Our engagement with Stuart Blythe's (1997) position—that it is counterproductive to promote one technology in an effort to invalidate others—encourages us to recognize the necessity of asynchronous forms of tutoring and integrate them within an overall writing center strategy. In particular, we recognize that some students may value the metaphorical distance and sense of anonymity that an email exchange makes possible. As David A. Carlson and Eileen Apperson-Williams (2000) noted, the material separation allows students a sense of control; the ability to hide some means of signification (or prevent certain kinds of interpretation) can be empowering for students.

Nonetheless, we acknowledge as well that writing center studies is rooted in a tradition of dialogue and interpersonal exchange that has encouraged us to make specific texts less important to our work than the individuals who write them. "Our job," as Stephen North (1984) defined it for us, "is to produce better writers, not better writing" (p. 76). As Dana Anderson (2002) argued, communication technologies inevitably alter literate practices; technologies enable and constrain particular epistemological attitudes and potentials—they can reframe (productively or otherwise) our very missions and values.

Asynchronous email exchange worries us, perhaps, because it threatens the historical identity of the writing center, our productive positionality outside what Harvey Kail and John Trimbur (1987) have called the "curriculum-based model" (p. 204). Writing responses to texts is what teachers do. What we do—indeed, as North (1984) has stated, what "we" are—is "an institutional response" to a need that writers have to converse about their writing (p. 78), something the university often appears to have been designed to frustrate.