Dear OWL Mail: Centering Writers' Concerns in Online Tutor Preparation

Abstract

Much of the scholarship on writing centers narrates the stories of writers and their texts as told by tutors, administrators, and researchers. In an effort to bring writers' voices to the forefront, this empirical study examines the types of questions and concerns writers have about their writing as submitted through the Purdue Writing Lab's OWL Mail, an online, asynchronous question-and-answer email platform. Through the employment of what Richard H. Haswell (2005) calls RAD research - that which is replicable, aggregable, and data-supported - thousands of users' inquiries, submitted from 2006 to 2010, were analyzed and taxonomized into six primary question categories - Documentation Style, Grammar, Beyond the Scope of OWL Mail, Punctuation, Genre, and Lexicon - plus Other. The implications of these results and the ways they may inform tutor preparation in response to writers' email inquiries are discussed. Suggestions for future research are also provided