First Consultation!

I'd been wondering if I would get a consultation before I was officially on the clock, because a few other 303ers have.  So I came in on Tuesday, and got one!  There I was, feeling simultaneously excited and terrified for next week, and then I got catapulted in a bit early.

I was much less nervous than I thought I would be, which was cool.  The writer was working on a personal essay, which is totally my forte. That was awesome, and it made me less twitchy.  I'd had myself half-convinced I'd have an hour-long appointment for a paper about quantum physics for my first consultation.  But, it went really well, and it helped that the writer was really friendly and open and had quite a good first draft.

Anyways, we worked on re-writing his conclusion and breaking up his page-and-a-half long paragraphs full of beautiful descriptions and wandering ideas.  He was really a good writer--his topic was great and well thought out, and I was a bit jealous of his skill with descriptive writing.  He seemed insecure about his own writing skill, though.  It was his first time writing a personal essay, and he seemed suspicious that I wasn't telling him to completely rewrite.

Overall, it was a fun appointment.  His paper was about going kayaking in Hawaii, so it was full of all sorts of Hawaiian words that he had to tell me how to pronounce as I read through his paper.  We laughed about how bad I was at it, which did a lot to help me feel more comfortable.  I like laughing. :)

Another Observation!

I had another interesting observation with Kelsey this Friday.  Somehow, this student had escaped ever learning (or at least he didn't remember learning) the 5 paragraph essay.  He got away with it for two years of college, until an English professor handed back his essay and said, "rewrite.  I want a 5 paragraph essay."

Alrighty.  The format is simple enough, so Kelsey explained it.  She scanned through his previous essay and then the beginnings of the rewrite, and quickly realized that it was all well and good to explain  the 5 paragraph essay, but what this writer really needed to do was focus his thoughts.  He had several different topics he wanted to talk about, but nothing nice and overarching with which to make a thesis.  So Kelsey spent a half hour on a nice brainstorming session, no matter that he already had an essay written.

The writer seemed very involved in the session, very earnest.  He seemed bewildered that he'd gotten an essay handed back, and couldn't quite figure out what he'd done wrong.  He sort of tried to get Kelsey to agree with him that grading papers is "totally subjective," (read: It's the professor's fault that he didn't like it) and Kelsey did a good job of explaining that yes, responding to writing is always a subjective thing, but that there were ways to correctly organize a paper and ways to do it incorrectly (at least where a 5 paragraph essay is concerned).

Observation

I'm off for a weekend with no internet at the parents' house (I'd trade internet for Spud Day any day!), so I won't get a chance to talk about what happens when I'm in the Writing Center tomorrow since I'm leaving right afterward.  Fortunately, though, I did get a chance to observe a consultation on Tuesday.

I had been chilling on the couch for about 20 minutes, time well spent going page-by-page through that giant book about giant buildings with Crystal (she was killing time after an hour-long appointment was a no-show).  Soon, though, a man walked in and said, "I need an appointment."  The person at the desk walked him through the registration process and when the time came to make his appointment, Crystal volunteered because of her no-show.  She eyed me and said, "Want to observe?"  I said, "YES."  I was a bit antsy since I didn't get a chance to do an observation last week.

The writer was an ELL student, though it took me a while to decide for sure whether he was.  His accent was very good, and his writing was impressive.  He had some awesomely poetic metaphors in his writing, but the one problem he had issues with was deciding which articles to use where.  On about the 4th "This should probably be 'an' instead of 'the'" from Crystal, she asked,  "What's your native language?"  "Korean," he answered.  "Alright, does Korean have articles?  I'm picking up that you're not sure where to put them.  It's hard because sometimes there's no set rule."  I couldn't hear what he responded, because he said it very quietly, but Crystal launched into a little lesson on which articles are used when, using his own sentences for examples.  He did a lot better after that, often correcting his own mistakes when he heard them read out loud.

The body language was interesting.  I always like to pay attention to body language.  At the beginning, Crystal asked if he wanted to read out loud or if he wanted her to.  He said, "....you can do it."  Crystal started reading, pencil in hand like a good English major, and the writer's pencil lay inert on the table.  I had my eye on that pencil, because I wanted him to pick it up and start making his own corrections.  Eventually, Crystal stopped, picked up that sad pencil and handed it to the writer, saying, "you can write stuff too, if you want."  Needing no further permission, he slid his orange paper towards him, turned it over, and started jotting down notes on the back.  I was satisfied.

About 3 pages into his essay, he stopped Crystal mid-sentence and blurted, "Do you have to read the whole thing out loud? I feel bad."  Crystal said, "well, I want you to be involved in the corrections we make.  Otherwise, it ends up being what I would write instead of what you would."  He mumbled something about how "this is different from the Writing Center in Tennessee."

One of the things that made me suppress a chuckle was when we got into the "he or she" vs. "they" situation.  I never thought about trying to explain this phenomenon to a non-native speaker, but Crystal smoothed it over pretty well.  "But, I thought 'they' was more than one person."  "It is, but you can also use it when you're talking about....like, a hypothetical person." He seemed to accept that explanation and they moved on.

At the end, Crystal seemed irritated with herself for spending so much time on grammar.  With five minutes left, she started quizzing him about the assignment, making sure he'd fulfilled it.  When she'd clarified, she wrapped up the consultation with some advice on how to proceed with the structure and subject matter of his essay, and the consultation ended.


I think I would have spent less time on grammar.  The writer had a couple problems with phrasing, but really the only repeated issue was the one with articles.  I think I would have stopped with that mini lesson and then started talking about other things much earlier (It didn't help Crystal, of course, that she only had a 1/2 hour appointment for a 5-page paper).

That's all for now!

My Writing Process/3rd week in the DubC

I didn’t get a chance to do an observation this week; it was realllyyy slooowwww both times I was there.  It was a good week though.  I spent quite a bit of time manning the desk, and ended up greeting a few people as they came in, and starting files for a couple of new writers.

So, I’d like to postpone my post on observation till next week, and focus more on the things we read.  The reading from The Bedford Guide especially got me thinking about my own writing process.

Prewriting:

I really don’t do much prewriting.  I usually just start writing with the knowledge that my structure and even thesis is really fluid—I rearrange clauses, sentences, and paragraphs on a whim until I find an organization that I like.  Once, I started with one thesis, and then realized that the entire following essay was arguing against it.  So the thesis changed.  Sometimes I’ll write a sentence or idea that I like but don’t know where to put, so I open another document and stick those ideas there, ready to copy-paste them into the essay when I find a good spot for them.

The only time I really felt like actual prewriting helped me was when I was working on an essay in my Nonfiction Writing class.  I had decided to write a segmented essay, a structure I had just found out about and really wanted to try.  The essay was about my experiences in community theatre and what goes on backstage that the audience doesn’t know about.  I had the vague idea that I would start out each segment with a story from my time in community theatre.  So I started writing those stories, saved in a Word document called “essay pieces.”  Through writing those stories, I got a concrete idea about what each segment would be talking about.  I eventually decided that each segment would be about a different facet of community theatre:  play practice, inter-cast relationships, auditions, getting into character, etc.   That essay turned out to be, in my opinion, the best thing I’d ever written up to that point.

In thinking of that experience, it occurs to me that I should try out more formal prewriting when I start a piece.

Writing:

As I said, my actual writing tends to sort of meld with my prewriting.  If I can, I like to get my whole first draft out at one time.  My ideas tend to change a lot, so if I write half of a paper at one point, and come back to it the next day, the second half of the paper sometimes goes in a different direction.  If I can get a whole first draft out at one time, when I come back the next day I can revise the whole paper to fit the newer, more mature ideas.  This works fine for shorter papers, but tends to be a grueling process for anything longer than 4 or 5 pages.  On one memorable 10-pager, I started work at about 6pm, and wrote, with a couple cat naps, until 5 am.  Then I slept for 3 hours, woke up for my 8:40 class, and then came home to revise.  That was my community theatre paper.  Super intense.

Revising and Editing:

The Bedford Guide mentions two types of revision: global and sentence-level.  I don’t do much on the way of sentence-level revision.  A lot of that happens while I’m actually writing, and I often spent a lot of time on each sentence and paragraph to get the wording right.  When I come back and revise, I correct typos, adjust some punctuation, and change a few words here and there, but rarely rewrite whole sentences.  I also often ending up adding transitions between paragraphs, which I never do a good job of the first time around.

My global revision usually involves adjusting my thesis to reflect the direction I ended up going in the paper, and sometimes involves rearranging or adding entire paragraphs. 

Then I give it to someone else to tell me if everything makes sense and what they think of it.  Then I revise it again, and usually have someone look at it again.

That’s the first time I’ve looked so hard at my writing process and….it is decidedly odd.  I think I need to prewrite more….




p.s.: Sorry I posted this blog late!

Bad Puns and Rhetorical Grammar: The Writing Center

Me: (reading a Laffy Taffy wrapper) "Why do melons always have such big weddings?"
Kelsey: "Because they're meloncholy?"
Nick: "Because they canteloupe!"

Yes, the Writing Center has been fun this week!  And a lot has happened!

But first, our readings for this week:

"Writing Centers and the Idea of Consultancy"--Willaim McCall


It's interesting how much meaning can be taken from one word, and how much controversy that can inspire.  Who knew what a difference calling a Writing Center employee a "consultant" instead of a "tutor" can make?  It certainly changes how I think about myself as a consultant. While I was in the Center this week, I was there for the duration of a few appointments.  The writer came in, sat down to wait for his appointment, and was greeted by a consultant. The consultant and the writer went to a table, and I would hear a background of murmured conversation coming from that direction for a half hour or so.  At the end, the consultant would stick the writer's file in the "to be recorded" box and wave a goodbye to the writer.  Odds are, the consultant will never see the final product, or what advice the writer chose to follow.  That seems to fit the title of "consultant" to me!

"Writing Centers as Sites of Academic Culture"--Molly Wingate


I liked this article!  I think it's absolutely true that Writing Centers provide an environment to nerd out without risk...although the article didn't use quite that phraseology.   There are plenty of jobs on campus that aren't academic at all, but those of us that work in the Writing Center have chosen to work in a place that is academic.  We love writing, and that fact, and the fact that writing is the purpose that brings us all to the center entail that the Center is an academic environment.  It encourages that kind of thinking, and though the conversation (as far as I've seen) isn't often about writing itself, it's often about the sorts of random facts and interesting ideas we learn about in school, while writing.

"Peer Tutoring and the 'Conversation of Mankind" --Kenneth A. Bruffee


I like this quote:

"As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of  an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.  It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves....Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognise the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation.  And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance."
--Michael Oakeshott

Thought is internalized conversation.  What an interesting way of thinking!  I agree, I think.  I especially like when he goes further with that logic: If thought is internalized public conversation, then writing is internalized conversation made public again.  Writing is the 'conversation of mankind' sifted through the filter of our own perceptions and way of conceptualizing that conversation, then re-submitted to the conversation.  How incredible!

Then peer tutoring comes in, which is our part in the process of re-submission.  My thinking is that if writing is the concrete manifestation of a writer's internal conversation, my job is to make that concrete writing as accurate a manifestation as possible.  My job is to help a writer figure out how to make their writing mirror their thoughts as perfectly as possible, so that their internal conversation can be re-submitted to the "conversation of mankind' in as pure a form as possible.

I think of writing almost as a language one has to gain fluency in.  I compare it to my own study of French.  When I speak French, I get really frustrated at the limited way I'm able to communicate my own thoughts in that language.  I don't have the words, the sentence structures, or the organization in French to re-submit my internal conversation in spoken form.  I feel like writing fluently is that same challenge: the writer needs the skill and the sentence structures and the word connotations to be able to communicate their ideas.



Now, on to the happenings in the Writing Center!

On Thursday night, I met with Max and co. to learn about T.E.A. time.  Thursday English Afternoons!  I like this idea so much, especially witth my experiences as an international student in France this summer.  Low-pressure opportunities to speak the language you're trying to learn are really essential.  The hardest thing about learning a language is having confidence that your brain knows what it's doing.  If you don't think too much, and you're not under the pressure of a classroom situation, you find yourself speaking the language much better than you ever thought you could.  I love that T.E.A. time provides that kind of opportunity.  So I'm going to help out with it!

In other news, it was pretty slow this week, as far as I saw. Not too many appointments!  A lot of the time was spent just talking to other people, which was a lot of fun, and very informative!  I learned how to record and file consultation records, I learned that everyone in the Writing Center except me is a movie buff, and I learned that the hot water in the water dispenser thing is brutally hot for most people but just right for me.  I also learned that I should have claimed a coffee cup earlier, because everyone else has a fancy one and mine features the mascot of some sports team that I know nothing about.  I also learned that Writing Center consultants are better at coming up with puns than the Laffy Taffy wrapper people. I learned that the word "garboligist" is a made-up word that is somehow still spelled wrong.   And I learned that in the sentence "Chuck Norris's hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush," the first instance of "hand" is the headword noun.

That is all.