By Izzy Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Million Dollar Question

At a weekly training meeting for new consultants in the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center, my tutor trainer—Greta, a first-year Ph.D. student who researches tutor self-efficacy—asked us to solve the million-dollar writing center question: How can we get students to buy in to tutoring? How can we make students feel comfortable in the writing center?

Instantly, I thought about how embarrassing writing is. It’s horrible to bring in your half-baked ideas and run-on sentences and show it to someone you perceive to be good at writing (whatever that is) and ask them to help you.

So, I started thinking about how to make students less embarrassed. The trite sentences we consultants always say to relieve that pressure—I’m not here to judge!—don’t end up going very far. But what if I could help by giving students a different place to put their embarrassment; what if I started trying to be “the cringiest person in the room?”

My theory emerged as I prepared for my next appointment: if I throw myself wholeheartedly into the student’s writing—inflecting my voice to sound impassioned, asking thousands of questions, talking about what I was interested in about the student’s work—students might throw themselves more enthusiastically into our conversation in return. At the very least, maybe my tutor-cringe would protect students from cringing at themselves in these sessions. Maybe the best I could do was just to allow them to leave the session relieved that however bad my writing is, it isn’t nearly as cringe as my tutor.

I’d like to share with you how I’m understanding and refining the concept of tutoring-as-hospitality and cringe as a method of hospitable tutoring. It’s my hope that telling my story makes you laugh, cringe a bit, and think deeply about the ways in which you leverage your body, persona, identity, and relationality within the tutoring situation.

Cringing for the First Time

In the fall, I met several times with a student in a first-year composition course working on a multimodal public argument—one of our major unit assignments in the first class in the FYC sequence here at the University of Tennessee—about the video game Cult of the Lamb. I felt out of my depth, anxiety fluttering; I knew nothing about this game, and the professor’s rubric for the assignment was confusing. Worse, the student himself was uncertain, unenthused, his body language completely withdrawn. If I wanted to pull him out of his shell—as well as learn something about the game, his assignment, his argument, and his writing—I needed to make it easy for the student to feel safe and welcomed in our conversation. It was time to test my theory. I steeled myself to be cringe.

I started asking incessant questions about the game, its mechanics, its art style, the soundtrack—anything that would get him talking. I responded completely overzealously anytime he looked even mildly interested in what I was asking. At first, he seemed confused: I was spending valuable minutes asking him what he thought about the roguelike game mechanics instead of checking his grammar or telling him his thesis needed revision. But as we kept talking to build a relationship—instead of talking to fix perceived problems with his writing—he bought in to my overexuberance. We had some insightful conversations on the game as an ironic take on the American perception of cults, and just like that, he had a nuanced, persuasive argument outlined. We were genuinely laughing together at the end of the session, as I booked him a follow-up appointment for a couple of weeks later—an appointment both he and I seemed enthusiastic for.

Coming back to tutor training the next week, I excitedly shared my discovery: cringe worked! Not only had being cringe allowed the student to feel less embarrassed about the act of presenting their writing, but cringe had also generated community between myself and the student—our relationship was forged in those moments of bonding over the uniqueness of the storyline, of talking about the game as an exemplar of the strategies of cults.

My tutor trainer recommended I talk to Kat, the Managing Director of the Herbert Writing Center, about the reading and research she has been doing on tutoring-as-hospitality work. That’s when I began to start thinking about cringe as a method of hospitable tutoring.

Hospitality in the Writing Center

Writing center scholarship is no stranger to constructing the writing center as a place of hospitality and understanding tutoring as hospitality work. Notably, Richard and Janis Haswell’s Hospitality and Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession argues that hospitality ought to be a tenet of English departments, classrooms, and spaces of learning.

Let me clarify, though, what I mean when I write hospitality. I’m not talking about the industry of hospitality, which operates mostly on economic exchange. I’m not talking about basic social niceties like Please and Thank you and That weather sure is something, huh? Instead, I understand hospitality as something relational, radical, cultural, ethical, and deeply hopeful. Hospitality is both something we as people do but also something our relationships become.

The easiest touchstone for me—a former classicist—is to think about the ancient Greeks and their concept of xenia. Closely related to the Greek root for stranger (xenos), xenia required hosts to welcome travelers, guests, and strangers under their roof, no matter the circumstances, and offer them food, shelter, and friendly company, because you never knew which stranger could be a god in disguise.

To me, the Writing Center is a place of hospitality much like the Greek concept of xenia: we have a sense of obligation to take in any stranger because we care about those traveling strangers, who might be looking for resources or simply a place to rest on their journeys of writing. Jeffry Davis, writing about the nomadic nature of writing centers, names the center as an oasis in the desert, “a fertile spot in the midst of an arid region” where travelers can rest in safety and flourish under the right conditions of care (Davis 14).

To be an oasis, we first have to understand our role as consultants in maintaining the hospitality room. Dale Jacobs argues that consultants ought to position themselves in the physical and intellectual space of the tutoring session. Hospitable tutoring isn’t checked out—it doesn’t ask tutors to couch their own opinions to please the student. Instead, hospitality asks us to show our cards:

“When we want to be really hospitable we not only have to receive strangers but also to confront them by an unambiguous presence, not hiding ourselves behind neutrality but showing our ideas, opinions, and life style clearly and distinctly. No real dialogue is possible between somebody and a nobody.” (Nouwen 70; qtd. in Jacobs 569)

Hospitality, then, isn’t about positioning the tutor as a faceless, personality-less nobody whose only goal is to be caring and provide helpful feedback. In fact, I’d argue it’s impossible to care about students if you’re nobody. Care in tutoring-as-hospitality emerges from a deeply embodied perspective of understanding how horribly embarrassing it is to ask for help on your writing. Every writing consultant knows how their students feel, squirming in the chair opposite their tutor, waiting for the verdict like it’s the blade of a guillotine slamming down, because we’ve all been there before, seeking feedback on our own writing. Hospitable tutoring starts there, in that chair, terrified to be perceived as a writer.

Back to the million-dollar question: What can we do to make our students comfortable in that chair? How do we get students to show up to tutoring, willing to talk and think about their writing—especially in the age of generative AI, where the allure of the faultless robot can alleviate the embarrassment of a human reading your writing? 

Becoming Somebody Cringeworthy

I told a student working on a Twitter thread for his multimodal public argument assignment that I play rugby. He was proposing an argument that although women who play professional basketball are paid far less than men who play professional basketball, the wage gap shouldn’t be constructed as an issue of gender equality, but rather of economics. The argument irked me, as a woman who’s been playing a highly competitive, masculinizing sport for nearly a decade—a sport which only just created a professional women’s league in the United States. And I’d spent many years in high school trying to convince my male classmates that the gender wage gap was real and something to be concerned by, mostly to no avail; most of them cringed at my annoying feminist tirade.

My job as a consultant isn’t to tell students what to argue. That’s not hospitable. It is, however, hospitable to show up as a whole person, and my whole person is sometimes somewhat cringeworthy.

We sat there, looking at his laptop, hemming and hawing over the argument’s missing piece, and I took the plunge: “Did you know, I play rugby?” He was a bit confused; he said it was cool, but I know he was wondering why on earth it mattered. I told him that because I’m an athlete who plays women’s sports, I’m very familiar with this argument about women being paid less than their male equivalents—often because I see that argument reposted by men who claim that not only should women continue to be paid less, but that those women should also quit the sport entirely. He bristled immediately at this. “I don’t want those guys to retweet my post,” he told me. 

Taking a leap to become Somebody—even if I worried that this Somebody would come across as cringeworthy for caring too much about women’s sports or the gender wage gap—helped this student and I connect. It also helped him find the missing piece of his draft; he needed to acknowledge a counterargument that would help define his audience clearly and weed out anyone he didn’t want to talk to. Being cringe changed the dynamic of our tutoring session. Cringe fortified the tutor-student relationship. And, most importantly, cringe strengthened student writing.

Cringe Theory

Psychological research on cringe paints the phenomenon in a bleaker light than how I view it. Thomas Spiegel argues that cringe goes beyond vicarious shame or embarrassment; it might instead be “an essentially hostile emotion” with a function to create “social distinction” between the cringer and the cringee (Spiegel 230). Similarly, J. Logan Smilges names cringe not as a violation of a social norm, but rather when the cringer and cringee react asymmetrically to that violation. Further, Smilges reckons with the unevenness with which we tend to label people or situations as cringe when they are minoritized, particularly when those “cringee”s are disabled or neurodivergent.

I don’t want to dismiss this perspective on cringe. But I don’t see this “essentially hostile emotion” emerging in writing center work. Driving a wall between the tutor and the student by being too cringe achieves pretty much the clear opposite goal of building connection or making the student feel welcomed and cared for. I don’t want to make students so uncomfortable that they never come back. But being cringe in the writing center isn’t just about adopting a cringeworthy persona, oblivious to social norms. I believe cringe in the writing center shows up because those social norms are broken asymmetrically across the tutor and student experience—because I view tutoring as one thing and students view it as another.

To me, tutoring is relational, hence my attention to rapport-building and hospitality, even when those things (seemingly) have nothing to do with writing; but to students, tutoring might be transactional, e.g. I have to come for extra credit to pass my class, or it might be like a medicine, e.g. I came here so you could fix all my grammar mistakes. Because we have different normative expectations of what tutoring ought to be, or is, me showing up as a hospitable tutor is cringey. I’m overly involved, get way too interested in talking about basketball, laugh too loudly, and ask too many questions. Those behaviors aren’t cringe in and of themselves—they’re cringe because students and I view tutoring as different phenomena.

Cringe as Hospitality and Caring Too Much

So, if cringe shows a gap between how students and consultants perceive tutoring, why does it work in the writing center?

I’m coming back to xenia here: I think being cringe is a way that I, as a host to these traveler-stranger-writers, welcome them, give them the space to ask for help, and reinforce that I am no more superior a writer than they are.

It’s important that I don’t leverage away all my power in a consultation. I am, after all, hired to be a tutor, ostensibly because I’m a “good enough writer” to help other students think and talk about their writing. If I don’t acknowledge that positionality, I run the risk of losing student trust, which runs counter to my quest to try and get students to show up to tutoring.

But if I think of tutoring as hospitality work, where hospitality is a site of learning, a social and ethical relationship between a student and a tutor, I think of student comfort. I think of the oasis. I think of building relationships with the students I see to make them more comfortable talking about their writing. I think of trying to alleviate the embarrassment and judgement I know students feel when they present their writing, because I, too, gag even to think of sending a draft anywhere. I think of reciprocity: students see you trying to meet them as a human, not as a faultless perfect writing robot, and they laugh with you. Students watch you make yourself a bit cringe by exposing that you care very deeply about the tutoring situation, even if they might not.

And you know what’s funny? I think that moment—the moment of cringe, where you lay your cards on the table, and tell your students that you care about writing, about tutoring, and about them—is exactly where students buy in. They show up. They care.

It only takes being the cringiest person in the room to get there.

Works Cited

Davis, Jeffry C. “Pitching a Tent, Welcoming a Traveler, and Moving On: Toward a Nomadic View of the Writing Center.” The Writing Lab Newspaper, vol. 25, no. 10, 2001, pp. 12–15.

English, Edward A. “Central Habits of Highly Effective Tutors: Hospitable Practice, Rhetorical Listening, and Emotional Validation in the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2025, pp. 133–158.

Haswell, Richard, and Janis Haswell. Hospitality and Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession. Utah State University Press, 2015.

Jacobs, Dale. “The Audacity of Hospitality.” JAC, vol. 28, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 563–581.

Nouwen, Henri J. M. Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. Doubleday, 1975.

Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.’” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 195 – 224.

Smilges, J. Logan. “Cringe Theory.” Lateral, vol. 13, no. 1, 2024.

Spiegel, Thomas J. “Cringe.” Social Epistemology, vol. 39, no. 3, 2025, pp. 229–240.