Writing Center Observations - 2nd session

Today the client I observed was a Social Work grad student who had come back to school after 30 years. The first thing was that his assignment sheet was unclear, so he and the consultant looked at it together to make sure they both understood the assignment the same way. Next, the consultanat asked what he was most concerned with in the paper, and he said the references and the overall coherence of the paper. In case they ran out of time, the consultant asked which areas were his highest priorites, and he said format was what he was most worried about.

He was fairly unfamiliar with APA format and his teacher hadn't explained it much, but instead of working through the works cited page with examples, the consultant told the student about easybib.com to automatically format the page for him. I thought it was a good idea to give him such a convenient source so that the session could be spent focusing on other things.

Next they focused on the in-text citations. The client pointed out a few he was unsure of, and the consultant got example sheets and APA books that they looked through together. She explained everything thoroughly and made sure he understood before he penciled in the corrections on his paper.

Next the client read the paper aloud, and often stopped as he went for corrections. The consultant only gave opinions and general advice rather than specific suggestions. The major problem with the paper was that the client was using excessive, long quotes without explaining their significance. The consultant made two good points I wrote down: "Where is your voice" and "It's you, the writer, who we want to hear more." His problem was that his sources were making his argument for him, rather than supporting his own opinions. Once he understood this, the consultant suggested he break up the quotes and use more paraphrasing, and to be sure to state the quotes' significance to his overall argument. He seemed well-prepared to do this later, so they didn't focus on it during the session.

After all that there were a few minutes leftover, so the consultant got a laptop and actually showed the student the easybib.com website so that he would be more familiar with it on his own.

I'm still a little uncertain of how confident I am of handling a few different problems in one session though. As a client we only focused on my paper overall (not citations or other issues) and the first session I observed as similar. However, I think this session provided a good example of a mulit-part session. The student and consultant set up priorities and focused deeply on the areas that needed more work, and the consultant had plenty of examples and advice ready for the more specific questions about formatting and references.