Mary,
   There's probably some attention to this in the Writing Center 
literature, and you'd no doubt get a different kind of answer on a 
Writing Center list.  Here's some reaction from a practitioner with lots 
of experience in the area. It might be something you can pass along as a 
somewhat professional perspective.
1)  It is very important for teachers to set high standards and to be 
clear and articulate about those standards. (If your experience is 
typical, this rarely happens.) The Writing Center is then in much better 
position to help students reach those standards.  "Grading the grammar" 
is simply not a clear articulation to the student (or the center) of 
what is expected.  Compare this, for example, to a directive stating 
that a paper should provide clear descriptions of both sides of a topic 
in question or a paper should describe and critique an approach offered 
by X, and so on.  "Grading the grammar" is a long way from being clear. 
I know of a writing center locally where tutors help students take out 
all passives for a picky (I should add ignorant) teacher and put them 
back in for a picky lab instructor.  What's to keep this from 
degenerating into meeting a particular teacher's unreflective 
idiosyncrasies? (The suggestions being given to you by others address 
these questions. Even English teachers are not particularly thoughtful 
or consistent in what they "correct".)
2)  The chances that a typical Education teacher knows enough grammar to 
do this usefully are pretty slim.  Is this an attempt to enforce 
standards or an attempt to help students achieve them?  Could an 
Education teacher simply tell a student that a paper is unacceptable and 
then send them to the Writing Center?  Is the Writing Center, then, in 
danger of being a remedial center and not a true writing center?  (Is 
this one more attempt to demean what writing centers are all about?) 
Shouldn't grammar be thought of as part of many substantial standards?
3)  Is grammar being thought of entirely in terms of error?  Is some 
attention being paid to coherence and cohesion as built through the 
movement of sentences? Is the student working with new kinds of texts, 
being unpracticed in their conventions? Are discipline specific 
conventions being addressed within the classroom?
4)  The problem, of course, is that you are working with students (and 
no doubt teachers) who know very little about the grammar of their own 
language.  Simply correcting error without a deeper understanding (and 
without sensitivity to the writer's evolving voice) may do little to 
correct error and much to demean the whole writing process.
    The key here, though, is to make it very clear to everyone involved 
that you are more interested in high standards than anyone else in the 
college,  and that you share their hope that all students will become 
highly competent writers, very comfortable with professional and 
discipline based writing, able to revise their own writing down to the 
level of the sentences, very much aware of the limitations of what they 
know but aware of ways to get better. Too often, I think, writing 
centers give the impression that grammar is beneath them, that they are 
not remedial centers. The right approach to take, I think, is one of 
shared concern, interested in how content area teachers and writing 
center tutors (programs) might work in harmony to be both demanding and 
helpful.  (Standards shouldn't just be gates to keep.  Students need to 
grow during their time with us, and we need to help them with that.) 
    How can we talk to these people if we have no thoughtful plan of our 
own?

Craig
mary murray wrote:

>Hello All,
>An education professor has asked me to give him a list
>of articles that would support having all education
>professors grade the grammar of student writing--any
>suggestions?  
>Mary Murray
>
>Mary M. Murray, Ph.D.
>Director, Writing Center and WAC
>Cleveland State University
>2121 Euclid Avenue
>Cleveland, OH 44115
>216-687-6982     fax:  216-687-6943
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