It's been a good month and a half since I completed my coursework for English 383, but I'm proud to say a few things:

1. Hopefully, if I continue in my adventures as a Writing Consultant, I will have more things to post on this blog as life develops.
2. I am still continuing to post on my personal blog (though entirely unrelated to the Writing Center or English 383) at http://raelh.blogspot.com. If you have at all enjoyed getting to know me over the past few months or reading my thoughts on things, that's the place that's most likely to continue to spread a bit of Rachel-related wit and cheer.

Stick around, it should be a fun ride.

Physical Stress, Emotional Stress, and Burnout in the Writing Center

The other day, Dr. Essid spoke to our class about making sure that we keep on top of our stress levels and mental and emotional health while working as consultants. He warned us that several current consultants in some way burnt out this semester: some went on medical leave, others just got too stressed out with their current workloads.

He also made it clear that there are a lot of options for consultants who are feeling overwhelmed. There are on-call consultants and other consultants who are willing to take on a little extra to help out someone who needs the break from all the stresses. But none of these options can be useful if the consultant doesn't admit that they're feeling stressed out or overworked in the first place. A lot of Richmond students, especially the kind of students who would look into working as writing consultants, don't know how to admit they've taken on too much and they need help.

I guess it's fitting that I'm writing this post this week, because I spent a good portion of this week ill. And I feel like this might be an area that I, like a lot of Richmond students, struggle. My life seems to be a pretty constant cycle of alternating physical and emotional stresses. A stressful work week means less sleep, fewer regular meals, and just an all-around neglect for my physical well-being. And then, once the emotional stresses of a hectic week let up, my body responds with the physical stresses of fatigue and illness.

This is a pattern that I'm going to have to work hard to break if I want to be an effective consultant. I think it's important to recognize that it's okay to ask for help and to admit when you're too stressed. Before you enter burnout mode. I cannot possibly be effective at helping other people if I cannot take the time to help myself when I need to take care of myself. Sometimes I might get overwhelmed, but I think if I want to be a decent consultant, I am going to have to learn to admit when things are getting to be too much and when I need help. I just hope I haven't learned that lesson too late already.

Can I Please Be Someone's Sempai?

Yes means maybe and maybe means no. Or at least that’s how Bouchra Moujtahid explains a major cultural difference between Arabic, Japanese, and English speakers (4). Because the Arabic and Japanese cultures both rely heavily on politeness, the implications of directly saying no are being considered rude and insulting. This difference in cultural meanings of words is merely a small example of a larger issue – the grammatical rules and clarity of language as they translate from another language to English for an ESL student rely on cultural rules that may result in difficulty bringing a writer from a Japanese or Arabic background into the English stylistic rules. Moujtahid cites the idea of organization and syllogistic reasoning. In English writing, syllogistic reasoning is the basis for a logical and well-written academic essay. A claim is made and then clearly and logically argued and supported. Moujtahid explains, however, that in Japanese culture, writing in this style would be considered boring and simplistic (4). Because Japanese writing focuses on moments of brilliant insight, clearly explaining how those insights were reached would detract from their spontaneous brilliance. Because of this cultural difference, I can see potentially insulting a Japanese student or demeaning their work (unintentionally, of course) by asking them to clearly explain how they reached the conclusion they stated or how their ideas interconnect. As a matter of fact, according to Moujtahid, pressing a Japanese writer for exactness could be seen as “extremely offensive” because the Japanese have a culture of ambiguity (4). Especially in a system where traditional modes of polite recognition (like the Japanese honorific system) do not translate, it would be incredibly easily to accidentally insult a Japanese student when they are already uncomfortable. Though I certainly wouldn’t mind being addressed as “sempai” if it would make a Japanese student feel more comfortable. It would probably make me feel special. I focused a lot more on the Japanese cultural elements than the Arabic, because there were some elements of the Japanese culture that I already understood which put these ideas in context. The idea that I most drew from this article, however, was that an understanding of the culture behind a student’s writing can explain the reasons for the stylistic choices they made and can also help a consultant figure out how to address these issues in a way that will both make sense and not insult the culture the ESL student is coming from. And that seems kind of important.

Prospectus: The Poli Sci Major and the Writing Center

Because Political Science is likely my major, and because I have had a significant amount of interaction with the department, it made sense for me to do my final project on the Political Science Writing in the Disciplines page on Writer’s Web (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/polisci/index.html). The current page already contains faculty advice and information on how papers are generally assessed in the discipline. There are still several ways in which I hope to increase the scope of the page. The first way I would like to expand the site is by incorporating information on APSA (American Political Science Association) citation, which would also probably link back to the original Writer’s Web citation page, because there is apparently a problem surrounding a lack of knowledge of the citation style. Luckily, there are several websites online with information on APSA citation. I would also like to incorporate rubrics and, potentially, dissected assignment sheets, since Kendall emphasizes the importance of understanding and decoding an assignment sheet to gather insight into the expectations of the assignments (3). I would also like to incorporate, with professors’ and writers’ permission, old papers with written commentary. Posting these on the Political Science site will demonstrate what a well-argued, organized, clear and precise paper looks like, because several professors explained that those are the major criteria they seek in Political Science papers (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/polisci/grading.html). Aside from that, including commentary will help remove the stigma of professorial commentary as “negative criticism” and “unproductive pronouncements about [students’] failings” (McGlaun 5). It will provide, hopefully, examples of useful, clear, and critical (though most likely directive) commentary that will help to clarify professors’ expectations for future students. And though directive commentary can often appear overbearing, from a professor, it is more acceptable from a professor and, as Straub points out, can often be helpful (233).

Fear and Loathing in the Writing Center

I think I have admitted before that I am often bothered by bad grammar. I’m also really bothered by sloppy word choice and awkward sentence structures. Sometimes, in fact, I am so bothered by these smaller issues that I get distracted from looking at the larger picture. A mistake like that can really mar a well thought-out paper.

My biggest fear as a consultant, though, is probably letting a smaller error that I shouldn’t waste my time on distract me from a larger issue. I kind of felt like this happened a lot with one of the essays I was working with in a tutoring session last week. The writer used the passive voice. A lot. To the point that her use of the passive voice was distracting me from the points she was trying to make because I was actually getting lost in her sentences. While that may be a grammatical issue that needs to be addressed, because it subverts meaning and clarity, there were other smaller issues that were irritating me as well. Lazy word choice that didn’t adequately make the point. Contractions in formal writing. Simple things that the writer should be able to fix on her own anyway. But in getting so fixated on them, I almost missed the fact that her thesis wasn’t really making a point.

The best way to prepare myself for this is, honestly, probably to try and desensitize myself to the immediate urge to take a red pen to a grammatically messy paper. I have also found that reading through a draft more than once helps me get around this issue slightly. While the smaller issues tend to taint my first view of the draft and also tend to distract me from the larger picture, a lot of times the second read through allows me to look at the larger arguments being made. Though the grammar and conventions may have initially detracted from my understanding and my ability to look at a paper for its central arguments, a second read through tends to make things clearer and helps me really focus on the more serious issues.

The Writing Center Is Not Ikea

Minimalism.

I don't like it in my art or my furniture, and I'm not sure I like it in my tutoring style.

Jeff Brooks commented that "when you 'improve' a student's paper, you haven't been a tutor at all; you've been an editor" (168). Brooks then goes on to explain a method of tutoring that puts all of the work into the student's hands. I guess the problem I have with this method is that if your approach to tutoring is that minimalistic...why bother to have a writing consultant in the first place?

I understand the idea to which Brooks speaks, the adage around which the Writing Center is structured: North’s “We don’t make better papers, we make better writers.” When going over a paper with a fine-toothed comb and highlighting grammatical mistakes here, digressions there, it’s very easy to lose teaching to simply editing.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t a role for tutor-directed work. Just last week, I had a writing conference for my first year seminar, and I met with my class’s fellow to discuss a comparison paper I had written. After watching far too many comparison pieces fall into the infamous “Two Essay Trap,” I was actually quite worried about spending too much of my time summarizing the works that I was comparing and not enough time actually relating the two (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/organize.html). The fact of the matter is, though, that I made another mistake, which my tutor pointed out to me. In trying so hard to focus on comparing the two works, I’d missed something really important – an actual thesis that made some coherent point.

I needed my writing consultant to not be minimal with me, to sit me down and point out that I wasn’t really saying anything, or at least not saying anything clearly. And that did teach me something which applied to more than just one essay: to make sure that I never get so caught up in an individual aspect of an assignment that I forget to consider the assignment as a whole.

Sure, in certain cases, it makes sense to use a minimalist approach. For a truly engaged student, a lot of the issues with a given essay can be fixed with introspection and self-correction. But if a student isn’t engaged or doesn’t understand the material or, like in my case, is so wrapped up in some smaller aspect of their work, minimalist tutoring will not do them any good. At that point, not only are you not being an editor…you’re also not being helpful.

Theoretically Ready-- But Is That Enough?

For several months now, the students in English 383 have looked at articles on theory and hypothetical problem consultations formulated by previous writing consultants. Some of the problems of these hypothetical papers were incredibly formulaic; certain issues always seemed to come up: organization and the ability to correctly cite and command evidence, among others. When our practical midterm came up, none of the issues I expected to encounter surfaced and I found myself needing to extend beyond the basic theories we had discussed in class. Half a semester of theory still had not really prepared me for a more practical tutorial. Practicing written commentary and discussing hypothetical tutorials did nothing to assuage the stresses of working with an actual writer for one of the first times.

Writing commentary was a drawn-out process. More often than with most of my writing, I stopped and went back to change a single word in a sentence to help to hone the meaning and change the tone slightly. After reading over the assignment sheet, like Anna Kendall recommends all writers and tutors do, and realizing that the paper was a comparison piece, I expected to work with the same kind of two-essay trap that many of the sample papers we have read before fell into (3). My marginal notes were almost nonexistent, except to point out which end note corresponded to a set of underlining or a section of the text. In an attempt to avoid commentary that was too directive and more “authoritarian” than writing center commentary should be, I focused my comments on explanations from a reader’s perspective and questions that hopefully were not too demanding of the writer (Straub 225). Authoritarian commentary that dictated specific changes that could be made may have come across as offensive, and the paper was actually strong enough on its own that a few leading questions would have been enough direction to clarify some of the issues.

Sitting down to conference with another consultant about his paper was slightly intimidating. Even with pre-written commentary in hand, I felt slightly unprepared. I repeatedly had to reference my notes, and I worried that I would not be able to clearly articulate the things I wanted to say. I forced myself to take more time choosing my words before I spoke than I normally would because I did not want to say something that might accidentally derail the friendly tone I tried painstakingly to achieve in my written commentary. I knew that, while I would have time with my written commentary to go back and rethink a sentence or a specific word I chose, in conference I could not have the luxury of editing myself, so I had to be more careful about what I said before I said it. Even so, as we sat in conference, I found myself occasionally slipping up and using words like “good” that we, as consultants, are not supposed to use.

Being on the other side of the consultation further demonstrated the point that the words chosen for written commentary and in conference must be careful and deliberate. Even though the other student acknowledged that my paper was strong, and the details he suggested for revision were smaller things that I could change and conquer easily, I felt slightly threatened, even though his commentary was friendly. This was my paper, a paper I had worked hard on, and any suggestion seemed slightly upsetting. If he had said something in a harsh way, I probably would have become really distressed about the fate of my paper.

Working with the other student, one of the largest issues I identified in his paper was my confusion over the focus of his introductory paragraph. As I read through the paragraph, I noticed that several of the statements within it could have acted as the central focus for both the paragraph and the paper, and I worked with Miles to try to clarify his point. When addressing the issue of unclear focus with in “Focus on Focus,” Bithyah Shaparenko asked her students to explain the focus of each of their paragraphs (11). This is what I attempted to do with the student with whom I worked. He looked over his introduction briefly and then explained the focus of his essay in his own words. I suggested that if he decided to revise his paper, he should write that down and further emphasize that point as his focus, because it had not been clear to me when I had read his draft.

Another important issue that we sat down to address focused on the clarity of certain points to an uninformed reader. This portion of the session stood out for me because both the writer and I identified the same issue as something that needed to be discussed. The class this student was writing for was a film studies class, and the content of the paper was very much focused on specific cinematic and thematic details of the films being studied. There were certain quotes in the paper, then, which did not make sense to me when reading the paper because they referenced points of the films which I did not understand. This led to a discussion about audience and also about expanding on the quotations used. First of all, we discussed the fact that the audience that he was writing for would probably already understand certain references and that, for specific references to scenes in the films or to specific details of the films, it was acceptable to make less general references. There were also some quotations which were presented without any real context, and I suggested that, upon revision, more explanation of the quotations used would be helpful.

In an earlier post to my blog, I explained that my first individual tutorial left me feeling terrified. After this practical midterm, I have begun to wonder if that anxiety over a consultation will ever go away. I think the fear comes from a combination of knowing that a consultant’s input can have serious impact on the final grade that a work earns and the fact that theoretical study can only do so much to prepare a consultant for an actual consultation. I hope that with more practice, this anxiety might go away, but for now, I felt like practical application was only minimally helped by the theory we have studied.

Don't Feed the Trolls!

It is both a written rule of the internet and a lesson that every user must learn on his or her own: do not feed the trolls. These "trolls" being the people who take to the internet in hopes of intentionally agitating the people they come into contact with through the use of inflammatory arguments, politically incorrect language, or just a complete lack of logic. Being raised in an internet-wary world, I have long since learned to overlook the arguments of people trying simply to get under my skin. It wasn’t until I was reading Serkan Gorkemli’s “This is a Redneck Argument!” that I actually considered how I might have to handle the situation if a troll, or really anyone I strongly disagree with, wrote a paper that I had to do a consultation on – especially if that paper offended me.

I’m a highly opinionated person at times. I try to keep an open mind about the arguments people present to me and I try to remain academically neutral, even when personally or politically opposed. It hadn’t really occurred to me, though, that I might be faced with a paper, potentially written simply to shock (to “troll”), that I could not choose to just ignore.

In this case, choosing to confront the writer can be as much a mistake as confronting the common internet troll. While trolls feed on the confrontation and thrive from the tension and irritation they cause, confronting a writer about a potentially offensive paper could have an even worse consequence: offending the writer.

I guess the important thing for a consultant in this situation would be to remain neutral and focus on other issues identified in the paper, but also to note that the argument made could offend someone. The advisor in Gorkemli’s article suggests counterpoints and a need for evidence on several of the writer’s generalizations, and that seems like the only role the consultant really can take: to remind the writer that claims need evidence and to try to use the need for evidence to get them to consider other points and claims. If the writer manages to support their claims with evidence and recognizes the risk that comes with writing a potentially offensive paper, yet still chooses to continue with the argument, there doesn’t seem to be anything else the consultant can do.

Now In Living Color!

Don't Judge Me!

When I write for someone else – for one of my peers, that is – I have noticed that I tend to put more care into my work. In class last week, we got into discussions about the roles of the internet in our class. Some people said they felt uncomfortable posting online. I can’t say I really blame them: blogging inherently means posting for the world to see. And that, my friends, is terrifying.

Two weeks ago, I had an appointment with the Speech Center prior to giving a presentation. We were expected to have a draft ready, to present it, and to workshop with the Speech Consultants before our formal presentation. There were two reasons this concept terrified me. First of all, I hate planning what I’m going to say ahead of time – if I know my topic, my thoughts sound better when I’m speaking off the cuff rather than trying to recall word-for-word something I wrote days before. Second of all, I knew my Speech Consultant and (Point!) wanted to impress her.

When a paper or a speech goes straight from my hands to the professor’s, I feel less of an obligation to make sure it really is my best work. For some reason, I put more effort into trying to impress my peers than my professors. This probably has something to do with how competitive Richmond students can be – I feel the need, repeatedly, to justify my place at this school to the people around me.

I think it is this culture of trying to keep pace with, and impress, our peers that a) makes my classmates uncomfortable posting online where anyone can read their work, and b) both helps and hurts the Writing Center process.

It helps because it means that the people who go to the Writing Center often want to take the advice of their consultants to really make their work the best it can be. I think it also hurts, though, because that extra set of eyes on a paper you know isn’t fantastic can be terrifying.

Consultants are not supposed to be judges, but as a student outside of the program, that was not the way I saw it last semester. I know I am less concerned about my professor recognizing that what I am about to turn in is not my best work than I would be about putting something I know to be B.S. in front of another student.

The First Time is Scary

I will admit – I had not used the Writing Center before when I first showed up for my observation last Monday. If our syllabus had not mentioned Weinstein 402, I very well might not have found it in time for my 7 o’clock shift. I had never actually gone through a writing consultation before, so I was not quite sure what I would see. While students were supposed to see their class writing consultant as part of their First Year Seminars, I found that my professor only gave us the time necessary to meet with the consultant for our final papers. By then, most of the class had figured out (the hard way) what he did and did not want from our papers, thus really eliminating the usefulness of the consultant. When I went for my observation, there wasn’t all that much to observe anyway, because the student scheduled to meet with the writing consultant never arrived for the meeting. I did, however, spend some time in the Writing Center and I noticed some things.

First of all, Richmond students – if you are reading this – the Writing Center is not in the library. Nor are the Speech Center or the Computer Help Desk. The first two are on the fourth floor of Weinstein Hall and the third is in the basement of Jepson. Unless it is a Sunday evening and you have a meeting with a writing consultant, the place you want to find is upstairs in Weinstein. I know that a lot of people actually are not aware of this fact, and it is probably the most useful thing you can know.

I think the biggest thing that stood out to me was that the environment of the Writing Center was actually incredibly welcoming. The harsh, fluorescent lights were off and a few lamps were turned on instead. There were couches, comfy chairs, and a table in the middle of the room. There were also some computers along the wall in case someone wanted to check something online or bring up Writer’s Web during a consultation. I actually liked being in the room, which was interesting because I was kind of expecting something cold or threatening like a computer lab.

I think this is really important and relates a lot to the work consultants do. Everything we try to accomplish involves helping people without appearing overly authoritative or intimidating, and I thought it was really interesting how even the layout of the Writing Center helps to foster that attitude. I found myself actually liking being in the room (I didn’t really want to leave, actually), which I think is really important. If the space is welcoming, students will feel less threatened and, hopefully, will have a more positive view of the consultation process. So my first experience with the Writing Center, while not necessarily completely productive, really was a good one.

Why I Must Not Use Red Pen

I feel like I should explain my blog title. Since middle school, I have frequently been the person my friends and peers have turned to for a fresh eye for their papers and written assignments. And I, being the frustrated author-editor that I am, gladly took to papers with my infamous red pen. Well, often red annotations in Microsoft Word, because people left me little time to actually look over a print copy and return it, but the idea was the same. One of my closest friends in high school even turned a novel over to me during our senior year to take my red pen to. Another e-mailed me two weeks into the first semester from another university to ask me to look over his first Philosophy 101 paper of the year. I always genuinely enjoyed this task. I guess that’s why it threw me when, the first day of English 383, we were told that we were not to use red pen.

This statement actually really resonated with me. The logic behind it was fairly obvious: red pen is unnecessarily intimidating and authoritative, and that kind of attitude oversteps the bounds of what we as writing consultants are supposed to do. But to me, it made a significant impact. It was the sign that the work as a writing consultant would be different from the work I had traditionally done with friends and peers in the past.

This idea parallels a lot of what Stephen North talks about in “The Idea of a Writing Center.” While a lot of professors, especially in the English department, had a very defined image of what the writing centers should do, focusing heavily on grammar and punctuation as I always had, the focus of the writing consultant is meant to be on organization, clarity, argumentation, and the bigger picture.

When I sat down for my first actual commentary assignment, it took a lot of effort to pull myself from the glaring grammatical mistakes in order to focus on the larger issues of the paper: repetitive reasoning, a lack of command of the source material, and organizational issues that severely weakened not just the appearance of the paper but the argument itself. When I finally managed to do that, I found myself looking at issues in the paper that would have been lost to me in past read-throughs of similar assignments. For the first time, it actually made sense.

In a lot of ways, I feel like the help I offered to my peers in high school was sufficient for what the teachers wanted from us at the time. But now, I realize that if I approached writing consultations the same way I used to, red pen ready to tear a paper apart, I’d be doing a serious disservice to the writers I was trying to help.

"When you say '8 Pages'..."

Part of our training involved reading a paper written by a previous writing consultant for the Core class (a part of Richmond academia that no longer exists) and then mercilessly sabotaged to turn a previously well-written paper into a gold mine of consulting material. One of my biggest problems with the piece was the fact that the writer talked in circles, saying the same thing over and over again. And who can really blame him when writers like John Locke have been doing the same thing for centuries? Try reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and you will quickly understand what I am talking about.

Repeating the same thought, slightly rephrased, throughout the course of a work can be a useful tool for emphasis. It says, “this thing that I am saying is so important that I am going to say it again to make sure you didn’t miss it the first time.” But simply rephrasing the same thought multiple times in a single paragraph or ad nauseum throughout a work surpasses the realm of clarification and emphasis and enters the world of unnecessary, tedious, and sloppy.

This whole endeavor with the Core paper got me thinking about something: word and page limits. Any time a professor assigns a paper with a page limit, the first question that follows is whether that page limit is a minimum, maximum, or suggestion. At one point in a class last semester, one of the students even asked, “When you say eight pages, do you mean to the bottom of the page or just on to the eighth page?” The professor responded that he always had an affinity for the bottom of the page, but the message the student sent was obvious: how much work do you really want from me?

Valerie Perry discussed the idea that when writing, certain papers are for “writing to learn,” others for “learning to write,” and then, often, another set is simply “writing to get it done.” The problem here is that the combination of students “writing to get it done” and professors’ strict enforcement of page limits or, even more, word limits, is that you end up engaged in a game of stretching. The result is often this constant repetition and recycling of ideas throughout a paper, because rephrasing the same thought half a dozen times takes up more space than saying it just once. And this does not even delve into the issue of font and margin play that everyone has learned at some point. (The difference between leaving Word’s “Widow/Orphan Control” option on and switching it off can be several lines of text, which add up in a 10 page term paper.)

The result, then, is often a weaker paper than it would have been if the same point had only been made once or twice. Saying that man’s goal in life is to achieve happiness and happiness is what men live for in two successive sentences ultimately weakens the argument for the purpose of hitting a word limit.

Tell Me What You Want

I feel like, throughout a good portion of my education, this plea has been my internal mantra with every professor and teacher I've ever had. I want to impress them, I want to please them, I want them to want to read my work. But I don't ever know what they want from me.

Sometimes it feels like the grade on a given paper is completely arbitrary. A professor returns an assignment with a B and a list of issues that could be fixed (if you are lucky enough to receive legible commentary). With the guidance offered by these comments in mind, you head towards the next paper and, thinking you have addressed the issues outlined from your last assignment, and find that the next project gets a lower grade than the previous.

I speak here from experience. In my previous first year seminar, it seemed like every grade was unpredictable and incomprehensible. Several students received As on one paper and then Cs on the next, and even when our final term paper was due, the class seemed thoroughly unable to anticipate how their current paper would stand up to the work they had done all semester.

In the very beginning, I suppose this kind of made sense. The professor was clear about the fact that the first assignment would be graded easier than the others to allow him to assess the skill level of the class, and so it makes sense that the next couple of papers would have lower grades. But I watched as students bounced from Bs to As to Cs on papers throughout the semester.

I think the confusion came in large part for the commentary the professor gave on each assignment. On the first paper, my professor commented that my paper lacked development and depth, and I got a B on it. In the next paper, I tried to go more in depth and instead I saw my grade drop to a B-. As a matter of fact, the best grade I got on a paper in the class (excluding the final term paper), I got on a paper that was about as simplistic and simply organized I have ever written.

It wasn’t only my work facing inconsistent commentary, either. I had a classmate who was consistently receiving Bs and As on nearly every paper throughout the semester who received a C on the final term paper.

It seemed like the commentary on one paper was very often the opposite of what the next paper would be assessed on. What it seemed to me was that the most important part of professor commentary, the ability to make the priorities and goals that the professor had for our writing clear, was lacking. It took far too long to figure out the winning formula on our own.