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What I want to suggest sounds absurdly obvious outside the fields of writing center and composition scholarship, but more interesting and, I hope, oddly fresh within them: writing centers should turn their attention to the tutoring of critical reading and intellectual writing. Joseph Harris's two books Rewriting. How to Do Things with Texts (2006) and A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (1997) - the former, written for students; the latter, written for composition speciaUsts - suggest a way for writing centers to embark on this project. Informed by Harris's approach, I urge writing center practitioners to rethink their stances toward the tutoring of writing in the university. Such a reorientation will depend, I argue, on acknowledging that what usuaUy makes university writing distinctive - and what shapes intellectual writing - is its engagement with aU kinds of texts, especially written texts. Writing center practitioners need to focus more expUcidy on the teaching and tutoring of what I call "the reading writer" than we have done in the past; doing so should become a crucial part of our effort to articulate a vision of our work that goes beyond mere service. Although the conversation about the art of tutoring has been richer in writing center scholarship than the conversation about the crafts of critical reading and intellectual writing, we need to attend to all three with equal subdety. I suspect many writing center practitioners will hold similar views to mine, even though there simply hasn't been a lot of talk about advanced reading and writing practices in the writing center.
Instead, our discussion about the tutoring of writing often seems to be derived from two opposing images of the writing center, one practical, the other visionary and radical. On the one hand, we hear a lot about the dutiful writing center - the practical writing center or comma shop, the place to fix remedial errors. This writing center works efficiendy to solve the writing problems students have which others don't want to confront. Although understaffed and underappreciated, it is still "the academy's prime site of social and Unguistic regulation" (Welch 53). If this writing center's vision is usuaUy shaped by the stultifying ethics of service, its practices are too. We notice, for instance, the tedious appeal...