It’s Notwhat You Say, but How You Say It (and Towhom): Accommodating Gender in the Writing Conference

A central mission of writing centers is to help writers in all disciplines, at all levels of proficiency, learn how to improve their writing skills. The primary tool for achieving this goal is the writing conference, in which a writer receives personal attention from a trained tutor who works with the writer on a specific piece of writing. Conferences, as Kenneth Bruffee suggested in his seminal essay on collaborative learning, have the potential to generate new ideas via conversation—a conversation in this case between a writing tutor and a student (645). In a writing conference, the tutor is challenged to facilitate conversation with a diverse and changing writer population which, in a successful conference, acts as a vehicle for the collaborative creation of new thoughts. Thus, conferencing and conversation are intimately linked, as the productivity of the conference depends on the quality of conversation in which the writing tutor and student engage. A tutor’s ability to hold a productive dialogue with the student is the difference between a successful conference, after which the student writer feels ready to tackle revisions with new ideas, and an unsuccessful conference, which may leave both the tutor and the student feeling frustrated by a lack of communication, and, consequently, progress. For the tutor, facilitating productive conversation about an unfamiliar piece of writing requires careful attention to the back-and-forth of the dialogue and the ability to respond and adapt immediately to conversational cues from the student. A tutor’s spontaneous conversational responses are influenced by more than the content of the conversation. Although “content” factors, such as the paper topic, the genre of writing, and the current state of the draft play a key role in determining what ideas will emerge in the conference conversation, the flow and development of the conversation are also affected by how the tutor and student enact and respond to each other’s social identities.1 In a writing conference conversation, particularly if it is between strangers, the social identities that could affect conversation often correspond to physically apparent characteristics that identify different persons as belonging to different social groups. Such outwardly visible characteristics lead others to make conclusions, correct or not, about an individual’s status “at first glance.” Social group identifiers, which affect both how a conversational partner thinks of himor herself and how he or she is viewed by other conversation participants, include race, age, and gender. Feminist scholar Evelyn Ashton-Jones identified gender as a feature of conversation participants that can profoundly impact conversational behaviors, proposing that the “ideology of gender” (the social expectations associated with one or the other gender) is reproduced in conversation (7). Thus, in a conference, tutors and tutees may reproduce social gender norms in their conversational interactions. Bringing together discourse analysis studies of gender and language and studies that examine the role of student and teacher or tutor gender on conference conversation, this paper investigates how student gender influences the conference style of undergraduate peer writing tutors (specifically, tutors from the Writing Fellows Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison). I explore in a small case study how a student and a writing fellow may inter-