2nd and 3rd co-consults

My second co-consultation (technically my first, because I ran solo on my other), taking place on Thursday, Sept. 18, was with an ESL student working on his dissertation. The consultant overseeing me silently took notes as I had him read each paragraph, after which we spent time going over HOCs/LOCs. His priority was to ensure that the content made sense to English speakers and fit traditional descriptive grammar.

I had a lot of fun with this writer. He was always open to suggestions but readily defended his word choices and sentence structure. We were both so thoroughly engaged in the session that the overseeing consultant had to stop us from time restriction. I told her I could stay longer, and so could he, so she left us alone and we spent more time covering similar issues, as well as inanimate objects assuming animate actions and such.

Before leaving, the consultant went through the issues she noticed throughout and knew an incredible amount about the topic he was addressing. They were mostly sentence revisions and a few questionable diction choices that she outlined through a cluster diagram, demonstrating that his parallel structure in one area of his dissertation referred to something entirely different from what he was trying to convey.

After my first session and officially observing six or seven sessions, I feel confident that I've mastered WC protocol. There are finer details to work out, but I am confident I will build on them as I continue to learn and grow with other consultants and writers.

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My third co-consultation (Monday, Sept. 22) was with a Tier I writer working on a persuasive essay. The overseeing consultant was a classmate who was supposed to be co-consulting, as well, but she and I teamed up and got things done. We had the writer read through each paragraph at first but quickly realized she was just half way done and hadn't developed many of her ideas.

Note to self and all: Always check when a paper is due and what the professor wants in the syllabus. Evidently the paper had been due at 5 p.m. that day, and it was...3 p.m. Or maybe 1? I didn't know this, so I started spending at least 10 minutes describing to her what she could do, and my co-consultant said "Well...what can we do for you to turn this in on time and have time to revise?" So there's that.

The client seemed to zone out at times, and I wasn't sure if it was because we were telling her to change too much, or if we were giving her too much advice...or too many revision directions...either way, the client said at the end that we had helped her tremendously, but I had no way of knowing this for sure. I guess a consultant never does. You do what you can with what you have given the time constraints and the standards and intentions of the client. It was a very interesting topic, one the consultant and I knew a lot about, but yeah. Maybe I shouldn't be as directive next time. I did ask her plenty of developmental questions, but she was in a very early stage in the writing process, which is something I need to take into account in the future.