Teaching in a Writing Center Spring 2020

"Where academic writing requires intricate argumentation, creative writing demands risk and finesse." I felt that this conclusive statement to Lorraine's story well-encompassed the struggle I see in both my rhetoric students and writing center students when it comes to individual strengths and weaknesses in specific writing genres. I believe that if I were to instill an awareness of this quote's idea deeper into my teaching mindset, it would help inform my methods during tutoring. For example, I have a student in my rhetoric class who is phenomenal at filing out a research paper outline to great detail. But any creative elements of the paper itself -- from including personal anecdotes in a conclusion paragraph to choosing an original topic to write on -- is incredibly overwhelming to her. She has even requested office hours for every paper or speech topic selection because she feels crippled by, what I can now identify as the "risk and finesse" that cre...

Hello! I know I have already posted once for this week, but I believe I am missing a post, and thought it wouldn't hurt either way to do another one! I have taken writing classes in other languages - Spanish, for example - but never in a language so convoluted. Having to consider each word for tense, gender, number, declension, or conjugation is bad enough, but when you start to look at phrases, sentences, and finally style, it becomes so incredibly dense as to be almost impossible. Trying to write a speech in the style of Cicero or a narrative in the style of Livy is impossible if you cannot work through your first tricky clause. You can't consider the bigger picture, or learn anything from your work, if you spend all your time fighting through each sentence. In other words, if you can't see the forest for the trees, you certainly can't learn anything from observing the forest (I know it's a tortured metaphor, go with me - it's the Livy).  I've been thi...

I have said before, and I will say again, that a problem with academia in general is its division of interest and expertise into the most specific niche fields. This implies that a person has only one interest or one thing they are good at and can speak to: as we all know, this is absolutely not the case. We don't see many classics students in the writing center, aside from the occasional reluctant student writing for a gen-ed mythology class. I therefore almost never end up tutoring in my own field. But I have had the opportunity to read papers in biology, public health, poetry, sociology, nursing, and film studies. My interests and breadth of knowledge certainly don't stop at the fall of the Roman empire, and I have really enjoyed getting to interact with disciplines and themes I would never otherwise be reading. This doesn't mean that I feel 100% comfortable with every student's field or the specific problems that come with them. I do, however, really like having...

Working with students who are not in my field, and this is mostly the case since I study Spanish Literature, has been challenging and rewarding at the same time. This is particularly true when students are in Spanish classes that are specific to their majors, such as business Spanish. I once had a student who came in with his assignment, which was creating a mock website for his company. Having no business background at all, I struggled a little with the instructions and different vocabulary that he had to use because the were quite technical. However, I think the overall session went well as I was able to help with things that are more universal, such as the organization of sentences and grammar issues. I was actually able to learn a great deal from that student about a field that I was not familiar with. The same issue happened when a student brought in his resume because he wanted to apply for an internship in Spain; his major was engineering. He had his resume in Spanish, but sin...

Confession: I had only attended a Writer's Workshop once, in my masters. I brought my music research paper in, hoping to meet a Chicago Style expert who would strike down my footnotes with a quick flick of a quill. Obviously, I found no such arbiter. However, since then I've been waiting to be that Chicago Style expert for someone in or near my field, but to no avail. Instead I've had the distinct pleasure to work with many science and medical students, and I've found that our experiences often compliment each other. I, for one, get an insight into scientific processes and the genre of the "abstract." I've eagerly built many of these things into my music papers, and I'm looking forward to crossing both styles for my dissertation. Similarly, I tend to be the voice for the uninitiated who are so often the audience of grants, applications, and public abstracts. I'm happy to be the Watson to their Holmes, a foil to their interesting research. I...

I find that working with a student from a very different discipline than mine is some of the most rewarding work I do at the Writing Center. One field that I particularly enjoy is medicine. On a personal level, I happen to get along with physicians and have several friends in that profession. And even though I am acquainted with some of the basic tenets of the science, my knowledge is nowhere near sufficient to engage academically with the problems I was presented by students. Nevertheless, it is always interesting and rewarding to ask the student about the subject they bring, and being receptive, I suppose, helps the student feel confident and assertive about what they want. One particular tutee was a nursing student who brought in various forms for a clinical study that she was translating into spanish. Since these forms were aimed at non-technical readers or participants, I had little trouble interpreting what she wanted to have the form say at various points. As some of my classm...

Getting to work with students who are studying vastly different disciplines than you is both a challenging and rewarding aspect of working in the Writing Center. I have been fortunate to have one student who is expressly interested in my poetry and creative writing, and I have found working with her to be a truly enjoyable and mutually beneficial experience. However, the majority of the students I work with have interests and academic focuses that span way out of my personal scope. Last week, I helped a student on a paper about sexual dimorphism in apes and then moved on to help another student write a personal statement about her experience and interest in Public Health. While approaching a paper on which the terms themselves are uncertain is a difficult task, I have found it a helpful tool in reminding myself of the basics of writing and how to give instruction on writing itself without feeling the push to interfere with my own personal styles, interest, sentiments, etc. We can focus...

Marisa Tirado Case Study - April 21st, 2020 For the purpose of this study I will refer to my tutee as Karen. Karen is a native English speaker from Chicago. I believe she is involved in some diversity and inclusion student leadership groups. She also holds a job as a student tutor in the chemistry department. Karen’s major is Environmental Policy & Planning. She is a very disciplined and hard-working student, and enrolled in the Writing Center to simply dedicate time each week to her Environmental Policy & Planning class’s major assignment. The assignment is a 4,000-word research report on textile chemicals, policies, and production. The paper is due at the end of the semester, but every few weeks, 1,000 words are due. As I started working with Karen, it became apparent that her major's discipline, Environmental Policy & Planning, required a massive amount of context and background knowledge in order to compose a well-written paper. I have worked on the same pr...

How important do you think it is for writing center staff to pursue writing center research? Why? I think writing center research/scholarship can be productive and insightful, but I don't think it's particularly necessary for all writing center staff to participate in. Doing is more important than meta-doing , and the best way for writing center staff to improve their craft (of teaching and tutoring) is to practice it. Theory is helpful, to be sure--I won't discount its merits entirely--but I think actual experience with students is what makes the real difference. Given the right circumstances, which topics, issues, or questions would you like to research?  How would you go about it? I think if I were given the circumstances to research a writing center topic I would dig into the relationship between expectations and outcomes. First: what kind of expectations do tutors bring to their work, and what kind of expectations do students bring to their tutors? Do folk...

For the purposes of this case study I will refer to my student as Midge. Midge is a non-native speaker of English. She is from a small town in Iran. She is not a student but works at the University, and has recently enrolled in a writing course. She enrolled in the Writing center because her professional capacity, she needs to write several emails a day, sometimes to her superiors, other times to faculty members, students, etc. She also needs to conduct surveys and studies, and solicit data for the same, all of which rely on a fairly precise grasp of the nuances of the language. Some pedagogical issues that recur during my time with Midge (although she’s shown remarkable progress in a short amount of time, due to her energy, enthusiasm and willingness to learn) are: (a) She writes in a very formal tone, which in this country could be interpreted as obsequious, and (b) she uses lots of words, so that sometimes the meaning or intent gets confused.   For these reas...

One of the things I have really enjoyed during this semester of Writing Center tutoring has been working with students who are in totally different fields from my own. This difference has proven to be its own teaching tool, as I often read aloud from a sentence that is a little vague and then ask the student to explain that paragraph’s topic to me, as I am unfamiliar with it. Engaging with a topic in conversation makes it less abstract--I like to write a little outline of some interesting things the student says during the explanation, things that potentially could be useful for them in their assignment—and the student gets confidence and enthusiasm in recitation of their knowledge/getting to be the teacher. Often the student discovers, in the course of our discussion that there is something new or important to write about. One example is my student who studies classical mythology; I find the topic interesting as a layperson and have some vague understanding of it....

In my program I only have to write poems.   I would categorize this as both “learning to write” and “writing to learn.”   Inevitably, when working on a poem I learn something about the given topic I’m writing about and/or the inner-workings of language.   However, when my poems are workshopped, I learn about what’s not working in my pieces and why something was or wasn’t effective, and so this would be the “learning to write” side.     As a Rhetoric instructor, I obviously do not have my students write poems, though I have had us perform rhetorical analysis on a few.   Each week my students are required to do a Writers’ Resource Notebook entry.   I would categorize these entries as “writing to learn.” I really love these assignments because it allows the students an opportunity to synthesize our class material in one place.   For example, this week they’re watching a John Oliver video that breaks down America’s voting system....

I can't find the prompt but it looks like from most of y'all's posts that we're sharing case studies of our own tutoring work, so here goes. I have a student--let's call them X--who comes to me with very densely written, legal-jargon heavy writing. English is a second language to X but their vocabulary is quite good. Their sentence structure on the other hand is often convoluted and confusing. Sometimes, we talk about word choice and I recommend different ways to rephrase what X is trying to say, to make the relationships between X's concepts more clear. The real challenge comes from when I want to avoid being just a proofreader--I want to avoid writing the thing for X--so I try to force myself to, as often as feasible, just explain a problem and teach the principle instead of offering any options for replacing the offending phrase/word. X has a hard time with this and usually bluntly asks "well, what would you recommend?" X is not trying to coerce...

I do think it is important to pursue writing center research because it is through research that tutors are able to learn a variety of practices in regards to tutoring students. I think we can all agree that we learned a lot through the studies we've read in class, and reading them make us reflect on our own experiences as tutors and students. The article that I read from the newsletter a few weeks ago highlights the importance of research (and also sharing/publishing research) because it showed me a new situation that might occur to me. Shortly after, one of my students submitted an essay that talks about her personal difficulties, and thanks to that I article, I know how to give feedback to that student. I haven't thought about what I would research, but I think I would want to look at the settings of various writing centers because I am quite interested in space and design. How are writing centers designed? What facilities do they have? Are they accessible? I would think a...

I’ve been meeting with Maria for the entire semester so far. She’s a graduate student in the nursing school. Maria is from the Middle East originally, and she is raising her daughters and son while her husband works in another country. In our sessions, we have been balancing our attention on fundamentals of writing and addressing high-priority writing assignments for her classes. Maria often shares her discomfort about switching from family issues to academic issues. Now that we’re connecting online exclusively, these two worlds seem to collide more and more often. We often spend our first portion of our meetings sharing a bit of our lives in quarantine and checking in on each other's family. We pause a few times each session for her to help her youngest son with something. It’s no problem for me, of course, but I can tell she can become flustered and distracted, which makes it hard to delve deeper into the complicated content that she’s writing. I get the sense that I might b...

For this study, I will be referring to my student as "B." B's case is one which I have discussed in class before: certainly, she's my most challenging tutee, through no fault of her own. From day one, B has know exactly what she wanted from me, regardless of whether or not that vision fit entirely with my own. She is a PhD student, in mid-dissertation, and hyper aware of her own needs, concerns, and disinterests. Initially, we struggled a lot. B essentially wanted a copyeditor, someone to go through her writing and check for commas, run-on sentences, and paragraph breaks. It became evident, however, that there were deeper language and grammar issues that were unresolved, and which needed to be addressed before we could move on to the nitty-gritty, so to speak. B's research deals with the largely unstudied population of women in sub-Saharan Africa, a topic close to her heart. To the best of my (limited) understanding, she is studying the prevalence of lower-bac...

Resource Report and Discussion--Kathleen Shaughnessy Article: Green, Neisha-Anne. “Moving beyond Alright: And the Emotional Toll of This, My Life Matters Too, in the Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal Vol. 37, No. 1 (2018), pp. 15-34. Green tells us on the first page that this story is about her 2017 experience at the International Writer’s Conference as the first Black person to ever give a keynote speech at the conference—and it technically is, but it is also about the larger implications surrounding the experience. The structure of the piece, the framework of a narrative surrounding her feelings before the speech, the speech’s text, and her thoughts afterwards is of particular importance; it feels like she is speaking to us personally, even with the inclusion of a transcript from an event most readers didn’t attend. Her description of moments of summoning courage with affirmations and reminders of what she is going to do onstage and why are literally em-bolded in...