She helps me, She helps me not

As a student, the question, “whom do we write for?” becomes a very difficult one to answer. Although in theory, I would like to think I write for myself, to push myself to really explore new ideas and present my ideas in an interesting way, the reality is that most of the times I, like most students, adapt my writing to suit the needs, preferences and requirements of my teachers. Although part of me wonders if this is how it should really be, I have come to accept it as part of our learning system. With that said, however, the question of whom are we serving as Writing Consultants, also seems to come into question a times as the article, “In Defense of Conference Summaries: Widening the Reach of Writing Center Work” by Jane Cogie suggests.

In my mind, the purpose of the writing center is to best serve the student by providing a safe space where they can receive judgment free assistance with their writing. Although teachers may argue otherwise, most students feel that in order to go talk to their professors about a particular draft, their paper must be in a state where it could potentially be turned in if need be. This means that students must be able to write their papers many days in advance and already be confident in their ideas and arguments. Overall, students tend to respect their professors enough that they are afraid of embarrassing themselves by presenting a draft that has any known weakness. Therefore, the student who is unsure of what they are doing, embarrassed about struggling or who has just written the paper a few days before it is due, feels that they cannot go to their teachers for help with their writing ahead of time. The honest truth is that the majority of us are that type of student. As a result, I think it is important that the writing center be an outlet for students who which to improve their writing without any harsh criticism, judgment or even pressure, where they can actually improve their papers before they present them to their teachers. With that said however, the concept of “Teacher Response” sheets makes me question whether or not we are in fact always serving the student. In her article, Cogie explains, “Comments by two of the study's respondents indeed reflect the stereotype of writing center tutor as subservient to the teacher. One of these instructors stated that the most useful aspect of the summaries was that they allowed her ‘to evaluate if I felt the best use of the tutor's time was being made.’” The professor that Cogie highlights seems to not only feel that the tutor is serving her needs specifically, but that she personally has the full right to evaluate the effectiveness and the purpose of the tutor. Cogie then takes this one step further, highlighting how another professor states, “"it was very helpful to know that my specific suggestions for improvement were being addressed."” This other professor pushes the relationship between him or herself and the tutor so far as to almost state that the role of the tutor is to reinforce the teacher’s own particular views of writing and that the position of the tutor is such that they should just be reminding the student to actually do what the teacher has told them. Although theoretically, these teachers want the same thing that the tutors’ want, to help the student improve their writing, it seems that the presence of this type of relationship between tutor and teacher could potentially change the student’s reaction to the writing center. As a student, if I felt that by going to my writing center, I would only gain a better understanding of the changes my teacher wished me to make, not improve overall as a writer, than writing to me would become merely a game. As a result, a writing center would no longer represent a place where I could participate in a process through which I could constantly work to express my ideas and myself.

The Fear of A Writing Consultant

Roosevelt may have said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but as I sat down with one of my ESL students who was on the edge of failing the one last class she needed to graduate, my own inability to help her successfully became what I feared the most. This particular student had specifically come to work with me from the School of Continuing studies. A mother of two with a law degree from her home country, she was clearly smart, educated and persistent, returning to get her undergraduate degree in America even though she had not been to school in twenty years. With that said however, her English analytical writing was very much at a middle school level. When she came to meet with me two nights before her paper was due, panic flooded through me as I realized that her paper was all over the place and would by no means get her the type of grade she needed to pass the English course that she had taken and failed the previous semester.

It was at this moment that I realized that what I feared most as a consultant was not encountering an abrasive student or being unprepared for a session, but letting down a student who clearly needed my help. This particular student, however, almost seemed to be unable to be helped because of her desire to “just be done with the paper.” Although I knew what she wanted was for me just to make some line edits, give her a few suggestions about her conclusion and send her on her way, I couldn’t do that. As a result, I was not only left with the task of somehow figuring out how to salvage this paper without making her re-write the entire thing and balance her growing anxiety and frustration as the list of my suggestions grew too.

Although I recognize that as consultants, we have to remove ourselves personally from the situation and not feel completely responsible for the success or progress of the student or use it to measure our effectiveness as a tutor, it is much easier that say than to do it. As the student with whom I had worked with many times before sat before me, I felt responsible for helping her get back on track because I had the knowledge and the realization that she didn’t have, that if she did not, she would fail. As a result, I was more afraid for her than she was for herself. Steve Sherwood speaks to this idea in his article “Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can’t Help” when he states, “We feel anguish when we fail to help students because we invest ourselves in and care deeply about our work. If the opposite were true, if we did not care and did not strive for excellence, we would find neither safety nor satisfaction.” It is therefore, the result of this very situation that I felt afraid to fail because I felt afraid of the very same “anguish” Sherwood describes.

In the end, I followed the age old principal, “Do your best and that’s all you can do.” Often as a writing consultant, I feel that if I don’t correct an obvious grammatical error or tell them to fix a particular topic sentence, it is my fault if they get marked off for that in the end. However, eventually, as I did with that particular student, I took a step back and remembered that it was not my paper and in the end it was she that needed to take responsibility for the content and quality of the paper overall. Although this didn’t get rid of my fears or even some of my guilt at knowing I may have not been able to help her enough, it helped me to relax enough so that I didn’t get discouraged in future sessions to come.

Don't Stop Believing: The Impact of Works Regarding Working as as Writing Tutor on a Consultation

As a result of my peer consultation with Carter Staub, not only did I became more aware of not only my own practices as a writing fellow, but also was able to better understand the role a tutor can have by placing myself in the writer’s seat. It was through this experience that I was, for the first time, able to practice the ideologies of the different texts we have studied. As a result, I have found that their particular practices were both applicable and influential to both how I conducted my writing appointment and my experience as a writer.

When talked about theoretically, much of the advice given by the readings we have discussed seem obvious, but when put into place, I found that their particular and specific guidance allowed me to both understand what the student I was helping was attempting to do. As well, having their suggestions as a reservoir of knowledge from which to draw from, possessing the insight given by these texts gave me a certain level of confidence as a tutor because I was mentally prepared and educated enough to provide practical and functional solutions. 

When I actually sat down and met with Carter, I felt prepared for my tutoring consultation because of the work I did ahead of time on the hard copy of her draft provided for me. Before this class, my natural instinct when correcting a draft was to cover its margins with little notes throughout the work. This is what most students are taught to do when reading any primary source text for class, or when checking over their own papers and therefore, it is natural to have a tendency towards this style of editing. However, as our readings discuss, the overwhelming nature of this style eventually detracts from the consultant’s meaning, leaving a student so defeated that they could become reluctant to making any changes at all. In Richard Straub’s, The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of "Directive" and "Facilitative" Commentary, he expands upon this point further. His advice culminates in his asking of the questions, “How do different kinds of response create different images of the responder and establish various relationships with the student? What kinds of comments distinguish a directive responder from a facilitative one” (Straub 225)? For me, by keeping these questions in mind, I am reminded of how to move away from the paper-bleeding-with-ink style of editing. I now attempt to produce commentary that addresses the student I am helping as my equal, while at the same time organizing my suggestions for improvement into easily understandable categories and solutions.

To do this with Carter’s commentary, I utilized two very different concepts that have become almost sacrosanct in our writing pedagogy classroom: the removal of “you” and the usage of the narrative to a list style of editing. Although more challenging than I had originally anticipated, removing the word “you” from my edits completely altered the tone of my corrections. The almost judgmental type of instructions I had used before were transformed into kind suggestions that established a relationship of constructive editing between two intellectual equals. I then incorporated this change into my new style of providing commentary. By opening with a narrative instead of just jumping to the “here is what is wrong with your paper” section. This way, I was able to convey to Carter that this was one step in an on going conversation about possible changes she could make to her paper, not a list of the commands. Furthermore, I put as little as I could into the margins and instead, listed my comments at the end of the paper organized by subject matter. The effect of which was two fold: I was better able to see what were the most crucial overall areas for us to discuss when we met in conference, and it allowed her to see where and when she was repeating the same mistakes. Furthermore, in these final end comments, I also attempted to make suggestions to her that could nudge her in the right direction without trying to grab control of the session and her paper. 

As a result of this preparation, when I went to meet with Carter in person, I felt that we were able to use our time extremely effectively because I already knew what I thought we needed to cover and therefore, we had more time to address what she felt were the weak areas of her own paper. The first area we worked through was Carter’s thesis. For her paper, Carter chose to deeply analyze a poem by poet Adrienne Rich. Although it was clear from her thesis that she was conducting a very close reading on a particular poem, her thesis failed to provide her reader with enough of a road map to help them understand where this paper whished to go and what the point of its argument was. I got the sense that Carter’s thesis had developed while she wrote the paper and as a result, her original thesis was unclear because she did not know exactly where she was going and what she was arguing until she finished writing the paper. So instead of spending a lot of time manipulating the word choice of her weaker thesis statement, at the very beginning of our session I directly asked Carter what exactly it was that she hoped the paper would argue. This strategy, introduced to me in the article “Helping students write literary analyses: Some challenges and opportunities for writing center consultants specializing in literature” was incredibly affective. Yothers argues that “the process of articulating what they find to be significant about a particular story is often the first step toward developing a coherent thesis” (Brian Yothers 6). This was exactly the case with Carter, as the thesis she formulated in her own words verbally (which I quickly wrote down as she spoke), was a clear and succinct depiction of what the final paper was actually arguing and how it attempted to unfold that argument. Not only did this mean we had effectively restructured Carter’s thesis, therefore providing a more solid foundation for the whole paper, but also that the new product was still entirely made of Carter’s own words. Therefore, I was able to avoid anything close to the situation where “usurp control over student writing, making sweeping editorial changes and dictating what should be said or how it should be presented from top to bottom”(Straub 247) that Struab cautions against.

Once the framework of the paper was more concrete, we narrowed in on Carter’s topic sentences. This was an area that both Carter and I had highlighted as a place where some improvements could be made. As a result of Carter spending so much time exploring the poem, there were portions of her work where she was so close to the material that she forgot who her audience was and that they needed to be guided through her breakdown of the poem. As the Writer’s Web page on Transitional Words and Phrases expresses, it was important for Carter to “Use transitions with enough context in a sentence or paragraph to make the relationships clear.” To most effectively help Carter with this, I followed the advice stated in The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors by Leigh Ryan. Although Ryan suggested this strategy for tutors helping students in the beginning stages, I found it equally successful for Carter who, while having already written her paper, needed to realign the spine of it. Ryan suggests, “Ask the writer to start drafting the thesis and topic sentences. It might be helpful to see the main ideas worked out in full sentences. These sentences can be a jumping-off point when the writer goes to compose on his or her own” (Ryan 46). Therefore, Carter and I looked at the structure of her topic sentences and talked about how they often just jumped right in to a new idea without making sure the reader understood the transition from the previous thought to the new one. We thought out possible suggestions for how to change the wording and I kept asking Carter questions to further her thought process. Once she began thinking of several good possibilities, I left it up to Carter to decide how she wished to rewrite them so that the work could once again be entirely her own.

The last issue Carter and I discussed in-depth during her tutoring session was her conclusion. Although it did a nice job of piecing it all together for the reader, summarizing the paper’s main points, it did nothing to push the paper further. Like many students, she fell into the trap of “ending with a rephrased thesis statement that contains no substantive changes,” which Writer’s Web specifically advises against. Although careful about my tone, I employed another suggestion from Ryan by asking her questions similar to “why do you feel this is important” and “so what do you think is the point?” (Ryan 42). In the past, whether it has been helping a friend with her paper or working as a tutor for international students, getting a student to move beyond restating the claims of the paper in the final paragraph is surprisingly hard to do because when students attempt to make their conclusions more thought provoking or bring up a new idea their conclusions often become too global with unsupported claims about the nature of society or history or something of the sort. Personally, I have had a hard time in the past doing this successfully and I found that teaching how to write a good conclusion is almost as difficult as actually writing one. However, using the “so what” question for the first time with Carter, I saw how such a simple question can force a writer to really consider their paper on another level.  From hearing the new ideas Carter came up with just during the consultation time alone, I found that this strategy is the most successful. Carter was able to turn her conclusion into something that “suggest[s] results or consequences” instead of just summarizing (Writer’s Web). I have found for getting writer to think deep at the end of their papers because by constantly asking yourself “why does the reader care about what I am saying,” it helps you to produce a conclusion that answers this question, but still remains specific to your topic area.

What was also really interesting about this exercise was when we switched roles and I became the student. One of the things I struggle with as a writer is revision, as I often have lots of trouble catching my own mistakes, especially on a first draft. Having Carter’s commentary focus on the content of my work and not the small punctuation and grammar errors was a very different experience from what I am used to with other tutors. There have been times when teachers have embarrassed me because my first drafts contained errors so much so that when they finally got around to talking about my ideas, I was too disheartened to listen carefully. It was clear that Carter was employing Ryan’s theories on revisions by the way she handled my work. As Ryan suggests, she focused more on “global revisions…the paper’s overall development and organization” (Ryan 48) and instead of making be feel stupid for my sentence level errors, discussed them with me and was “carful not just to correct mistakes but also to explain how [I] can identify and correct future sentence-level errors” (Ryan 51). 

Therefore, the experience for me felt much more respectful and conducive to my future improvement.

Although I was unsure when I first entered this class how the works we were reading could possibly be as helpful as the lifetime of personal knowledge I had acquired, I now firmly see the impact of their teachings. Although often subconscious, the ideas and suggestions they provide have become the foundation of how I approach working as a writing consultant and have firmly changed both my definition and opinion of the writing consultant process.