Weekly blog — two together (also, consultation #2)

I haven't posted in a while — not because I haven't had the time but because I haven't had a clear set of ideas about which to blog.

I still don't. But after our multimedia literacy presentations, my thought processes are flowing a little better regarding the foci of this course, as well as our final creative piece to our literacy narrative.

When we were first assigned the literacy narrative, I immediately began thinking about what made my "literacy journey" unique. Scott and I brainstormed a few of our ideas, and I realized that playing soccer for six years and being involved in music for ten somehow specialize the kind of person I am, and what specific talents I possess in the realm of literacy. Everyone learns how to read and write, at least those who have been accepted into MSU and are in this class, so I didn't even consider writing about and focusing on such a seemingly simple aspect of my literacy development.

The presentations last week made me see the error in my thinking. Yes, everyone learns how to read and write, albeit with slightly varied levels of expertise; however, everyone's journey is drastically different. You may be thinking, duh, right? I'm thinking duh right now, sort of. Clearly that's what Trixie wanted us to explicate; obviously she wanted us to think critically about how far we've come and what steps we took to get here. But I just wasn't thinking in that mindset, and I'm afraid that whenever I hear the word "literacy" after this class, I'll never think of it in terms of strictly reading and writing ever again.

Thanks, Writing Center. (What are people thinking about writing about for their creative literacy narrative installment?)

I'm happy for this development. The Writing Center has opened my mind in so many ways, not just in terms of writing but what writing can mean. It's amazing to see so in-depth the many degrees people are earning and the abilities they've acquired along the way. While they are using writing to expound on these abilities from time to time, I'm enlightened to how complex and unique the respective ability is.

I was planning on mainly focusing on the literacy narrative, but now I'm heading for a spiel about WC fabulousness. Get ready.

Developmental Editing

I want to be an editor. I've wanted to be an editor since I realized I didn't want to be a reporter, and I would like to think my ambition hasn't steered too far from my course of study, considering four of my current jobs revolve around the skill. What I never had before the WC was an aptitude for developmental editing. I never believed I would fully access this skill, either.

I think I proved myself wrong last Thursday.

I was tutoring a client who had composed a two-page cover letter. She first asked me to go "quickly" through the grammar mistakes so we could return to the beginning and start going over her content. For the first time in a session, I felt comfortable and confident enough to set her straight. "I'd be happy to go over a few grammatical elements with you, but correcting mistakes isn't what we do here. I'd like to instead go over your cover letter piece by piece and look at how each paragraph makes your entire cover letter work." She looked at me, nodded complacently, and we forged onward.

Now, this client didn't have many grammatical mistakes as it was. But that wouldn't have changed how I approached her cover letter — we read one to two paragraphs at a time, and I explained to her what's probably going on in her audience's mind (in this case, her potential employer's), and I asked her if this was the kind of information she wanted him or her to know most. She couldn't always give me a yes or no answer, so we tackled the tone of each paragraph and removed anything that would most simply be answered by a resume.

After the session was finished, she had a huge smile on her face and said to me, "You're a real tutor. You didn't just do grammar with me, even though I asked you. I needed a different perspective, and you gave that to me."

My heart melted a little. It's not even Christmas time (officially), and my heart was melting.

Writing Center, 4,530; me, 1

Consultation #2

So, for my second consultation session in which I was the client, I once again scheduled nothing officially. It was a spur of the moment, something I set up on the spot, because hey, we don't always have a million things to do in the WC.

I had my latest resume version. I still need to bring in my personal statement/SOP for grad school, but anyway. My audience was application readers at NYU, and I needed to make my resume shine.

I get frustrated when someone can't find stuff wrong with my pieces of writing. I realize I've been working on my resume since senior year of high school, and I've been refining and touching up duties practically on a monthly basis. But still, I was hoping for feedback that would help cut out what I didn't really need and possibly merge together a few relevant skills or jobs that communicated with the reader more concisely.

I did receive a few pointers on a few cluttered skill sentences. But the session didn't end up being what I wanted it to be.

The consultant really did try his/her hardest. I know he/she did. But resumes are trickier than traditional papers; similar to different professors, you're always going to have different employers and, in this case, an educational institution. It's a constant consideration, and the more you know, the more value there is in your content. Do I know NYU admission standards? No, not really, other than their graduate admission rate (50-60%). Does the consultant know? If I don't — and I'm the one applying — then he/she certainly doesn't.

So. We work with what we have, where we can, when we can do it.

Digital Remix

Working on the latest portion of my literacy narrative was an interesting experience. It gave me the opportunity to return to some programs I hadn’t used in quite a while. When I was putting it together, I had originally planned to use the Sims to recreate some of the events from my childhood that I described. However, I ran into a number of roadblocks along the way. Most of my files were lost in my last big hard drive crash, and the newer files I downloaded for this project kept crashing the game. Unwilling to sort through hundreds of files with names like “ziyanobj01” to find the problem, I switched tactics. Instead, I began hunting through the Creative Commons section of Flickr. I was pleasantly surprised to find so many pictures that so perfectly captured the ideas I was trying to convey. I was even more surprised that some people thought they actually were pictures of my family. Apparently I must have done something right with my project.

My second major difficulty came from the program I chose to make my presentation. Though we went over iMovie in class, I don’t have a copy of that program on my computer. Instead, I chose to go with WindowsMovieMaker, since I had used it before. This turned out to be a mistake. Though I generally prefer PCs to Macs, I will freely admit that in this area, the Apple product is far superior to the Microsoft one. In terms of applying transitions or adding effects, iMovie seems to offer a lot more flexibility. By the end of the project, I was so frustrated with my work that I just wanted to be done with it. I’m honestly tempted to recreate the entire project from scratch in iMovie for my final version.

Watching everyone else’s presentations made me keenly aware of all the ways my own movie could have been improved. I’m not sure why I thought I had to narrate mine, as if I was telling a story. It was interesting to see all the myriad ways everyone else thought of presenting their narratives (seriously, Mike’s was amazing). Even though we all had the same assignment, we took our stories in very different directions. I think that’s the best part of doing this kind of digital remix. Though I was initially reluctant to step outside my comfort zone, I’m glad I had this opportunity. Now I feel better prepared to help any students who visit the writing center with this kind of assignment.

Co-Consulting

Thursday afternoon I co-consulted two different sessions and I thought that both of them were extremely interessting, engaging, and inspiring. Both of the sessions were with an international ESL client of Asian decsent, and each of them were working on an assignment for their WRA class. They had to discuss any aspect that they wanted about social construction in America.

The first client had many argues that he was trying to argue within his paper. We spent most of the time looking at his first paragraph and trying to shape it into an introduction rather than a jumble of loosly connected ideas and isues. I thought that it was really interesting to discuss issues of social construction with the US with a non-native. We were able to ask lots of questions about what he wanted to talk about and how he wanted to do it. I thought it was really engaging to actually have a working text in front of me that I could really dive into and begin to consult and aid as best as I could.

The second client had a paper with fewer ideas and isseus to deal with, but he was lakcing clear focus and direction in his argument. This was also a well developed draft to focus on and really apply what I know about consulting and clear arguments. It was also very engaging. We spend lots of time really dissecting the begining and ending to his paper to determine what it is he was trying to say and what he wanted to say and how he was going about all of these things. We were able to create clearer deffinitions of some loaded terms such as feminism, gender roles, and patriarchy.

These sessions really were inspiring to me. It has been a long semester and I have been feeling burnt out and unsatisfied intellectually. These sessions showed something that I can look forward to for next semester, when I truely begin to work at the center. These sessions also helped me feel that I am ready to begin consulting on my own...scary but exciting!

Perhaps a positive ESL session?

I read Nina's post and I feel very bad that she is feeling so down about ESL clients :( So, I'm going to try to lift the mood... One of my best sessions so far at the WC was a 2 hour session with an ESL grad student. Yes, I was terrified. But it was probably the only session I actually felt excited after. What made it good was that the client was really interested and involved and wanted to talk WITH me about how to make her paper better. It was long, so we needed the 2 hours... Of course there was the usual grammar issue... but it wasn't distracting, and once I pointed out the patterns, she could fix them herself. Her problem was taking the ideas in her head and making them make sense on paper. She had awesome ideas, and was really emotionally invested in her topic. We spent a lot of time with her just explaining her views to me; then I would read that section of the paper, and show her how to make her words reflect what she said without confusing the reader in a jumble of run-on thoughts. It was fascinating to talk with her about her ideas, and it was fun (yes.. fun, oddly enough) for me to help her express her ideas. I learned a lot from the session.. even though I was way intimidated going into it.

Blog 10: Technology Remix

When I first began to work on the technology remix aspect of our trifecta literary reflection piece last week I was frusterated at best. I did not understand why I was being asked to work in a medium I am not comfortable with, or how this experience was going to help me work at the writing center. I was extremely frusterated with myself that I could not get a better grasp on i-movie and I was forced to resort to the same old powerpoint that I have been using since 4th grade....
I cannot say that all of my initial frusterations have been resolved, but I do feel much better about the project on a whole. I thought it was really interessting to observe other people's projects and presentations in class. It was nice to see what it is that they talked about, but also how they went about showing and discussing it. Although I am not sure what other classes or settings people use presentations like this I think it is pretty cool to incorporate images, music, possibly audial description, and possibly written text too.

ESL & Creative Writing

I haven't started working at the Writing Center yet officially. And I have only seen one session with an ESL student, and she spoke English perfectly and I couldn't even tell English was her second language! I keep seeing posts about how difficult and/or depressing working in the Writing Center is because of language barriers. I think I'm still not feel prepared to help ESL students yet. However, this could be because I haven't been in a real session with one. And even if I was, when I enrolled in WRA 395 I did not envision helping students who don't understand English. And I don't want all of my sessions to be monotonous or depressing because of communication barriers! I wanted to work in the Writing Center so that I could learn more about writing, and to help others develop as writers. I feel like I involuntarily have a negative outlook on sessions with ESL writers already and I haven't even observed/participated in one. There has to be some positive sessions with ESL writers, but I don't think I've heard them yet. Any takers?

Also, about the creative writing workshop... I don't think I would ever bring my creative writing paper/poem to the Writing Center on my own. What would I say? You work in the writing center. So tell me, are all of my lines completely unoriginal and cliche? Unless there is something specific they need help with, there are a limited amount of things we can help students with. I feel like poetry is what the reader makes of it. Sometimes I don't understand what poets are saying, famous or not. Something I think stinks might get a 4.0 from a professor. A poem I don't understand could be revered as the greatest of all poems. Sure we can help them IF they are trying to use iambic pentameter, rhyme, etc. But what about free form? I learned some great new vocabulary from the workshop, but it still seems like there are a limited amount of things to help students with in terms of creative writing because EVERYTHING is so subjective! And by the way, I would never tell a student their poem was not good even if they asked for my opinion. I hate telling people things they don't want to hear - it may be my downfall as a Writing Center consultant. I would definitely bypass the judgment call :)

Creative Writing

I thought the creative writing discussion was interesting the other day but discussing how to help with creative writing is difficult. The one thing that I think I'm particularly wary of is trying to look at literature as a cold process. The best example of this is the beginning of the movie Dead Poets Society where the beginning of their poetry book suggests making a graph in order to rate poems and fit them into this graph. Essentially this is an attempt to understand creative writing scientifically and rationally, which may have some merits, but ultimately misses the point of literature and art in general. I'm wary of looking at creative writing and characters, for example, in terms of whether or not they fulfill different requirements regarding "character as action" and the other different elements.

As far as writing being personal, I personally am quite scared of showing any sort of creative writing I do to anybody. However, if someone brought something into me and asked my opinion, and many of my friends have before I was a consultant, I would give them my honest opinion and not hold anything. If you ask for help, you want someone's opinion. I think that you owe it to someone who asks what you think to be honest with them. I've had friends who ask what I think of some writing they've done, when I tell them I didn't like it they get upset. We as consultants have the ultimate defense here. "You asked for my opinion, that's my opinion."