Electronic Writing Centers

This book describes the emerging practice of e-mail tutoring; one-to-one correspondence between college students and writing tutors conducted over electronic mail. It reviews the history of Composition Studies, paying special attention to those ways in which writing centers and computers and composition have been previously hailed within a narrative of functional literacy and quick-fix solutions. The author suggests a new methodology for tutoring, and a new mandate for the writing center: a strong connection between the rhythms of extended, asynchronous writing and dialogic literacy. The electronic writing center can become a site for informed resistance to functional literacy.

Describes the emerging practice of e-mail tutoring and suggests a new methodology for tutoring as well as a new mandate for the writing center.

Booknews

Coogan (English, Illinois Institute of Technology) theorizes the electronic writing center as a dialogic space where students and tutors learn to value those off-stage voices and contradictory impulses that inform their writing. By connecting e-mail tutoring with similar practices in the classroom, he challenges teachers to not only imagine new uses for computers in the writing center, but to implement a new practice of dialogic literacy in the discipline of composition. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

DAVID COOGAN is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology.