In her July 21st blog post on AXIS, Kathryn Raign asked whether writing centers housed in insalubrious environments, and their directors, are being unfairly evaluated by student users. She posited that they are, due to her opportunity to measure student satisfaction with the space in a new location when the center she directs was moved. In the center that houses AXIS and its parent journal, Praxis, we have recently had a chance to evaluate Raign’s argument for ourselves.

It's been a big summer for Praxis. Thank you.

As an open-access internationally peer-reviewed academic journal, it should come as no surprise that Praxis believes in the importance of scholarship generally, and of writing center scholarship in particular. We are dedicated to sharing our authors' contributions to the long effort involved in improving our grasp of the situation in which we find ourselves as scholars and as writing center staffers, and we believe that effort includes attention to the institutional and social landscape in which writing centers and scholars exist. Toward that end, today Praxis Managing Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks discusses how data, ignorance, and instruction traverse the divide between individual and institution with Gerry Canavan, assistant professor at Marquette University and editor of Science Fiction, Film and Television (Cambridge UP, 2015) and The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015) with Eric Carl Link.

What can the writing center do to amplify voices before they are lost?

At the writing center I help staff, we've just re-opened for summer, which means one thing: weeks upon weeks of personal statements and applications, mostly (so far) for med school. I think this may be my favorite genre, even though it is probably the most difficult and confounding genre of writing I can think of. After all, where else does a writer have to brag, be modest, and show professionalism and ability while gesturing modestly toward their relative lack of both, all while asking for something they desperately want?

In the writing center I help staff, the heuristic we use to guide consultations is to 'focus on the writer, not the writing.' Obviously from a service standpoint this is smart, since we won't be open long if we alienate the people that choose to come to the writing center by ignoring them in favor of their work; this policy also helps us avoid becoming an editing service. But I suspect the real point of this dictum to focus on a writer and not on their writing is to avoid using what I call a product-oriented worldview during the writing center encounter, because to do so would be to blunt the positive impact of that encounter.

In reading Lester Faigley's address to the 2015 South Central Writing Center Association published last week in Praxis, specifically his discussion of how complex writing center consultations are in cognitive terms, I am struck by two things: the importance of writing center practice to writing center theory, and the immense research possibilities presented by writing centers.