Email Consultations!

Are stressful!  But fun.  It's a good challenge, I think.

It's all the things we talked about in class--harder to communicate just with written words without the ability to ask questions and use body language.  At the same time, though, isn't helping people communicate with only written words what we do at the Writing Center?  This is just another form of writing to learn, which makes it kind of exciting!

My first for realz email consultation was today, and it was rather stressful.  It was a concurrent enrollment English 101 student writing a personal essay about a learning experience--standard 101 prompt. Her learning experience, though, was the process of writing the essay itself.  It was kind of mind-boggling, and as soon as I comprehended that I was like, "THAT IS SO META."  It was interesting, and she did a good job with it!  I had trouble writing my letter back, though, because it was hard to pinpoint exactly what needed changed.  She needed to make her meta-ness more clear to the audience, but it was hard for me to pinpoint ways she could do a better job with that. She was also writing in this stream-of-consciousness style that she actually pulled off really well for the most part, but I'm not sure she was intentionally using stream of consciousness or if that's just what ended up happening.  So I talked to her about stream of consciousness, warned her that it's not common in English 101 writing, and that it takes a lot of mental power on the part of the audience to understand it.  That said, I picked out a couple places where her stream of consciousness made some logical jumps that I couldn't follow.

It was an odd paper.  My cynical side said, "of course you would get something so complicated for your first for realz email consultation!"  Ah well.