It's Thursday, and I just realized I completely spaced posting last week...

Yeeahh.  Had a super full weekend in which I took off out of town literally right after my shift at the Center (actually, I had to get someone to cover the last hour of my shift) on a retreat with my church group.

BUT, last week was our first week fully on schedule!  I had an interesting mix of appointments.  First up was a 1000 word long movie review assignment that my poor writer was super flustered about.  She had about a page of tentative reviewing written, most of which was taken up by a super in-depth summary of the entire movie, which was really obviously a desperate attempt to fill up her length requirement.   This session ended up being very successful--most of her problem was that she just didn't know what to include in a movie review, so we talked about some ideas there.  She left feeling optimistic and I left feeling quite cheerful and satisfied.

My second appointment was a required visit: one of the mathematician timelines we've been getting a lot of.  I honestly had trouble helping this writer, except for some very quickly and easily generated ideas on what to talk about in his two paragraphs and a quick review of the format for his works cited.  The session ended up only being 15 minutes long--I literally had nothing more to say.  This writer was not particularly engaged, and no matter how many times I tried to get questions or ideas out of him, he answered with a minimum amount of words and then we had an awkward silence.  About 5 attempts later, he pulled out his phone to answer a text and I decided we were done.  I talked to Max about it afterward, because he commented on how short the appointment was, and he suggested that maybe I would have done well to have him do some freewriting.   I will keep that in mind, as I'm sure this wasn't the last such appointment I'll ever have.

On Friday, I was only in the Center for an hour before I had to skedaddle, and it was taken up by an hourlong appointment with Mike Tam.  This session was focused entirely on a line-by-line run through of his argumentative paper.  My red flags were waving about focusing on LOCs, but in this instance I feel like that's what he really needed.  He told me that he's had some head trauma and has a really hard time transferring his thoughts into coherent writing, and I could totally see that.  Most of his sentences were fragments or run-ons, and often didn't have a subject or a verb.  We figured out that it was most helpful if I read out loud, since he could hear what was wrong with a sentence if someone else was reading it--he just added in the missing words or completely re-worded it if he read it himself, and he made so many changes that I couldn't keep up with him to make those revisions on the paper.  What we did instead was have me read a sentence out loud, and he would say, "no, that isn't right." Then I would have him say what he really meant and I would type it for him exactly as he said it (we were working on his laptop.)  Then, if there were still issues I would read it out loud again and we would rinse and repeat.  It was a super slow process, but ultimately effective.  We also talked about his organization and rearranged some paragraphs.  At the end of our hour, we had made some reasonable progress, he went away satisfied, and I was pretty exhausted.

After that, I took off for my two-hour drive to Cascade, and Zach covered the second hour of my shift.  His reward is to be my BFF.

First week on the clock

It's been an interesting week, for sure.  I've had an ESL writer, a grad student, and two APA papers.  None of which are particularly in my comfort zone.  Sooo, they had mixed results, but overall it was a successful first week.

I'm still thinking about the ESL appointment.  It didn't go so well, because I ended up at cross-purposes with the writer but I didn't know what else to do.  He came in wanting help on how to expand the ideas in his paper, of which he had 3 out of 6 pages written with the rough draft due that day.  I started reading it, and immediately realized that he had a lot of grammar issues.  Sentences without verbs, run-ons, etc, that worked together to make a paper that was incredibly hard to follow.  So, I found myself working on that sentence-level stuff that was so overwhelming.  But what he wanted help with was expanding his ideas.  We did talk about that at the end, but I could tell that he was frustrated on how much of the session we spent re-writing nearly every sentence. We both walked away from that appointment frustrated, but I don't know what else I should have done...

Other than that, my consultations this week went really well.  I had a grad student come in with a literature review for a 500 level Health Science class.  My experience with lit reviews amounts to proofreading one my mom wrote once.  So, all I really knew about them is that it's somewhere between a research paper and an annotated bibliography (I think!).  I asked her to explain the assignment to me, and then we started in on her paper.  I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I could help when both the type of writing and the subject matter were so far over my head.  But we still worked on things like re-ordering her paragraphs and picking out ideas that needed more explaining (after I asked stuff like "is this a concept that someone in your field would understand without much explaining from you?").  I was immensely satisfied with that session.

My other APA paper was a woman that came in wanting help with citations.  This was alarming to me because I have only ever written one paper with APA and I'm reasonably sure I did it wrong.  So I went and grabbed the style manual and set to work figuring out how to cite a quote she found in one of her sources that was from another source.  I told her the best and least complicated thing to do would be to find the original source, but she sort of ignored me when I said that.  So we figured out how to do it, and she went away happy.

Basically, I'm pretty satisfied with this week.

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.