In Jane Cogie’s paper, “Avoiding the Proofreading Trap: The Value of the Error Correction Process.” Cogie advocates for writing center tutors to resist becoming “cultural informants”. Where when there are “relatively few sentence-level errors, the cultural informant approach… can begin to feel a lot like proofreading, with the student becoming increasing passive, knowing that the tutor will be there to help.” From there, the other authors in the piece introduce a frankly, excessive, chart that promote students to us a “learner’s dictionary minimal marking, and error logs.”
I disagreed with Cogie’s argument because I believe there is value in being a cultural informant to non-native students.…