A ReMARKable Case Study

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 be one of the few people that Maria has a chance to converse with in a given week.

Maria definitely hungers for writing and rhetorical fundamentals. Once she came in simply asking how one constructs an argument. I’ve also been slowly introducing parts of the writing process that are easy to skip if they aren’t habits-- brainstorming, outlining, and finely sculpting a sentence-- to name a few. Many of these seem like new concepts for her process. 

Maria, of course, is not the blank slate that many Rhetoric students appear to be; she has been in survival mode as a writer for a long time. Maria possesses great instincts, and uses many tools and technologies that are available to her. In a teaching philosophy draft, she wrote that grading should be, “...persistent, authentic, and transparent.” I am quick to celebrate those moments in our sessions. However, when we get around to free-writing or drafting together, she quickly retreats to translation software that often produces clumsy sentences. I find it difficult to recommend new habits-- like when I try to model how I sense the breath of a comma-- to someone who has been surviving with their own methods for so long. Sometimes it’s clear that ground-up revision of the writing process isn’t what Maria is looking for from our sessions: “I just need to know if this is right.” Other times, she comes seeking answers: “How can I make this statement unique?” I try to stay neutral until I’ve tested the temperature, as it were.

When I work with Maria, I am constantly double-checking that I’ve honored her work, experience, expertise, and her unique perspectives on language. I work hard to frame my statements as a friendly peer or collaborator, and I’m fearful of becoming an arbiter of English, an editor, or a zealot bent on re-working her entire writing process. On the other side, I care about her and her writing enough to speak my mind about an awkward or unclear sentence, all while guarding against overly-patronizing language. 

Well, that’s where I’m at these days.