Electronic mail-based tutoring of undergraduate writing students upsets the temporal basis of the face-to-face paradigm for writing tutorials. Taking place in real time in a specified place, the face-to-face tutorial session has a beginning, middle and end. Further, the session must have a tangible point. By contrast, in on-line tutoring, time is boundless; the power dynamics of tutoring is changed, and the text itself is decentered. Such a system fosters an informal dialogue at the level of ideas instead of personality. Without the distracting elements of personality, computer mediated discourse establishes a more egalitarian atmosphere. The catch-all theory is that the paper-bound environment creates vertical relationships while the paperless environment creates horizontal relationships, precisely because the student's "property" (in the paperless environment) is disembodied, less clearly marked. In a electronically based exchange, the teacher asks the student, implicitly or explicitly, to re-envision his or her writing, to use writing to improve his or her writing. The pedagogical idea is to encourage students to write by telling them how their words affected the teacher while he or she read them, to give them what Peter Elbow calls a "movie of the mind." The goal of electronic-based tutoring must never be to fix meaning on the page but to engage meaning in a dialectic. Ambiguity is a must, as are open texts. (TB)