The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

A Word about Being Directive
42
Brendan Johnson
Spring 2010
One of the biggest struggles as a new writing tutor is negotiating that thin line between giving
non-directive, facilitative advice to our tutees and being overly directive, appropriating their ideas to fit
into our own schema of what makes a good piece of composition. This may sound a little discouraging,
but this is a problem that will persist throughout your tutoring career. The purpose of this article is not to
give you some sort of secret model for how to be a non-direct, facilitative writing instructor, but rather to
reassure you that there is nothing wrong with being direct and straightforward at times.
Reading through the tutoring handbooks, you have no doubt already been exposed to a number of
different theories on how to conduct the ideal writing session. And if you tried to incorporate every theory
that you encounter over the course of the semester into one tutoring block, your head (as well as your
tutee’s head) might possibly explode. One essay tells you to work collaboratively, coming to rhetorical
decisions together with your tutee as two “knowledgeable” peers. One or two essays might tell you to be
non-directive and “minimalist” in your advice and questions, allowing the student to come to the answer
through their own intellectual exertions. A number of essays insist that your primary goal as writing tutor
is to reveal to the student that her paper is not her own, but that it is actually a cultural construct, or
perhaps a post-colonial “middle discourse,” shifting between the language of academia and her own
particular discourse community. Ok. Now try and incorporate all these tutoring methods into a thirtyminute
timeslot. Wow! This isn’t possible, nor should it be encouraged.
Now, to be even more incredibly reductive of the writing theories and practices you will
encounter over the semester, I would say that the vast majority of the essays generally urge tutors to take
a non-directive, facilitative approach when addressing a student’s writing. And I would absolutely concur
that this is the ideal way to conduct a tutoring session: the tutor acting as a knowledgeable peer, giving
helpful advice, asking constructive questions, but not necessarily tampering with the ownership of the
tutee’s text. However, this ideal situation is rarely, if ever, the case. In fact it is often a great struggle to
keep the reins of the paper in the hands of the tutee. Often these writers are more than happy—if not
eager—to have their “knowledgeable” writing tutor rhetorically “hijack” their papers. They see the
writing center as a place where their papers will be revised and redirected by the careful hands of a
“master of writing.” This is a dangerous, but common situation; and often when you meet with a new
tutee, a good portion of your first session will be spent explaining that editing and aggressive revision are
not the responsibility nor the desire of writing center tutors. Krista Tawlks, a former Writing Center
Tutor, has written an excellent article that weighs the pros and cons of directive versus non-directive
approaches to tutoring. She gives very helpful strategies and suggestive questions to ask when “adapting a
particular approach” (Fall 2009). (If Dan hasn’t assigned this article for the semester readings, I
encourage you to look it up in the archives.) Again, the rationale behind my article is not to gainsay or
undermine any of her valuable advice, but rather to encourage you not to always be concerned if you feel
that you are being too directive or prescriptive.
It’s Impossible Not To Be Directive:
If you think about it closely, it is impossible not to be directive. Almost any suggestion that you
make to a tutee is directive in some sense, however overt or subtle. Any comment you make about an
aspect of a paper, any question that you answer or deflect with another question is directive. Even when
you make suggestions or you draw attention to a certain portion of the paper that is confusing, you are
suggesting that something needs to be changed. Even if you are not supplying the student with a