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here are all of them, three of them revised, because i haven't been putting them up.

CONTACT ZONE AND BORDERLAND IMPLICATIONS In “Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands,” Carol Severino argues that the view of writing centers as places where diverse ideas and language usages meet is a useful model for examining the role of writing centers at the university. While she often falls into dramatics and redundancy, her main point that the writing center should be thought of as a place of convergence for dialects and ideas is well argued, and I agree with it wholeheartedly, based on my experience at the center. Severino first makes the argument that the writing center is a contact zone, a place where different cultural and literary/linguistic ideas meet, due to the different backgrounds of the students using the center’s resources. Moreover, the writing center can not only be a place for ideas and linguistics to converge, but also to expand, as clients share cultural knowledge with their consultants, and their consultants help them express their identities. I have witnessed this at the Writing Center, as people from many different backgrounds, whether they be social, ethnic, or geographic, bring their assignments in to the consultants. The result of these interactions, argues Severino, is contact literature, which is “often characterized by nativization of a non-native language,” resulting in “autoethnographic texts.” Severino also points out that another contact literature form is the result of the mingling of multiple languages. A student at an American university who is from another country may use his/her native grammatical constructions to say/write something in English, often leading to new words/phrases that better explain an idea than any normal English word would. This is significant not only for the two involved in the writing process, but also for the English language as a developing and changing form of communication. I have observed for an international student from Korea, and he did have new and interesting ways to explain his ideas that were not ‘normal’ phrasings in English, but nevertheless explained his feelings better than a native English speaker could. The consultant and I, as the observer, were able to witness these new ideas and linguistics in his paper, and I for one enjoyed hearing them, thinking about what they meant to him, and finding ways for him to use them in a grammatically correct way. Contact dialects, on the other hand, are the spoken equivalent of contact literatures. Severino argues that while informal language is often used in the writing center, it should not be confused with the complex ideas being explained with informal language. She quotes Judith Langer as calling this “literate thinking,” where the thinker is able to critically engage with his/her paper and mold it to his liking. I also have seen this in the center, as the consultants will speak somewhat colloquially about a paper in a very in-depth, critical way, attempting to correct the colloquialisms and grammatical errors in a paper. This “easy going” type of speech allows the consultants to talk to their clients in a more direct, personal way that often helps move the clients in the right direction. Carol Severino argues correctly in Linguistic Borders and Contact Zones that the Writing Center is a place where different ideas and linguistics collide, to the cultural and linguistic benefit of both the client and the consultant. My limited experience at the center only supports these ideas.
WORKS CITED Severino, Carol. “Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands.” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together (2001): 230-239.