Observations! OMG!
By David James Tibergien
The other day I did my first consulting on my own. Several members of the writing center staff had called in sick. I suspect that they had the Brown Bottle Flu. Trixie had come to me and asked if I could help a student with a poetry analysis. Being a lover of poetry and an English major, I felt as though I might be able to serve this client well.
I greeted the client and went through the rhetorical and aesthetic script. I introduced myself, I offered her refreshments, I asked her where she wanted to sit, and I sat next to her.
Instead of having her read through her paper, which was visibly incomprehensible, I asked her about her goals and her instructor’s demands through the paper. We analyzed and discussed the rubric. I felt as though that the instructor might be well advised to consider having a writing center consultant look over his rubric, but I didn’t mention this to my client in the interest of professionalism.
After we each read the rubric several times, the demands of the clients’ instructor became more clear. After we had agreed on some goals and benchmarks for success (unlike a certain administration that invaded a certain country) we proceeded to read through her paper.
Her paper, printed in periwinkle and in a font that I would expect to see in a seventh grade girls’ scrapbook had a lot of difficult sentences despite the fact the reader could get a good idea of what she was trying to say. I helped her work with her syntax and word choices to help her give in an effort to improve her clarity. I think after I showed her this that she understood why her previous analysis had been more weak than she would have liked.
The other place where the client needed some help was connecting her analysis to the course material. Based on the rubric, it appeared that the instructor wanted the client to demonstrate that she could identify key terms and concepts in poetry. Since she already had a pretty good analysis and interpretation of the poem, I showed her how she could use these key terms and ideas to support her argument. I gave her a basic argument formula that she seemed to connect with:
“Here is how I think it is, and here is why I am right.” (Opinion and supporting evidence.)
Finally, I suggested that she use a more standard font and color on her assignments in the future.
She was pretty enthusiastic and energized after our meeting. I think she felt pretty lost and hopeless before our consultation, and that after she was on course toward produceing an excellent paper. I told her that she should feel free to come to the writing center whenever she felt like she could benefit from it.
Despite the snark that I display in my posts and in class, I cultivate a more cordial aspect with my clients. I really think that presenting myself as an accessible facilitator helped the client to trust my suggestions for improvement in such a way that she felt good about adopting them. Based on personal experience, criticism that is more acerbic can create a needlessly adversarial dynamic that could make the client less inclined to adopt consultant recommendations, despite their value and validity.
All in all, I feel as though the observations that I have been making (and that I will continue to discuss on this forum more often) have been putting me toward a place where I will be able to handle more clients on my own, and where I will be able to take on more complex and challenging assignments so that I can make a more valuable contribution to the writing center.
David
Maybe
Not A Good Style To Go With In Academic Writing
