Wendy+Warren

Wendy's page!

=Post 1= 2/21/10

Having taken this class last semester as well, I feel as though I have had a different, although interesting, developmental experience as compared to that of my classmates. Last semester I was positively terrified of working with clients. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to help them or that I would freeze up when an issue arose, along with many other unlikely but equally terrifying situations. My change over the course of last semester was mainly focused on overcoming this fear, learning to work with clients and staying in charge of the session. With this roadblock out of the way, I have really been able to take to heart the readings and discussions we’ve had in class and focus on becoming a better consultant.

One of the class activities we did, the mock session with the paper on irrational crowd behavior, struck me as particularly interesting and helpful. This paper ended up being what I’ve now learned to call a “discover draft,” a paper that's thesis ends up coming to surface towards the end. This term comes straight from the Rafoth readings on page 102. I had had clients in the center before that came in with papers similar to this, but I always had trouble pin-pointing what the problem was and why their ideas were being conveyed in such a seemingly construed way. Being shown how to help clients who come in with this problem has really helped me with my sessions. I am able to see more clearly what the client’s thesis may be, even if it doesn’t happen to be in their introductory paragraph. Helping the client develop a better thesis also helps give the paper direction, and I find it easier to revamp a paper when it has clear direction. I’ve always been a very thesis-oriented person and I tend to solve most of my client’s problems, such as elaboration and organization, by having them refer back to their thesis, so being shown a new way to develop them has really been helpful to me.

1. What is the best way to go about telling your client that they probably need to rewrite their thesis and restructure their entire paper? 2. What is the best way to organize a paper that doesn't require a thesis?

=Post 2= 3/7/10

Along the same lines as my last post, I am once again fixated with the idea of the thesis statement. During a class discussion, I had a sudden epiphany upon hearing a new suggestion about how to help clients create a more well-developed thesis. We were told to ask why or how after giving a general thought or statement. For instance, one could say “The novel Brave New World makes many social statements about the dangers of becoming a trivial culture preoccupied with mindless pleasure.” This is the type of thesis I see a lot of in the center. It seems well thought out and intelligent but in the end, it really doesn’t argue anything. The writer needs to add to this by showing //how// the novel argues this or //why// the author is making this statement. This also helps the writer showcase the main points he or she plans to talk about in the rest of the paper right there in the thesis.

In our Rafoth reading “Organizing Ideas: Focus Is the Key,” it was suggested that the writer “nutshell” their ideas so that they could better focus on where they wanted their paper to go. Expanding a thesis can provide the exact same results and help the writer find a good direction. Since this class discussion and reading, I have actually worked with clients on expanding their theses in this way and they’ve all had very positive responses to it. Most of the time, their paper has already included everything they wanted to say and adding to the thesis helps to summarize all their main points.

1. What have you found to be the most common way clients like to brainstorm thesis ideas? 2. Conclusions are something I find clients need a lot of help on. What is the best way to help a client with their conclusion?

=Post 3= 3/9/10

The other day, I had a student come into the writing center with an anthropology paper about communities and how they interact with each other. I was about to get off my shift but I helped her for about ten minutes or so before I left. After having read just the first paragraph, I was so utterly confused by what she was trying to say that I didn’t even know where to go from there. It was basically my worst writing center nightmare come to fruition. Her writing wasn’t completely atrocious, but it was just bad enough and the subject was just foreign enough that it did not click with me at all. I was so thankful to give my session over to someone else when my shift was up because I was just floundering around trying to help the poor girl who was probably wondering why on earth I qualified to be a consultant in the first place.

And while this isn’t directly related, this situation reminded me a lot of the readings and discussions we’ve had on working with students with disabilities because a lot of the same suggestions applied directly to me. Our Murphy reading on page 237-249 talks about how to react in situations that may seem unfamiliar. I remained calm and patient, explained my reasoning and asked questions to guide the client. I didn’t show my frustration or annoyance. I also pulled from my knowledge of the Rafoth reading on page 115-119, Tutoring in Unfamiliar Subjects. I asked her questions when I didn’t know what she was talking about and tried to frame them in a way that could help her with expanding her ideas. Being unfamiliar in the subject helped us be able to work on sentence clarity as well because it was easy for me to point out to her when something didn’t make sense. I felt that this session was definitely a humbling learning experience for me because I had never been so clueless about a paper before, but I was glad to have discussed how to deal with it beforehand.

1. What do you do when you absolutely cannot help a student? 2. How do you approach a paper that has a format or style that you are unfamiliar with?

=Post 4= 3/9/10

I believe one of the biggest misconceptions I had about the center before taking this class was regarding the fact that the center is not an editing service. I figured working would be a breeze because I know a lot about grammar and have been editing my friends’ papers on the technical level for years. I was thrown for a loop on the first day of class when we were told we couldn’t simply edit someone’s paper. But after our Ryan reading on helping writers through all stages of the writing process, I felt much better about the job at hand. We learned all different ways to brainstorm, to organize and revise and to make sentence level revisions. I like the idea of “improving the writer, not the writing,” and under this objective I learned that it was ok to help the writer with basic grammar rules, as long as the client can learn from the revisions and utilize them in future papers. Along these same lines, I’ve found that many people who visit the center have the same preconception about what our job as consultants is. Most who visit want help simply editing their paper and I’ve had to learn our to steer the client away from this without seeming like I have taken control of the session and am only doing what I want. Most of the time, this comes in the form of working on editing the thesis to fit with the paper, working on general organization, or making a more clear and concise conclusion paragraph. Moving sentences around or revising for clarity oftentimes makes the writer feel as though the paper is edited, when oftentimes we end up changing more higher order concerns.

1. What do you do when a paper is so good it really only needs light, lower order revision? 2. How do you deal with a client you is insistant on only working on editing?

I responded on 3/10/10 to: Kelly Robinson's post on going over the session time limit. Michael McFarland's post on working with ESL students.