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The writing conversation

It could have turned out differently. When a Procter & Gamble grant enabled John O'Neill, the Edmund A. LeFevre Professor of English, to hit the road in the mid-1980s to study writing centers on other campuses, the question of what might work for Hamilton was very much an open one. O'Neill, who ultimately played a defining role in creating Hamilton's Writing Center and would serve as its first director, recalls visiting the mazelike facility at Cornell, where work stations were cubicles for student privacy and isolation. The philosophy implicit in that arrangement, O'Neill says, was that writing was "a solitary activity." It felt wrong; he leaned instead toward the model at Ohio Wesleyan — a large, open area with communal tables. "I thought that looked quite attractive," he says.

At almost the same moment, Hamilton faculty members and administrators were beginning to think about a related issue: What part might personal computers play in writing and learning? And one of the first lessons of the digital era quickly turned the conventional wisdom about writing on its head and confirmed O'Neill's emerging belief: Writing was no longer a solitary business, carried out by lone students hunched over typewriters. Writing was a social act, a kind of focused conversation in which people learned and improved by bouncing ideas, responses and skills around like basketballs on a playground. And a social act needed a social space — open, accessible, near the action.

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"The advice I give my clients is what I learned and shared every day in the Writing Center: A good idea is worthy of the time and effort required to communicate it effectively."
— Sean Ryan ’97


"From my Hamilton professors I learned the utility and mechanics of persuasive writing. Sharon and my Writing Center colleagues exposed me to the joys of writing by enabling me to frequently discuss ‘writing’ as expression of ‘self’ or ideas."
— Desmond Bailey ’94


"Being connected to the Writing Center is great. Sharon and Dori and the rest of the tutors understand a good pun and appreciate the use of well-placed semicolon, which sounds dorky, but it’s true."
— Laura Hartz ’07

"Once we began to think about the role computers would play in the Writing Center, we realized that we wanted students to be able to turn to the person next to them and say, 'How do you do this?'" O'Neill says. Similarly, it wouldn't do to have the place tucked away in a corner of campus like a slightly seedy clinic. That's what he had discovered during many of his campus visits: "A lot of times, the writing centers were hard to find because the schools were kind of embarrassed about even having one."

But O'Neill concedes that he "first felt more comfortable with the notion of professional tutors rather than peer tutors." Hired guns were then in vogue, and a number of composition scholars and writing center administrators told him that they were the way to go. "I felt that the 'wrangling' of student tutors — the training, the scheduling and so forth — seemed like a huge burden," he recalls. O'Neill wasn't alone. "It was a big transition," Professor of History Esther Kanipe says. "There were some faculty who questioned whether this was something students could do. I suspect there still may be a few."

However, necessity soon became a virtue. In 1985, as O'Neill, Kanipe and the rest of a writing committee appointed by the Committee on Academic Policy and chaired by Professor of Music G. Roberts Kolb struggled to give shape to a Writing Center proposal, it became clear that the budget would not support a platoon of professional tutors. "It was never an acrimonious committee," Kanipe says. "We were all committed to improving writing instruction, and it's personally important to me as a historian. But we also had a realistic sense of the resources available at a small liberal arts college like Hamilton."

The College's Writing Center would have to defy the conventional wisdom. Students would mentor students. The center would succeed — or fail — with peer tutors.
 

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