Currently in the University of Richmond’s Writing Center, the policy is for students to bring a printed copy of their paper to the tutorial. Often the student or the peer tutor will read the paper aloud and both parties will discuss the paper together. However, this does not mean that a student is not allowed to bring in his or her paper saved on a disk. If the project was hypertextual, it would lose its effect when printed onto paper.

There will be aspects of the tutorial that change when it is performed in front of the computer. As M C Morgan explains in the article, Hands Off: Ten Techniques for Tutoring on Word Processors, "The text, it is argued, is so in flux, so volatile, so much like a still-wet canvas or an emerging drawing, that teachers or tutors or readers can heavily influence its shaping by the writer-at-work with a comment, a remark, the point of a finger" (1). Morgan’s article centers on word processing, but it can easily be applied to evaluating hypertext on the computer as well. In both cases it is dangerous for the tutor to sit in front of the screen because he or she has such a direct influence on the content of the project. The writer should remain in front of the computer and in control of the writing by performing all of the keystrokes.

Instead of having a correction placed alongside of the original section as in printed papers, changes can be made directly in the text of a computer project. The writer may lose the option of later comparing his or her original words to a tutors suggested change. For this reason, a tutor must be very careful not to dictate the student’s writing. Morgan gives this advice, "The writing is the student’s and it is our job, mine too, when I work as a tutor, to come to an understanding of what the writer wants to do instead of imposing our meaning on the writing by imposing our choices on it" (2).

One advantage of viewing a project while it is still on the computer is that it loses some of its bulk. A narrow region of the project appears on the screen as opposed to a lump of printed text. This enables tutors to get the students to really focus on their writing. Viewing only a small passage at a time often makes the revision process less overwhelming. Another advantage of viewing the project on the computer monitor is that the text can be manipulated. Students can quickly add lines and move around existing elements of their writing to get a better feel for the best organizational strategy. Students often can learn a great deal about their own writing, when the text is so easily mobile. It forces them to question their motives for placing sections of their writing where they did on the web site, and it makes rearrangement of the text less daunting. Morgan agrees, saying that a writer can, "manipulate[s] the text to discover her own designs" (15).

The goal of peer tutors always stands to create better writers and not to produce a perfect paper. Tutors should enable writers to become more proficient at identifying and correcting problems in their writing. As Donald M. Murray discusses in his article, Teaching the Other Self: The Writer’s First Reader, the writer needs to develop the ability to question his or her own reasoning in a paper and realize when it is not working. In the peer tutorial, the tutor will often act as the writer’s other self in order to present an example of the questions a writer should begin asking him or herself. This becomes even more important when a student is writing hypertext. As Murray notes, "The larger the audience, the more universal we want our message to be, the more specific we must become" (53). When projects are done in hypertext, they are no longer viewed by the teacher and class alone, they can instead be seen by anyone browsing the web site. For this reason, it is crucial that the writing is clear and that its scope is not too wide. The tutor becomes a potential browser of the web site and can give his or her reaction as such.

In many ways the peer-to-peer tutorial with hypertext may not be that different from the tutorial in which a linear paper is discussed. The methods of evaluating a hypertextual paper and discussion of it will be different, but the relationship between the tutor and the writer may remain the same. Writers of hypertext will need the same motivation, the same empathy, and the same level of comfort while discussing their writing as a writer of a linear paper would. They might even need more encouragement because many students are still inexperienced in the language of the Internet. Those of us in English 376 who had never done a web project before were very frustrated in the beginning because we had only a vague idea about what goes into a hypertext project. Fortunately, Dr. Essid provided the needed reassurance that the web holds no fleeting secrets. He showed us that the same planning that we had always used for linear papers could be used to create hypertext.

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