Spoken written-language in writing center talk

Our goals are to examine the validity of concerns about plagiarism and, more speculatively, about short circuiting students' thinking in writing center tutoring. Specifically, we describe spoken written-language (SWL), the oral language that writing center tutors produce for potential use in the student writers' written products. We analyze SWL from a specialized corpus of 37 conferences in terms of three variables: (1) the length of each SWL occurrence, (2) the frequency with which SWL occurs in a given conference, and (3) the extent to which an SWL occurrence is ready for placement in a written text. Our analysis indicates that student writers' use of tutors' SWL in their papers does not represent plagiarism and that, in fact, it may help student writers move forward in their writing.