Abstract
The writing center asynchronous format traces its history back to the 1990s as an equitable modality for student-writers to fulfill their writing desires and needs. Asynchronous session notes are a successor to the traditional, in-person, synchronous session notes that have remained a mainstay in writing center practices as a viable research artifact. Despite the mayhem invoked on in-person, synchronous tutoring services in 2020, few research inquiries have been made since to better understand the conveyed values of asynchronous notes through tutoring sessions. I sought to understand the conveyed implicit and explicit values of a university’s asynchronous tutor note sheet. I put the tutor feedback through a corpus analysis generator and used the constant comparative method to compare the tutor feedback with the terminology found in the university’s writing center note sheet. My findings indicate tutors focused their feedback on global concerns over local concerns in the asynchronous modality. Additionally, tutors conveyed a wide array of implicit and explicit values in these notes, including the explicit values of linguistic politeness, the organization and development of ideas within paragraphs rather than amongst paragraphs, and assuming the role of a reader to help tutees address global concerns. Indirect feedback addressed clarity issues and other lower order concerns. The conclusions reached are that the university should foster the growth of the asynchronous modality, should make necessary revisions to the existing tutor note document to promote writing center asynchronous values, and should adopt a values statement for the writing center.