How much to too much??

So in trying to find the Grimm article that was mentioned in the first article I took a look at, I found a different article that interested me! It is called " Are Writing Centers Ethical" by Irene Clark and Dave Healy. I'm not sure how to get the link because it just came up as a PDF when i clicked on it, but if you go to Google scholars and type in the name of the article it should come up!

Again, this article was really long so i focused on a few pages of it that seemed to stick out to me. These pages talked about the different kinds of help that could be given to students in the writing centers. Some people are of the belief that writing centers should focus only on grammatical help because otherwise, the students who visit the centers could be accused of plagiarism. This group warms against replacing students words with your own and focusing only on the very superficial elements of the text. The group of the extreme opposites cites of examples of professors re-writing sections of their papers right in front of them and saying it was one of the most helpful things they had experienced in their writing process.

This posed a really interesting dilemma for me- how much help is too much? At what point does writing center collaboration cross the boundary of appropriate help? When have you taken your clients original piece and made it your own? I can see how this would be an issue because I sometimes have to fight the urge of re-writing sentences here and there in papers that I proofread because it just seems like an easy, time effective way to help someone better their papers. I guess that the best scenario would be to get your clients to the point where they can re-write their own sentences, but how can you do that in an hour? How can we strike the balance between directive and observative? ( thats not actually a word but I couldn't think of what the opposite would be!!)

I also thought it was interesting that this article cited the North article that we read for class. It seems to me that a lot of the literature on writing centers seems to be very linked and interconnected. It almost seems like its more of a conversation between writers where they are building and expanding upon each others ideas!

Have a greaaaaaaaaaaat monday! ( if thats possible!)