Look Who’s Talking!: Gender Equality in Writing Center Consultations

Abstract

This study adopts an empirical, linguistic approach to investigate the effect of writing-partner gender on writing-center consultation dynamics. Based on Deborah Tannen’s solidarity vs. dominance theory and previous writing center scholarship, I expected to find unbalanced power dynamics in mixed-gender consultations and balanced power dynamics in same-gender consultations. However, a quantitative analysis of turn-taking from eight consultations shows no statistically significant difference between student and partner in either session scenario (p≥0.10). Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of five linguistic metrics reveals that both types were generally of a collaborative nature. It is theorized that the emphasis placed on collaboration and non-directive partnering pedagogy in writing centers outweighs the gender differences found in speech in other contexts. This study thus has exciting implications for gender politics as the linguistic gender equality found in the collected corpus in some sense makes the writing center feminist rather than just feminized.