You're Not A Bad Writer: Tales From the Writing Center

By Anna Brailow on September 21, 2018

The Writing Center is only one of many underused on-campus resources available at institutions nationwide. During first year orientation for both undergraduate and graduate programs, there are often speeches from faculty and staff, many of which include phrases like this:

“Make use of the career development center.”

“Be sure to take advantage of your professor’s office hours.”

“There are free trainings available for ____ programs and a list of dates.”

All of these are solid statements, but they don’t always resonate with the students. As a result, they’ll pass up on opportunities that may not be as readily available off-campus. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be talking about Writing Centers. A little bit about me, I was a Writing Center Consultant at the undergraduate level, and am in another Writing Center as a graduate student. Of course, there are differences, and for that reason, there are conferences and events held every year to help improve existing Writing Center programs.

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According to the director of the UNT Dallas Writing Center, “the writing center is [often] perceived as a place where only bad writers go to learn how to write, and it is the responsibility of the writing center to perfect students’ grammar skills so that afterward, they return to the classroom as ‘better writers’ and faculty members can then grade students’ essays without having to worry about certain problems.” Yes, this misconception is ever present. Feel free to disagree, but while some writing implements rhetorical strategies more effectively than others, there’s no such thing as a “bad writer.” With the right motivation, enough practice, and dedication, anyone can improve their writing skills and create compelling arguments. Writing Centers exist to be a part of that process.

The Writing Center is a space to engage in conversation about any and every stage of a project regardless of medium and form. If it were a proofreading center, people could just leave their papers at the door.

You’ll find that, when you see me going through appointments I’ve had in the past or explaining how I’d conduct a session, I don’t give what I like to refer to as a Grammarly Session. A Grammarly Session, especially for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Grammarly software, is a session where all that is discussed is grammar and syntax while the argument itself is either partly or wholly ignored. According to Value Colleges, “Writing centers strive to collaborate with their college’s students in order to instill formidable writing habits that can be carried into adulthood and eventually, the workforce.” This is the goal, but achieving that goal is a two-way street. The conversation needs to be fulfilling.

Here’s an account of a very standard session of mine. I’ll ask how their day is going and how they’re liking their classes as they prepare to show me their product. Before they do, I’ll ask if they have a prompt or assignment sheet. After we go through the prompt thoroughly emphasizing all the questions that the assignment requires the answers to, we’ll go over the product that the student has brought. We’ll read through the paper, or at least parts of it, out loud together. We’ll talk about the effectiveness of the thesis, which questions are being answered where and how thorough those answers are. We’ll talk about whether a source is properly contextualized, if it lends itself well to an argument, etc. I might answer questions about citations, capitalizing this or that, and comma splices, but the student will normally catch these nit-picky mistakes.

Because of preconceived notions of what a Writing Center is and what it does, it isn’t often used to its full potential. Here are some examples of productive sessions outside of a standard session. This, by the way, does not negate the standard session in any way. I merely say this to indicate that there are other options.

The first is the brainstorming or overview session. Sessions like these are, arguably, the most productive that I’ve ever had.  A student that comes in for a brainstorming session will have a prompt that we will discuss and unpack. We will talk about the answers to questions that the professor asks, source material that will be used, and the method by which the student wishes to construct their argument. Here’s why I say that these sessions are the most productive. The student will usually leave with something tangible that will motivate them in the next stage of their writing–a fully fleshed out outline, a working thesis statement, etc. An overview session is a title I would normally reserve for an in-class session where a Writing Center consultant is present while a professor talks about an assignment. Not only will that consultant get an equally substantive review of the expectations of an assignment, but they’ll be around to help students in the crucial phase where they are beginning to think about their projects. Usually, students will leave this overview with either a topic chosen and approved and/or a scheduled meeting with either the consultant or the professor.

In-class sessions are also non-standard, but they require at least some advance scheduling. A professor can usually request in-class visits from consultants on specific assignments and presentations about what the Writing Center has to offer. This way, a student will come into the Writing Center with a better idea of what they can expect from a session and what they can bring to a session. Also, professors will get a better idea of what we can offer students.

“Through these practices, writing centers aim to change student perspectives on writing and our centers.  Because writing centers tend to focus on the individual student more than a single paper and seek to tackle big problems (higher-order concerns such as voice, organization, content) before little ones (lower-order concerns such as grammar, citation), a student’s attitude towards writing shifts. They become more aware and comfortable with the writing process as a whole (brainstorming, analysis, drafts, revisions, etc.) and begin to develop the fundamental skills required to write for any discipline” (UNT Dallas).

Often, a full Writing Center staff consists of students from all different majors and specializations, and writing is no less important in one discipline than another. Writing Centers can also go through presentations, scholarship applications, graduate applications, and much more.  Let’s break down a couple of these to get a better idea of what they could look like. Every consultant’s style is different, so feel free to agree or disagree with my approaches.

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First, let’s talk about lab reports.

A lab report reflects on an experiment conducted by a student or group of students. It’s important for the student to keep their thoughts concise, to make sure their information is accurate and well-researched (should research need to be done), and that any limits and errors in the experiment are laid out within the parameters of the assignment. The following is an excerpt from a sample Biology lab report from Hamilton College:

“The results supported my first hypothesis that sucrose would be the most easily detectable sugar by the flies. Flies show a selectivity of response to sugars based on molecular size and structure. Glucose, the smallest of the three sugars, is a monosaccharide. The threshold value of glucose was the highest in this experiment because a higher concentration of this small sugar was needed to elicit a positive response. Maltose and sucrose are both disaccharides but not with the same molecular weight or composition. It has been shown that flies respond better to alpha-glucosidase derivatives than to beta-glucosidase derivatives (Dethier 1975).  Because sucrose is an alpha-glucosidase derivative, it makes sense that the threshold value for sucrose occurs at a lower concentration than that for maltose. This might also be the reason why sucrose tastes so sweet to people.”

This is the first paragraph from the “Discussion” heading after the student has given an account of their data on the Perceptions of Different Sugars by Blowflies. First, I would have the student or myself read this entire paragraph out loud before we talk about it. In our discussion, I would say that this student has clearly done the research and knows what they’re talking about. I can also tell that they’re making the correct appeals to their intended audience. Further, I would say that the student has options should they wish to revise here.

One recommendation is to fully restate their first thesis statement and use that as an “anchor” of sorts, as I see that they started to do that, but they only talk about why they originally thought sucrose would be the easiest to detect at the very end of the paragraph. It looks like a digression from this angle, but for reference, here’s what I took to be the first thesis. “Because sucrose is so sweet to people, I expected the flies to taste lower concentrations of sucrose than they would of maltose and glucose, sugars that are less sweet to people.” I see a lot of explanation of what these sugars consist of, what makes them sweet in general, and the reactions of the flies. However, I don’t see as much of a description as to the reactions of humans and the functions by which we detect sweetness, yet they appear to take precedence in the thesis and in small parts of the discussion. We could do a number of things in the session. Here are my top two suggestions. The student may disagree for any reason as this session is for them. I am here to work with them, not over them.

1.) Amend the thesis statement(s) to focus more on outside research and a more concrete reason as to what led the student to produce this thesis, thereby omitting human taste.

2.) Use some space to compare and contrast the tastes of humans and flies, effectively creating a balance between the two subjects while also keeping in mind the required length of the report. If the student is to do this, I would recommend that they turn to similar experiments done in which humans took part.

Now, let’s look at a sample from a medical school application that the University of Pittsburgh put in a guide. This is the second paragraph from one of their samples.

“Throughout my young life, I have made an effort to be well-rounded, improve in all facets of my personal life, and find a balance between my personal interests and my social responsibility.  In my quest to understand where I fit into society, I used service to provide a link between science and my faith.  Science and religion are fundamentally different; science is governed by the ability to provide evidence to prove the truth while religion’s truth is grounded on the concept of faith.  Physicians are constantly balancing the reality of a person’s humanity and the illness in which they are caring for.  The physicians I have found to be most memorable and effective were those who were equally as sensitive and perceptive of my spirits as they were of my symptoms.  Therefore, my desire to become a physician has always been validated, not contradicted by my belief system.”

Again, the student or I would read the paragraph in its entirety out loud before we discuss it. It’s important to remember that this essay should, ideally, read like a narrative and this student has begun their story effectively to my mind. I can see that this paragraph is supposed to communicate the way that this student is going to get from Point A, their goal to find the way in which they fit into the world, to a Point B. First, I would say, let’s unpack this all-important paragraph and be certain that these two points are abundantly clear.

Here’s my suggestion — let’s begin this paragraph right away with that link between science and faith and how they as an individual fit into that equation. Next, they have a word limit, so let’s be sure that every point is as direct and active as it can be. Further, I question the ways in which their desire to be a physician has been validated by their belief system. Are we going to see this later? If yes, great. I’ll ask them to flesh this out so they can preface the rest of the essay in a more direct and active manner. The student won’t lose any narrative value by doing so.

This is a very bare breakdown of what I would do for each assignment, but notice that I’ve not talked about the students themselves. The way that a session will go depends on what the student wants to work on and their comfort level with their writing abilities, the assignments themselves, or even with the expectations of the professors. Moving forward, every culture has a different system of teaching rhetorical devices, so if a student is used to one system and feels like they are under pressure to conform to another system, that complicates things. In expanding on this pressure, I’m going to turn to Ben Rafoth and the introduction to his book, Multilingual Learners and Writing Centers.

“Whether the words are hard-to-translate ones like dude (American English) or cafune (Brazilian Portuguese), or deceptively simple ones like boy, girl, or whatever, words are only the beginning of the great chain of meaning…Words also create a sense of belonging, exclusion, marginalization, and indifference. It is one thing to know grammar and vocabulary but quite another to know how to use language in specific, local contexts where one feels welcomed and accepted.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. There’s a difference between learning a word and creating meaning from that word, placing it in context with other words and ideas. Speaking specifically about learning languages, it is difficult to pick up new languages because every language comes with a new set of rules. When institutions only honor one set of rules, those of Standard Academic English, the type of English that bans “dude” from the vernacular, it looks like they’re advocating unlearning one culture in favor of another.

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Linguist Harry Ritchie puzzles over the question of Standard Academic English in his article, “It’s Time to Challenge the Notion that there is Only One Way to Speak English.” “The modern study of language has shown that all native speakers are experts in their language. Almost all judgments about someone’s language – the laziness of a glottal stop, the slowness of rural speech, the supposed ugliness of a particular urban accent – have no linguistic justification and reflect only the prejudice of the judger.” That is to say, do we really have to be so judgmental? (We don’t, we just are.) Or, are we really this judgmental? (Yes. Absolutely. Let’s stop judging for a second and keep moving forward.)

Ideally, both an institution and its Writing Center should strive to find a balance that allows a student to add new writing skills to their portfolios without being resistant to cross-cultural representation. Does that make sense? Let me put it another way. Learning a new skill should not be an attempt to erase skills we already have. Instead, we should put more tools in our toolbox. Learn, but also remember.

A multilingual student is, above all things, another student. Again, I greet them, I ask them about their day and how their classes are. If they indicate that they are a first-year, I ask them how they like it here, etc. They bring in their assignment sheet and tell me what their concerns about the assignment are. If we’re just going over a prompt, we’re just going over a prompt. If we’re reviewing a full piece of writing, we’re reviewing a full piece of writing. These things are constants.

In portions of my training that concern how to best work with multilingual students, we explore questions of how to help students get the grade and feel more confident about their communication style in an institution that primarily supports only Standard Academic English and a few select forms of persuasion. In my sessions, I generally focus on the broad category of “Writing for Your Select Audience.” An application for a job, for example, will likely look different from an email to a professor. Appealing to different audiences is a skill to add to other skills, it does not replace anything nor does it intend to.

I’ll go through a session I had recently. Feel free to associate, agree, or disagree.

My student is fluent in both Mandarin and English, and their assignment was unconventional. They had to choose two topics from a prompt, and write hypothetical emails to their professor based on the topics that they chose. I don’t remember the second prompt, just the first, but we worked on both. The first prompt said something like: “You did not do well on the most recent quiz. You would like to meet with your professor and possibly re-take the quiz.” We read their email out loud, and they caught a few conventional errors that complicated their meaning. We read the whole thing before discussing it. They answered each of the questions they were expected to in a concise manner, and I commended them for this. So I said, as I’d normally do, “I just have a couple questions. [Insert sentence]. Can you tell me what you mean by this?” This, I remember, was a longer sentence that tried to cover a lot of ground at once. I’ve done this many times, as I would later say.

My advice was to break the sentence apart into two different ideas. They circled the subjects of each sentence and wrote them out. After they did this, their primary concern was whether or not what they said was polite. I assured them it was very polite. Moving towards the end of this part of the session, we talked about the hypothetical email’s subject line. It was long, so I encouraged them to pare it down to only a few words. They looked concerned about this, and it took me a moment to realize that they couldn’t understand what I was saying.

I said something like “an email’s subject line is usually read fairly quickly. Would you be okay with trying three to four words?” After an “oh, okay!” we used the dry erase board that we had available. I wrote out the subject line that they had, and handed them the marker. “Which, would you say, is the most important part of this phrase?” They thought for a moment and said, “retaking the quiz.” I said, “alright, and keep in mind that you have a choice between a few things.” They were confused about this, so we made a short list of subjects together. they chose to make their subject about securing the meeting.

The most rewarding part of being a Writing Center consultant for me is, as cheesy as this sounds, knowing that a student has felt better about their writing after I’ve worked with them which is why I always try to find new ways to do just that. There is no single correct method for persuasion and there is no one correct way to run a session. At the end of the day, a session is a conversation, and like any conversation, it will only be as fulfilling as the participants make it.

My parting suggestion is to make use of as many resources as you can while they’re accessible to you. They really do exist to help you. If, in any situation, you find that you are not being helped the way you need, do your best to find a place that will give you that help. It’s entirely worth it to help yourself.

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