Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 3 (2022)

Inclusive Sentence-Level Writing Support

Bridget Draxler
St. Olaf College
draxler@stolaf.edu

Anne Berry
St. Olaf College
berryag@stolaf.edu

Manuela Novoa Villada
St. Olaf College
novoav98@gmail.com

Victoria Gutierrez
St. Olaf College
victoriagutierrezpereira@gmail.com

Abstract
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.

When it comes to sentence-level corrections in the Writing Center, the research used to be clear: in order to avoid being seen as a proofreading service, good peer tutoring should focus on higher-order concerns (argument, evidence, structure) rather than lower order concerns (grammar, syntax, punctuation). Building on Jeff Brooks’ classic 1991 essay on “Minimalist Tutoring,” this hands-off approach emphasized asking questions rather than giving answers, teaching rather than fixing, and making better writers rather than just better papers. By not correcting grammar, we saw ourselves as inclusive and empowering for all writers.

However, as Writing Center research has continued to grapple with issues of equity and inclusion and more openly faced the complexities of Standard Written English [SWE] as a language of power marked by privileges of race, class, and nationality, the conversation has become less straightforward. More recent contributions to the field, including work by Sharon A. Myers (“Reassessing the ‘Proofreading Trap’: ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction”) and Lori Salem (“Decisions… Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?”), along with an edited collection of essays titled Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, have either explicitly challenged or at least complicated the supposition that Brooks’ idealistic approach is actually serving all students in an equitable way. Increasingly, Writing Center directors are asking whether our policies have implicitly favored students who already have writing skills that just need drawing out and inadvertently made it difficult for students with less formal preparation to ask for help with sentence-level concerns.

Many of us have slowly shifted our policies on sentence-level concerns over the years, often quietly and with some hesitation. When a student comes looking for sentence-level help, we used to explain why we prefer to focus on higher-order concerns. Now we may ask students why those concerns are important to them right now. We used to be as non-directive as possible, and now we try to recognize when being more directive would be appropriate. We used to help students only with patterns of error, but many of us have become more flexible on that rule. We’re still not a proofreading service, but in an effort to be more equitable and provide access to the language of power when students desire it, our Writing Center has more sessions that address lower-order concerns than we used to.

But while we’ve shifted the way we treat requests for sentence-level support, in terms of giving students more choice and agency in how and when we help with lower order concerns, the tutor training at our college had done little to coach tutors in terms of how to actually help when students seek this kind of feedback. We gave tutors “permission” to help students with sentence-level concerns, without specifying what that sentence-level support would look like exactly. And the vague flexibility of this policy is a reflection of the fact that many directors are working through these significant questions alongside our tutors. How do tutors function both inside and outside institutionalized systems of linguistic prejudice? How do we help students with sentence-level concerns in a way that is empowering, rather than simply policing conformity to the somewhat arbitrary and potentially harmful conventions of SWE? How and when do undergraduate writing tutors typically tend to address sentence-level issues in student writing? How do tutors differentiate between patterns of error, variations in style, and expressions of voice? How do student writers interpret feedback when the focus is on their word choice, grammar and mechanics? How do our approaches to tutoring shape students’ identities, skills, context awareness, confidence, and feelings of belonging? And perhaps most importantly, how can we address sentence-level issues effectively and equitably, especially for multilingual or linguistically diverse students?

In seeking the answers to these questions, we assembled a research team that included a Writing Center Director (Bridget), a Multilingual Student Language Support Specialist (Anne), and two multilingual/international student tutors (Victoria and Manuela), and we spent a year working collaboratively on a grant-funded research project related to sentence-level support in our Writing Center. Initially motivated by a desire to better serve translingual students, we developed an approach to sentence-level attention grounded in linguistic social justice that better serves all writers. Our work culminated in a multi-session training workshop for fifteen experienced Writing Center peer tutors which took place over three days in the middle of the academic year. Informed by the scholarship of Rebecca Day Babcock, Nancy Grimm, Asao Inoue, Christine Pearson Casanave, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and others, and contextualized with institutional data and our own individual experiences as writers and teachers/tutors, our goal was to give tutors the tools both to teach SWE and to empower student writers to self-advocate when choosing non-standardized usage. This balanced approach, we argue, is both structural and activist, as it lets tutors and students engage with and disrupt the systems that would discriminate against them.

This article follows the structure of our tutor training modules, which included preparatory reading and writing, and a mixture of lecture, discussion, and practice. We begin here, as we did with our tutors, by outlining the complicated history of grammar in the Writing Center and then reviewing our own institutional data on student desires and expectations. Next, we move into the topic of language and identity. During the training sessions, we used a combination of think/pair/share and storytelling activities to guide tutors through a reflective discussion of how our relationship with SWE shapes our writing and our tutoring. Finally, we offer some of the sample sentences and paragraphs that we used during training as a way to identify errors and distinguish them from variations of style and voice. Using a real-time quiz tool, we prompted an interactive discussion of use of language in context, which we partially summarize here. We also share the Decision Tree that we developed to help tutors decide whether to address an instance of non-standard usage with a writer. Tutors practiced using this tool as they considered each potential error, its context, and the tutoring relationship. In addition to outlining our training, this article also describes our own journey toward a more linguistically just approach to sentence-level concerns and toward more effective strategies for training writing tutors to do their work in a way that is equitable, inclusive, and empowering.

How Writing Centers Approach Grammar: A historical view

Writing Centers proliferated in higher education during the 1970s, at the same time that universities became more accessible to first generation students, low-income students, and BIPOC students. The confluence of these two events has fueled perceptions of Writing Centers, by faculty and students alike, as remedial—providing a gateway to linguistic belonging in higher education. From this perspective, supporting students’ use of SWE is giving students access to power, and this approach has a pragmatic reality to it. Scholars like Patricia Ann Hill have argued that one of the goals of higher education is to produce graduates that fit employers’ expectations. As writing is a highly important skill for many jobs, she notes, it is important that universities focus on teaching “standard English” (11). When Writing Centers take this approach, they empower writers; however, they simultaneously uphold the status quo, which in turn perpetuates the “communicative burden,” where non-mainstream voices (in terms of class, nationality, or race) are expected to accommodate linguistic norms and must do the work of changing to fit other people’s expectations.

The critique of this approach since then has been swift and sharp. Carter equates the “forces that compel the marginalized to assimilate into the dominant discourses of the more powerful” to all of the other “systematic and institutionalized forces that oppress the powerless” (W135). Greenfield and Rowan echo the criticism, arguing that “the work of and in writing centers is always implicated in the institutional racism that shapes all our work in higher education” (124). Writing Centers must grapple with Grimm’s “paradox of literacy.” As Carter paraphrases, “Traditional literacy is said to ‘empower writers’ by helping them find success in a given rhetorical space, but to find success in that space these marginalized writers must learn to write in ways the academy values. If literacy education itself is a political enterprise rather than a neutral one, learning to manipulate the dominant cultural codes requires once marginalized writers to become someone else – embody the dominant culture instead of their own” (144). Scholars now agree that this drive for assimilation perpetuates power imbalances, systemic oppression, and a silencing of student voices.

In the 1990s, the Writing Center theory around sentence-level support shifted to one of minimization, an approach which became a touchstone for Writing Centers’ resistance to perceptions of remediation and standardization. SWE, of course, is not a universal, objective, neutral standard, but at best an imaginary standard and at worst an expression of white language supremacy (Inoue). The solution, perpetuated by Brooks and others, was one of avoidance: a focus on higher-order concerns and the use of non-directive tutoring. If students bring up grammar concerns, we minimize their importance and redirect the student to things like argument and structure. When pressed, tutors are only allowed to help with patterns of error.

Avoidance of sentence-level support, however, has also been increasingly questioned in Writing Center scholarship. Here is the double bind: to enforce SWE is to be complicit in protecting the dominant discourse at the expense of linguistic minorities, but to not teach grammar is to withhold access to that language of power. Scholars like Nancy Grimm have reminded us that these individualist approaches to writing, which focus on higher-order concerns and nondirective approaches that put the onus on writers, may benefit least or inadvertently harm the linguistically diverse writer and perpetuate the structural racism surrounding language and literacy. She says, “If tutors continue to be advised to ‘make the student do all the work,’ then dominant discourses will remain impenetrable to students who are true outsiders, and structures of privilege will remain unchallenged” (84). She goes on to explain that, for students whose cultural or linguistic backgrounds “are not congruent with the backgrounds they are imagined to have as college students, … the dominant forms of language and academic ways of making arguments are not already lodged in their heads, waiting for the gentle coaxing of a mainstream, probably white and well-intentioned tutor. ... [and] Indirect approaches in these situations can be perceived as insulting, frustrating, and patronizing” (84). In other words, the problem with minimizing sentence-level errors is that it over-corrects. Rather than forcing students through the door of SWE, as with remediation, we lock the door and hide the key, refusing to engage with sentence-level issues at all. Students that want sentence-level help have nowhere to go.

As Grimm notes, avoidance ultimately reinforces a system of insiders and outsiders. This color blind/grammar blind overcorrection led to another shift in Writing Center theory in the 2000s to refocus on student choice. The idea was to affirm writers’ identities and give them choices: the choice to learn SWE, or, the choice to use a non-standard style of English. The tutor’s role is to give writers information about that choice. For example, Shafer posits that we can help writers “to see writing as a series of choices rather than a transmitted set of rules, stages, and regimens to which to adhere” (296). Tutors share the rules of grammar without enforcing them.

At the same time that Writing Centers have embraced writer choice, scholars of writing and writing center theory have simultaneously become more attuned to recognizing and valuing the ways that writers’ identities are expressed through language. Cox reminds us that terms like “international student” and “ESL writer” reductively categorize students in ways that dissolve important differences in linguistic identity, and scholarship on writing center studies and composition increasingly focus on the distinct writing identities and experiences of generation 1.5 learners (Harklau, Thonus), African American writers (Young), and others.

A tutoring approach centered around writers’ identities and choices enacts post-process theory, framing all writing as inherently personal and political, and rejecting or at least questioning the prescriptive rules of SWE. This attention to identity and personal choice is also grounded in translingualism, recognizing that there is no single standard and that language differences are natural and meaningful. Finally, it promotes code-meshing, which is not switching between a home language and SWE, but intentionally blending and combining them (Young 139). Building on this identity-conscious approach to discussing language, tutors can empower student writers not by enforcing SWE or by pretending sentence-level concerns don’t matter, but by developing students’ critical awareness in their language choices.

Yet this identity-driven approach is not uncomplicated, and it “risks the sort of stereotyping, overgeneralizing, and, indeed, racial profiling” that can cause tutors to make problematic assumptions about writers’ skills or goals (Greenfield and Rowan 133). One problem with this approach is that we, as tutors, are the ones framing the choices, even when we are not always the target audience. On the one hand, students may come to us and feel affirmed in expressing their authentic language identity, only to be criticized and maybe graded down by a professor for those same choices, after which the student may rightfully feel betrayed by our encouragement. On the other hand, we may present the choice in a way that is more honest about the possible consequences of choosing to write in a non-standard style, but then the choice doesn’t really feel authentic, and we become tacit enforcers of the status quo. By focusing on choices, and by being the person to frame those choices for writers, tutors may inadvertently be building up their own power instead of their writers’, as we can too easily steer writers to the choice that we think is best for them.

In surveying this history, our research team and our tutors were better prepared to identify our own blind spots. Prior to this research project, training at our center effectively prepared tutors to enact one half of this approach: affirming students’ language. We took this approach one step further, from offering choices to cultivating self-advocacy: it is not enough to just give students choices; we must also give them the tools and confidence to defend those choices. We don’t just say, “we like the way you write” and send writers out into the world hoping others will, too. We invite students to understand, engage with, and potentially disrupt the systems that would discriminate against them. As an example, the singular ‘they’ was, until recently, still a somewhat contentious choice in some academic contexts. While many style guides and disciplines have embraced the form, there are still faculty who would mark it as an error. So, in a poster campaign from a few years ago, when we encouraged students to use a singular ‘they’ and we modeled it in our own advertising, we also provided template language for an explanatory footnote (fig. 1). By using a footnote to defend their choice, the professor knows that the student is being intentional and can even see a rationale, including references for academic style guides that affirm the choice. In this way, we’re not just offering students a choice and hoping for the best; we’re helping them understand a choice and then giving them the tools and confidence to stand by their choice. The footnote example here is a way to model resistance to standards and norms of language, and our tutors were well prepared to offer writers similar tools and strategies to self-advocate for non-standard forms.

But what about the other half of the choice? What about the students who wanted to learn SWE? We were so eager to avoid complicity in the racist and colonialist legacy of SWE, that we hadn’t made space in our center to help writers who wanted that kind of support, or tutors who wanted that kind of training. We were giving students choices, presumably, but everything from our advertisements to our training signaled which choice we thought was the “right” one. We wanted to be forward thinking and inclusive in our center, but we found ourselves stuck in the 90s avoidance mindset. So, what is the equivalent of self-advocacy for writers who are interested in learning about and using SWE? What is an updated approach to grammar that is grounded in the tenets of linguistic justice? And maybe most importantly, what kind of sentence-level support do students actually want?

Grammar in the writing center: a survey of student goals

In order to discover what students want in terms of sentence-level support, our research team gathered student feedback and tutor observations at our own institution, and we shared a summary of this data with our tutors as part of this training.¹ For context, St. Olaf is a selective, residential, liberal arts college in rural Minnesota. Students are required to take three courses (writing and rhetoric, writing across the curriculum, and writing in the major) which offer an applied and cumulative approach to writing. To support students in their writing, the Writing Center at our college is staffed by 40 student tutors who offer appointments and drop-in tutoring along with embedded writing support in first-year courses.

Our research painted a complicated portrait of students’ relationship with sentence-level concerns. On the one hand, some students express frustration with a perceived over-emphasis on sentence-level issues:

“One time, I gave my paper to my roommate. He read it, and he just corrected all the grammar and I was like ‘Ah! I was not really looking for grammar, more like ideas,’ but then he was like, ‘Yeah, um, if someone reads it, they can see like what you're trying to say, but like the grammar is like, you know, everything.’"

At the same time, others express a desire for more attention at the sentence level:

“I would ask [my tutor] questions and - Specific about writing, about some small things, like, what do you think about the paper? What do you think about this specific thing? And she would never answer. She said it's not her job to do that, and I was like, okay. And I would ask, how do you think is the best way to phrase something? And they'd be like, this is your work to do that. And I was like, okay. Then what was the point of me coming here at all?”

Finally, some students described the satisfaction they felt when they received sentence-level support:

“I don't think I have, like, good amount of vocabulary for adjectives, so like, I can't really explain the person I see in the book and I was like, ‘uh…’ (Laughs). And then I try to explain in a way and my professor gave me lots of, like, ways to say that in one word, so like, it was really helpful.”

This mixed feedback is reflected in our analysis of the top reasons that students listed for visiting the Writing Center, as noted both in responses to a tutor survey (fig. 2) and in data collected from tutors’ visit notes (fig. 3). For example, almost half of approximately 2,000 session reports in 2020 signaled student interest in sentence-level concerns—most frequently requests for help with punctuation and sentence structure, but often more vaguely described in tutor notes as “working on grammar.” Interestingly, we found no predictable trends related to discipline, class year, or demographics. Any student, it seems, may desire additional help with sentence-level concerns, and we can’t assume that major, year, or identity will shape who does and doesn’t want sentence level support.

After reviewing the data with our tutors, we asked them to reflect on feelings of discomfort in addressing (or not addressing) sentence-level concerns during their tutoring experiences. We brainstormed how to preserve a collaborative community of practice while being responsive to moments that call for more directive tutoring. Some tutors were eager to talk about grammar, while others steered students away from sentence-level concerns. Although most tutors thought that sentence-level issues are important for us to address, and increasingly recognized these concerns as an issue of social justice and inclusive pedagogy, only 40% of our tutors were comfortable or very comfortable offering this kind of support. In addition to lacking confidence in terms of their knowledge of grammar rules and terminology, many expressed anxiety about when, whether, and how to correct:

“I was not at all confident in my ability to address this issue [proofreading] just because it can be hard to know what all I can/should correct. At one point when the writer was reading through her work she started stopping at every sentence to ask if it sounded okay.”

The historical context and institutional data, combined with the tutors’ own discomfort with grammar, demonstrated the need for tutors to have a stronger understanding of the rules of SWE and also more practice with addressing sentence-level concerns during tutoring sessions. The next part of our training prepared tutors to offer more effective grammar support by first exploring the ways in which their own language and identity shape their own relationship with SWE.

Language, Identity, and the Writer/Tutor Relationship

In framing grammar instruction that would be grounded in linguistic justice, we next asked tutors to think about their own languages and identities. When tutors understand their writing identities, they are better equipped to help writers develop their own self-awareness. This identity-informed approach to tutoring is at the heart of what Writing Center work must be about, especially when looking at grammar and SWE. Oliveira writes, “Asking writers about their process of writing, their motivations for the paper they are writing, what they want their paper to show readers and how they want it to be done might reveal aspects of their academic literacy practices relevant for the sessions. Moreover, learning about those aspects may help tutors concentrate on the possibilities for self-hood inside the social context of academia which a writer might not be aware of or has not yet explored” (45). In other words, by asking questions about their writing identities, we can help shift writers’ mindsets about their writing from a kind of performance to meet some imagined ideal to an authentic expression of who they are. Instead of seeing academic writing as something that hides or denies their true self, it can be something that expresses and affirms that true self.

We invited tutors to share a story about their identities as writers, and we participated as well, in order to model the ways in which identity shapes language at the sentence level. For instance, Anne described how diagramming sentences in middle school Language Arts class, which she enjoyed, inspired her study of language and linguistics in graduate school. Victoria talked about attending bilingual school since the age of 3 and growing up with an idealized perception of grammar conventions and American accents; it was not until she was surrounded by people using a variety of Englishes that she realized that SWE was neither superior nor standard. We found common ground in a love of language conventions and the puzzle of English grammar, but also in the complicated feelings of inadequacy and othering tied up in language.

Along with storytelling, we explored themes of identity through a think-pair-share activity, which asked tutors to reflect on the following questions:

What parts of your identity are most important to you?
What are the ways in which your writing or speaking is an expression of your identity? This could be your race/ethnicity, class, major, gender…Try to think specifically about grammar, syntax, vocabulary as you answer this question.
Do you code switch? When and why?
What are different ways that identity (yours or the writer’s) might enter a writing tutoring session? Try to think specifically about grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. as you answer this question.

Throughout these conversations about writing identity, the idea of SWE emerged again and again. Tutors referenced ideas from the assigned readings that challenged the supremacy of SWE, including Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, Jamila Lyiscott’s TED Talk “3 ways to speak English,” Christine Pearson Casanave’s “What and Whose Standards for L2 Writing?”, Nancy Grimm’s “Retheorizing Writing Center Work,” and Asao Inoue’s CCCC keynote address “How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about White language supremacy?” Tutors saw SWE as the preferred language of academia, but also as neither neutral nor static, or even common. SWE is problematically determined by “powerful people and institutions” and “implies homogeneity and oversimplifies linguistic realities” (Hudley 20), and the concept of ‘correctness’ is inherently biased, “only definable in terms of conformity or divergence of expectations” (Newman 25).

Tutors latched onto the idea of the communicative burden in particular: “in situations where there is a perceived language barrier… the person with the non-mainstream accent is often expected to do more work to help the other person understand” (Hudley 47). They came to understand how “the educational system expects students from nonmainstream backgrounds to accommodate to the social and linguistic norms of mainstream students without much, if any, instruction on how to do so" (Reaser et al. 4). They also recognized the ways in which language use remains one of the most socially acceptable ways to perpetuate covert racism, classicism, and sexism: a coded way of discriminating against others that seems to be about language but can more often be about the identities signaled by that language use. This shared foundation let us approach sentence-level support with a set of common values, particularly around affirming writers’ style and voice, even when, and maybe especially when, it varied from SWE.

Grammar in Context: Addressing Non-Standard Usage

Our social justice goals were complicated by the reality of putting these grammar concerns in context. For example, whether we think that non-standard usage is problematic or not, it is absolutely the case that readers have expectations. Disciplines adhere to agreed upon conventions that convey meaning. Genres are recognizable and follow predictable patterns that allow readers to access content quickly. Not only that, writing at college is graded, and rubrics often evaluate both higher order and lower order aspects of writing. Professors have expectations and pet peeves. Grades matter to many writers, and meeting expectations is often important to them. Standing up for these truths may feel less heroic for a social justice warrior, but they are important considerations that challenged us as we thought about our practices—both for teaching grammar and for teaching self-advocacy. In addition to understanding writers’ goals, reimagining inclusive sentence-level support requires understanding writers’ intentions. When writers use non-standard forms, it might be because they are using their own English (their own dialect or variety or register) and not wanting or trying to use SWE. Or, it might be that they are using non-standard forms intentionally, perhaps creatively, or even politically. Or, it also might be the case that they are intending to use SWE but either don’t know the correct form, are applying the rule incorrectly, or were busy thinking about the message and not attending to rules. Tutors are tasked with identifying and addressing sentence-level concerns in a way that affirms natural variations in language, yet gives writers the opportunity to learn from and correct their errors. This process relies on tutors’ abilities to distinguish between style (linguistic preferences or expressions of personality that reflect contextualized and conscious choices, such as sentence length, use of metaphor, denominalization, or formatting choices), voice (linguistic variations that are rooted in an expression of self or identity, such as written accent, code-meshing, or “interlanguage”), and error (unintentionally breaking rules which may impede meaning to the point of miscommunication). Of course, the line between style, voice, and error is contextual and open to interpretation, which is why our training invited tutors to consider sample sentences, and answer two connected but distinct questions: 1) Is this an error? and 2) Should we address it?

To illustrate this activity, we will reflect on five of the sample sentences we analyzed together as a group. During the workshop, we projected each sample sentence on the board and polled tutors to see what percentage of our group believed each sentence had an error. Then, we asked tutors to explain their answer and created space for debate before offering some guidance. Finally, if they agreed it was an error, we discussed whether and how they would address it with a writer. For instance, we began with this sentence:

1. How do we language so people stop killing each other…?

Is this an error? The construction breaks a rule because the writer is using a noun in the verb position. But at the same time, this is intentional and creative. Nouns are used as verbs as a natural part of language change all the time. For example, a gold medal is an object, and “medal” is a noun, but many athletes have been heard saying they’d like “to medal” in an upcoming competition.

Should we address it? Since tutors had watched Inoue’s CCCCs keynote address with this title in preparation for the workshop, they recognized this move as intentional. In this context, tutors agreed we would not point it out as an error. If we saw something similar in a student paper, however, we might ask about it. It might be a typo, it might be a mistranslation from a first language, or it might be a choice. So, we might just say “I notice you are using a noun as a verb here. Are you doing that intentionally?” Context heavily determines whether denominalization such as this is an error.

2. The debate continued between my colleague and I.

Is this an error? Tutors disagreed on this example, and we acknowledged that a writer who writes this probably thinks that the sentence is correct. In fact, they might insist that it is correct. But technically, this construction breaks a rule. It uses the subject pronoun (I) in the object position—in this case, the object of the preposition between. To many ears, the correct version of the sentence (“The debate continued between my colleague and me”) sounds wrong, but in fact, it follows the rule because “me” is an object pronoun in an object position. This confusion is common with the preposition “between” because “between” requires two objects. Imagine the same sentence with “behind”—“I walked away, but the debate continued behind me.” We would not likely say “The debate continued behind I.”

Should we address it? The problem here is that this error is widespread, and to many ears, the first sentence sounds like something a more educated person would say. So, the question is, who will be reading this sentence, and will this reader know the rule? Will this reader hear the “I” as educated or as overcorrection? If this is a context where it matters (and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t), we would address it, but we would also suggest ways to rewrite the whole sentence and avoid this construction altogether. For example, does it work in the paragraph to say “My colleague and I continued to debate the issue” or “The debate continued between us.”

3. I’m feeling sick at my stomach.

Is this an error? This construction sounded incorrect to many of our tutors, because in Minnesota, we typically say “sick to my stomach” or maybe “sick in my stomach.” If we were working with a student who was still acquiring English (and we reminded tutors that prepositions and articles are some of the last elements to be acquired), we would probably teach the writer the more typical idiomatic expression and ask them about changing the “at.” However, in Appalachia, the correct preposition for that expression is “at.” So, it is possible that the writer was using their own patterned, rule-bound, native English correctly, and this might be an opportunity to lift up that voice.

Should we address it? Just as people have different accents when they speak, they can also have a written accent. Depending on the context and the relationship that the tutor has with the writer, this might be a conversation or a point of interest, rather than a correction.

4. In the first section of the chapter, the author achieves to introduce her main point about waste disposal systematically.

Is this an error? Here we agreed, yes, this is an error, though not all tutors could explain why. This particular sentence was written by a student whose first language is Spanish, and we happened to recognize this construction as a direct translation that shows strategic competence. The student used the English verb “achieves” in place of the Spanish verb “consigue,” which is a correct translation if that verb is followed by a direct object, but in this context, the English construction would be “the author is able to introduce” or “the author successfully introduces” or “the author succeeds in introducing.”

Should we address it? In this example, we recommended providing the writer with multiple ways to rephrase, partly because it is a good opportunity for the writer to acquire more language. If we provide options, the writer can choose the one that sounds most like what they want to say and maintain ownership of the text.

5. The idea of attending St. Olaf College is thrilling to me. And I would love to continue my academic journey as part of its vibrant and caring community.

Is this an error? The rule broken here is that you shouldn’t use a conjunction to start a sentence. While tutors disagreed on the seriousness of the error, they were all familiar with the rule.

Should we address it? Using “and” in this way makes the text sound more conversational and more stream-of-thought, and that might be the style that is desired. But at the same time, context clues suggest that it might be part of an application. Because a polished and proofread CV and cover letter are often the way to make a strong first impression, that is one context where careful attention to sentence-level issues may be desired and warranted.

Examining these sentences² helped us demonstrate that whether an error should be addressed (in fact, whether an error even exists) is heavily context-bound. In addition, deciding to address an error is only the first step in determining how to address it with a writer. For that reason, we also looked at longer passages and gave more context about the writer, assignment, and audience, and we asked tutors to consider not only whether there is an error and whether they would address it, but also how they would approach the conversation with the writer. For example, we analyzed this introductory paragraph to an essay written by a first-year multilingual international student in a Introduction to Academic Writing course who was responding to the question of who should be held accountable for overconsumption:

There a big problem in our society, whenever we go out we see a lot of shops and a unconscious force make us want to buy things that we might not need. This is overconsumption and it has been raised up together with us. We are bombed with a lot of advertisements since we are children. Overconsumption is destroying the world that we know because of our “needs” to buy anything. Because in order to satisfy that necessity of buying has a price, that most of the time the nature and the environment is taking it. This process of destruction has three main characters in the problem; Consumers, government and producers.

In this particular example, tutors decided that they would point out the missing word in the first sentence, partly because even though it’s a small error, it distracts the reader right at the start. We might also correct the article before “unconscious force,” remembering that articles are acquired later than other grammatical structures but that they tend to be errors that are noticeable to some readers. Some tutors said they would ask the writer if the use of “bombed” (rather than the more typically idiomatic “bombarded”) was intentional. Others said they would not mention it because they felt it was visceral and descriptive, and an effective stylistic choice that may reflect the students’ multilingual background. The conversation helped us to consider not just the context of the rhetorical situation—writer, reader, text—but also, crucially, the relationship between the writer and the tutor. The tutors increasingly acknowledged that pointing out particular instances of non-standard usage would depend on the writer’s goals but also on the existing relationship at the time of the session. They knew that this student would be working with an assigned tutor all semester for this particular course, and they guessed that, at the point in the semester when they would be writing this paper, the writer and tutor would have had time to develop the trust necessary to discuss sentence-level issues.

To emphasize the centrality of the writer/tutor relationship to the decision process, Anne shared a story about a student who was applying for jobs after college and considering using her initials instead of her name, well aware of the unfortunate truth that an applicant’s name is sometimes part of what determines whether they will be called for an interview. The student’s advisor was able to give helpful advice partly because they had a long trusting relationship and partly because the advisor had shared experience with this situation. What might have been a face-threatening conversation was, in this context, a safe conversation for the student. Within this context, the student and her advisor had a clear-eyed understanding of the meaning and purpose of the advice. In other words, the student felt that if she decided to make this change, she would not be giving up or selling out or losing herself; she would have critical awareness of what she was doing and why, guided by a trusted advisor. The story gave tutors a concrete example of how language and identity are powerfully intertwined and of how the rhetorical context, the writer’s goals and the writer/tutor relationship are all relevant when the objective is to truly see and support the writer.

A Decision Tree for Addressing Sentence-Level Concerns

Tutors became intensely invested in (and palpably enthusiastic about) picking apart sentences, debating the rules in play, and articulating their own opinions and preferences with language use. But identifying a non-standard use of language, of course, does not necessitate (or even allow) that a tutor discuss it with a writer, and as we provided more context for the writing samples, tutors became increasingly uncertain about labeling non-standard forms as errors. What if the writer doesn’t want grammar help? What if the writer wants grammar help, but this particular usage is an expression of their identity? What if it is an expression of their identity but they want to learn the rule in SWE anyway? And what if the paper deadline is in an hour? As tutors increasingly recognized the importance of context and relationships in these conversations about errors and non-standard usage, the layers of possibility within any given sentence became overwhelmingly varied. We reminded tutors to understand each writer’s goals and to ask writers to paraphrase their writing or clarify their intention before deciding whether to address an error. But we also introduced a heuristic to guide them in this process: a Decision Tree for Addressing Sentence-Level Concerns (fig. 4).

The first question in the Decision Tree asks tutors to consider whether the non-standard form is an error. It is followed by a series of additional questions, though, signaling that error identification is the first but not the only condition to consider. We noted that there are many off-ramps in the Decision Tree. If the tutor doesn’t know the rule, if sentence-level correction doesn’t fit the writer’s goals, or if the construction doesn’t interfere with meaning—in all of these cases, the answer about whether to address the non-standard form would be “no.” Moreover, if the writer is on a tight schedule or if the tutor doesn’t have a trusting relationship with the writer, sentence-level issues are often not the appropriate focus. We tell tutors that they do not need to memorize all the steps but that, in any given session, this tool can help them remember and consider the importance of context and relationships in deciding whether to address a potential error in student writing. The Decision Tree operationalizes the advice of scholars like Grimm and Shafer to centralize student choice and agency, and it gives tutors permission, when students ask for it, to spend time considering sentence-level choices.

Our training in inclusive sentence-level support was reviewed positively by tutor participants, who overwhelmingly noted that the sessions contributed to their learning of equitable tutoring practices, their perspective on offering sentence-level support, and their engagement in antiracist tutoring (fig. 5).³ The best measure of success, however, may be that tutors, recognizing the value of providing sentence-level support as part of becoming a more inclusive Writing Center, have asked for additional training on grammar and mechanics. We continue to expand our training for tutors in standard usage, but not because we are becoming more prescriptive in our approach to grammar. Giving tutors a stronger command of the rules of SWE, with the caveat to prioritize context and relationships when deciding to address grammar, ultimately serves the larger goal of giving writers more agency in choosing the direction of the tutoring session and taking ownership of their writing.

Notes

Student focus group data was collected by Bridget Draxler and Diane LeBlanc as part of a separate IRB-approved study of our first-year writing preparation courses. Other data were collected through TutorTrac, our tutor reporting software, and tutor surveys collected prior to our training on inclusive sentence-level support.
Other sentences that led to fruitful conversation included the following:

This is the story of my brother, my best friend
and my childhood nemesis.
The chairman was charismatic, and the board
members who supported him
wholeheartedly approved his proposals
every time.
The voters have several options; mailing in the
ballot, dropping off the ballot early at City
Hall, or voting in person on election day.
I provided documentation to the subjects who
I interviewed.
If a consumer focuses on the organic label
alone he is not necessarily “thinking
green.”
The athlete lost the tournament and the trophy.
This was his last.
Humans are over consuming the boundary
natural resources that we have.
From wildfires in Los Angeles to flash floods in
Indonesia, Nature is reacting to the man-
made damage being done.

3. We also conducted a pre- and post-test with tutors in which we asked tutors to assign a number to each word in the list of crucial vocabulary (fig. 6). They chose from 0 to 2 based on their knowledge of each word— ‘0’ means that you have never heard the term, ‘1’ means that you recognize the term or you know what it is, and ‘2’ means that you could explain the term to someone without any difficulty. The growth in tutor knowledge of these concepts can be seen in the results of the post-test (fig. 7).

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