ABSTRACT
To provide a fundamental description of the specialized corpus and to build a foundation for understanding its aboutness, I analyzed the writing center talk in terms of some basic characteristics, characteristics that give a sense of the size and diversity of the corpus and the tutor and student-writer subcorpora that comprised it, such as the number of words that tutors and student writers contributed to the conferences. Taken together, these characteristics helped to reveal the essential make-up of the corpus, but they did not distinguish writing center talk from other spoken registers as accurately as the key words, key-word collocations, and lexical bundles that I discuss in chapters 5 and 6.
