Response to Molly Wingate's "What Line?"

How does Wingate define/describe the difference between
"writer-centered, process-oriented"
and
"tutor-centered, product-oriented"?

Which does she seem to favor and why?
What other quotes from the text seem poignant?

Post due by Tuesday, August 5.

Focus Draft

The assignment, due in a week, is a three to five page paper on the effects that factories have on the environment. Tonight I need to write everything I can think of on the topic to sort out later. I call this the "vomit draft", because it reads like a bunch of nonsense vomited out of my brain. So environment...trees, yeah start with trees.
Trees depend in sunlight and clean air to grow, and in turn...
I like grilled cheese sandwiches...with a slice of tomato.
Where did that come from? I am kinda hungry. I'll get an apple to snack on, it'll help me focus better.
Okay, back to paper. Trees provide us many aspects of our daily lives. Everyone knows trees provide wood, but have you ever considered the living beings inside the wood? Birds, squirrels and many different species of insect would have to find new places to live if we started cutting down trees in favor factories. This means squirrels would start making nests in your house and you might have baby squirrels in your cupboards.
Do squirrels build nests? How come I have never seen a baby squirrel? When I was growing up, there was a squirrel in our neighborhood that would come up and eat marshmallows out of your hand. I bet marshmallows weren't healthy for him. Wonder what baby squirrels look like? I'll Google it. No, I have to write this paper.
Factories, while beneficial to communities, are increasingly devastating to the environment. That sounds like a thesis statement. It will go toward the beginning of my paper when I polish this up. I have an important part of my paper written already! I should take a break and check my e-mail.
Two hours later:
As I was logging in to check my e-mail, one of my friends sent me an instant message. I hadn't talked to her in a awhile, and so I chatted and did some research for the paper. Baby squirrels are cute. Learned that not only should I have never fed that squirrel a marshmallow, but it was possibly sick to be coming so close to humans. So after quickly researching rabies I discovered I would be dead by now if I had been infected. Then I got concerned over the nutritional value of marshmallows. After some quick discussion, my friend and i realized neither of us knew what was in a marshmallow. I looked it up, found out it is mostly corn starch and sugar. Disappointing, but not unexpected. However, I did find instructions telling me how to make a marshmallow bra, information that was shared with my friend over IM. Finds such as that must be shared, so I sent out an e-mail to all of my friends. I then responded to a few other messages, and logged off IM as I was getting sleepy.
As I stood up, a piece of paper fell off my desk. My assignment landed on my foot, the typed words glaring at me. Which has led me to sitting here, writing explaining why I have to close out of all open applications, turn the radio off, and begin to focus on my paper.
How often does this happen to you as a writer? Have you found anything to help combat this? Did any of you have a neighborhood pet? Does the destractibility help or harm your writings?

Responding to William Macauley Jr.'s "Setting the Agenda"

This essay is an excerpt from Ben Rafoth's A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One, which is in its 2nd edition (2005). I find it particularly appropriate for Rafoth to begin this collection with "Setting the Agenda"!
Agendas can be handy, yet particularly tricky when you do not have the slightest clue about where you should be at the end of a 30 minute session with any given paper . . . For another example, if pressed, I would have no idea how to set an agenda for this blog because I have no idea where it might take us . . .

However, my questions for you folks, for this post, would be: Did you find this essay useful? If so, in what specific ways? What parts were dull or non-applicable to our setting? Why? What observations can you make about Macauley's style or voice? Could you write something like this for, say, a conference?

Try to respond by Thursday, July 24th.

Welcome to the OU-C Writing Center's Blog

This blog has been established in the Summer of 2008 to serve as a virtual space for Writing Center tutors and staff to read, reflect, and write about shared experiences and visions of hope for the work accomplished here at Ohio University's Chillicothe campus.

We hope that this blog also becomes a public space where the work we do is not only more transparent to other students, faculty, and administrators, but also becomes an inviting conversation about the ways we can improve writing to learn strategies in our classrooms, in our careers, and even in our personal lives.