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...