Week 8

I've noticed that people are always trying to put the writing conference process in a step-by-step fomat. There's so much involved in tutoring a writer that putting it in a consistent format makes it seem more manageable. Some of the articles we've read for class suggest that they have one or a few of the steps to that process. However, most of them point out that their strategy won't always work or will work differently with various writers. What works for a native speaker may not work for a multilingual writer. What works for someone who has been to the Center before may not work for a first-timer. What works for someone who came of their own volition may not work for someone who was required to come. Tutoring writing can be messy and unpredictable and the strategies that are appropriate depend completely on the writer you're working with. Tutoring writing seems to completely defy the step-by-step format. I've come to the conclusion that it's not about following a procedure, but having a toolbelt full of strategies so you can effectively adjust to each individual writer.

I have seen this in the Center over the semester, but especially in my first full week on the schedule. I worked with four different writers on the same assignment this week. They were all doing an analysis of the BSU Theatre Department's production of Becoming: An Evening of Short Plays. Although I thought that it would be pretty boring conferencing about the same thing over and over again, it wasn't. Each consultation was incredibly different even though the papers had some similar content. I worked with freshmen, and juniors, and ELL writers, and native English speakers, and shy writers, and unengaged writers... The point is, I had to use different strategies and methods with each writer. Figuring out what would work for each writer just came kind of naturally. I just chatted with them and figured where they were at and what kind of help they needed and moved on from there, and adjusted as necessary.

That's not to say my first week on the schedule was flawless. I noticed my tendency to skip or rush over the pretextual dimension after I've already worked with a couple of writers in a shift. I feel the time crunch of a half hour appointment and jump right into the textual dimension. One thing that has already helped me remember the pretextual dimension is Max's comment in class on Thursday. He said, "I can usually rate the quality of a session by how long it takes to look at the actual paper (Or something very similar with the same meaning)." I employed this idea in my consultations on Wednesday and noticed a huge improvement. The longer I talked with the writer about how their class is going and how they felt about the assignment, the more helpful I was able to be. The conversation brought out problem areas we should focus on, gave me an idea of what to expect, and even made it clear that the writer had skipped over the prewriting stage and needed to spend some time there.