Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2019

This is something I've been thinking about recently as I just got a few new students in the Writing Center (relatively recently)-- one is a first year in Business/Economics, and the other is a Senior in Sports Management. There was a paper recently for Economics which was all about marginal analysis which I did not understand. I think it was especially hard because this student had a lot of questions about not understanding the prompt or what the professor was asking him to do with his analysis. I told him I didn't really know anything about marginal analysis but we could try to dissect the prompt together. This only went so far, and what I ended up doing is just asking him to the best of his ability to explain marginal analysis to me and what they were talking about in class. I think this turned out okay, because when he had to explain it, I could grasp more what it was about and I think it also helped him clarify what he knew so he felt a little more confident.  But I think ...

This is a timely subject for me this semester, as I've found myself tutoring students in the writing center whose instructors have each required them to utilize topics that interest them in their own disciplines in order to apply rhetorical analysis in ways that may be relevant to their broader academic careers and/or interests. Both of my students are in business/finance, and while one has been working on a research project which spans the entire semester, asking her to consider the ways in which researchers in her field apply rhetorical strategies to advocate for one investment method over another, my other student is often invited to frame individual assignments through the lens of economics if he can make a case for its relevance. This puts me, as a tutor, in a liminal space, trying at once to translate assignment for my students, and the conventions of their discipline through teh filter of rhetoric in order to be able to assess whether they've adequately offered the relev...

I have previously worked with writers of scientific papers and am currently working in the WC Enrollment Program with a PhD student in the music therapy department. Her papers and presentations are an interesting mix of both empirical research on the effectiveness and practices of music therapy and case studies / personal anecdotes of actually practicing it. At the same time, the student is sometimes worried that a true "research paper" shouldn't necessarily incorporate stories about actual humans (not even officially researched case studies); on the contrary, I encourage her to use these stories to explain/balance the research, as long as she does so professionally. Like we once talked about in class, the best academics are people who know how to seamlessly integrate rigorous abstract ideas / thoughts with concrete, intriguing storytelling--except burgeoning academics feel they must be overly formal and reliant on a stripped academic tone (the student is also an inter...

One of my students was recently tasked with writing a theater review for her Acting I class. The assignment asked her to focus specifically on tracing / evaluating the acting chops of one main character throughout the play, which she found difficult to do without also commenting on other aspects of the play (script, directing, set). Which is to say, it was hard for to separate the acting performance from the other aspects of the performance, and since I hadn't seen the play and she was working from memory, it was hard for me to figure out what kind of questions would tap into those distinctions. I also have NO experience doing anything in acting or theater. Like, I actively avoid those situations because I hate them. This student is passionate about theater (she previously wrote about a "Dear Evan Hansen" song for a rhetorical analysis assignment) and we have worked in previous sessions on developing a monologue that she performed for her class; this was easier for me t...

I wonder if, as writers, most of the writer tutors share the philosophy I clung to since I was a kid, dreaming of becoming a novelist since I was six years old: because writers write what they know (to some extent), it's critical to learn as much as possible about as many ideas and fields as possible to be a good writer. Because of this, I change my major three times as an undergraduate and ended up with 3 minor equivalences, plus I came to grad school for a holistic field that borrows shamelessly from every corner of the sciences and humanities to study a big topic, human beings. This experience in writing lab reports to critical literary essays boosts my confidence in the Writing Center and some of my most fruitful, rewarding repeat students at my old WC in Rhode Island were social workers and nurses. I know less than ever, but I can fake it through the basics of most disciplines. I've struggled with tutoring across the curriculum the few times I've hunkered down to do ...

Since I haven’t taught Rhetoric, I am helping almost all of my enrollment students with work in areas that are not within my discipline (I also tutor a Political Science major with work in his field). As described in chapter five of the Bedford Guide , I find myself helping them a lot with process. With my Rhetoric and Poli Sci students, we’ve spent sessions working on research techniques (What is JSTOR and how do you use it?), pre-writing activities (brainstorming and outlining), and grammatical/syntactic deep dives (How to know when to use a semi-colon or comma). One of my students is a Creative Writing major working on their fantasy novel which features a dense, complicated mythology and an invented language system. We began our work on it together with the third-to-last chapter. In a way, this text proved perhaps even more foreign than the Rhetoric or Poli Sci essays, and we even took one 25-minute session so they could outline for me all the major pieces of...