ABSTRACT
Thirty-seven years later, the “hosting” metaphor remains a usable one, an apt one—perhaps more apt now in the current landscape of higher education where the terms, parameters, and stakes for learning, knowing, and becoming have grown increasingly complex for degree seekers arriving at the writing center with far more than erroneous comma placement on their contemporary minds. A little over a decade after North’s important paper, Muriel Harris further defined the work that writing tutors engage in her 1995 piece entitled, “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors”. Slowly, but with increasing lucidity, the people began to see that what writing centers offered was indeed much more than a quick “fix” for the ailing text. Many—many kinds of inspiring, challenging, informative, resilient testimonies of what tutoring’s powerful interchange can mean both academically and personally to writers using their texts and their writing center visits and experiences to become more incisive, empathetic, enlightened, bold, and rhetorically honest individuals.
