bookMARK: Writing Across Curriculums

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.

It really makes me want to shed the tutor title. The Writing Center is more like a conversation hub, where scholars of different fields interact. It's the kind of thing that entire organizations try to do on campus, but we do it weekly and in response to a significant need.

I'm really glad for the chance to work with those students, for both party's sake! I feel like that's our Center's greatest strength. I think that students still come in to their meetings with that same goal that I had years and years ago, and it's up to us, I suppose, to show them that value.