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.