Productive & Useful

Productive And Useful For A Change
(In The Barack Obama sense)

The class discussion that we had last Thursday was probably one of the more useful that we have had. I felt like there were a lot of ideas going around about how writing centers can collaborate with academic departments to provide both better learning opportunities to students in specialized writing courses and also offer the opportunity to enhance more effective better consulting skills. It might be possible that by offering workshops to help writing center consultants become more useful and more responsive to the specific needs of students across an array of disciplines that we can truly improve writing across the curriculum.

This is what will ultimately be my final project, so I'll certainly be talking about these things more. But I can express honestly that when I consult for someone who has a Master's Thesis in the biological sciences, I don't feel like I understand the genre of academic science writing as well as I could. I feel like if I knew more about the expectations of the field that I could offer better consultations with students. This challenge wins a double frustration score when this thesis has been prepared by an ESL student.

I think we can do a lot more to prepare students for workforce writing and that we can also do more to help writing center consultants help them.