Megan's+7+March+Post

One of the scariest client concerns for me as I began working in the Writing Center has been organization. When I see an unorganized paper, my first instinct is to put blinders on and work on putting it together as if it were a puzzle rather than to help the client figure out how to organize their papers effectively. Luckily, I haven’t really encountered an extremely unorganized paper yet in the WC, but when I do, I’ll be sure to consider some of the things that I’ve learned from Writing Center Workshop. Rafoth’s “Organizing Ideas: Focus is the Key” article discussed some ways to go about helping students with organization to avoid making the mistake of reorganizing the client’s paper for him or her.

One of the most important suggestions from this article is the idea that an unorganized draft can be used as a discovery draft, where the writer’s ideas are contained //some//where in the draft. After reading this article, I decided to keep this idea in mind for when I work with a client who needs more serious help with organization. Last week, I had the opportunity to put this strategy to good use when a client walked into the WC and wanted help with organization. As we got further along into her paper, we had to stop more frequently because her ideas were literally all over the place. She had a general framework that was organized really well, but organization within paragraphs was a problem. I asked her a few questions about her ideas, and we discussed how we could put like ideas together. We ended up making a list of the different paragraph topics and put some of the ideas that were located somewhere within the draft under their corresponding paragraphs. In retrospect, highlighters could have been a really useful tool to help show the client which ideas should go together, but she seemed to understand how to better organize her paper because she had a fresh pair of eyes going over her paper with her, and she was able to look over her paper in a more objective manner.

Rafoth’s “Organizing Ideas: Focus is the Key” has been one of the more practical articles that we’ve read when it comes to applying its key concepts to working in the WC. I would definitely recommend keeping these ideas in mind when working with unorganized drafts.


 * Questions:

1. Are there other resources for helping clients with organization out there? 2. Have any of you had experience with helping clients in the WC with organization? If so, what were some of the strategies that you used?

Kelly's Comment: Megan: My first session was largely spent working on structure too. It sounds like you found tools which worked well in this session (I like the highlighter idea a lot). However, for the future you could also try parroting what the student is saying back to them in order to help them conceptualize what they are saying. Another idea that I did not use but I think would be very helpful for organization, is writing the paper ideas on sticky notes so you can move them around until they are in a logical order. I hope these ideas help!

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