Teague McElroy's Digital Portfolio

This is a training I did for the 2024 consultants and future ones as well.

The General Structure of an Appointment

The general structure of an online synchronous or in-person appointment is as follows:

1. Read the appointment form before the appointment
2. Greet your writer
3. Fill out the start of the Client Report Form (CRF)
4. Ask questions about the writer’s writing process
5. Ask about the assignment and any background information that you need
6. Read through the piece while giving feedback and asking questions as you go
7. Ask if anything wasn’t addressed or if they have any additional questions
8. End the appointment before the :50 mark of the hour
9. Wish your writer good luck on the assignment and walk them to the door

Keep in mind that appointments are supposed to be around 50 minutes. If you go under, it won’t be a big deal. If your appointment goes over 50 minutes however, you might need to stop the appointment sooner than the student would like to. Take this as an opportunity to schedule another appointment with the student.

Read the Appointment Form Before the Appointment

Before you begin, it’s important that you know what your writer’s concerns are and what kind of assignment you are looking at. You will find the filled-out appointment form in your email. You want to pay special attention to the writer’s concerns, the type of assignment it is, and if they’ve attached any files for you to look at prior to the appointment.

How do I Analyze the Concerns?

There are many ways to approach a writer’s concerns. Here are a few examples:

“I need help with grammar”

• “I see you would like help with grammar. Let’s get a sense of your argument and audience so that we know the best kind of grammar to use.”

“I need help organizing my ideas.”

• “Let’s see how we can order your ideas to give this project a logical flow for the audience.”

“I need help with citations.”

• “I’ll read through your paper and comment on claims that need to be supported, and I’ll provide guidance for how to structure your citations according to the required format.”

How do I Analyze the Confidence Question?

You can look at confidence as a sense of what the client wants us to preserve in their work. Think of it as everything besides what they need help on, and focus on the things not mentioned in this section when providing feedback. Here are a few examples:

“I really like my argument.”

• “Let’s focus on the evidence you’re using to support that argument and the language you’re using to convince your reader.”

“I’ve gathered good evidence.”

• “Let’s make sure that the evidence is presented clearly and that it is organized in a manner that reaches a logical conclusion.”

“I’m a good writer.”

• “Let’s think about the uniqueness of your argument and consider how you can organize the flow of your evidence to make the greatest impact.”
  • This person is coming to us for higher-order discussions, so we should highlight comments like this when they come in. This is somebody who has been successful in their communication practice thus far, but they are looking to rise above the rest by considering things like uniqueness, voice (humor/professionalism), argument soundness, and personal branding.

Greet Your Writer

Once the front desk worker introduces you to your writer in the WCC, make sure to give a friendly welcome to your writer! Open the meeting with a “Hello,” a compliment, and maybe a polite question about their weekend, holidays, or overall week. This is the moment where you establish a peer-centered tone in your appointment. Avoid being overtly serious and authoritative, since we are peer tutors, not professors.

Offering something to eat or drink from the snack corner comes next! A quick mention works, but keep aware of what supplies we have to inform writers when we are low on something (or everything!).

Fill Out the Start of the Client Report Form (CRF)

Open the CRF from the home Canvas page and walk through the form with your writer. Remember to designate preferred names and possibly pronouns if applicable. If you feel you need to do so at any point, you can put any confidential information or questions in the final question on the form. These comments will go directly to Dr. Gale and will not be shared with anyone. If you have any questions about the form, ask someone working with you in the WCC! Feel free to ask to do the CRF for the appointment you shadow to get extra practice! 

Ask Questions About the Writer’s Writing Process

Knowing how to help your writer starts with knowing the writer. Understanding how your writer writes will help inform how you suggest to go about almost any concern. 

Some helpful questions to open your appointment may include the following:

• “Have you ever worked on a paper like this one before?”
• “Could you walk me step-by-step through your writing process?”
• “Could you walk me through how you wrote this paper?”

Ask About the Assignment and any Background Information that You Need

Even though you may understand the assignment already, it is helpful to ask the writer about the assignment to gauge how much the student understands the assignment and can show you where you might need to provide more help. Some helpful questions to open your appointment may include the following:

• “Would you mind explaining the assignment to me?”
• “Do you have an assignment guide or rubric I could look at?”
• “Are there any specific sections of the assignments that you feel less confident in?”

Read Through the Piece While Giving Feedback and Asking Questions as you Go

It is extremely helpful to have your writer read out loud. Pay attention to words left out, pauses, and other natural speech patterns that imply grammatical differences in the work. There are several reasons for this:

• Reading out loud helps the student catch any grammatical errors or flow issues
• Takes up awkward silence
• Less work for you to do

It’s important that you stop after each paragraph or wherever the student finds an issue, as it can be hard for it to find later. If you are working with a longer paragraph, consider stopping at each quote, topic change, etc. If you want to interrupt your reader, the following might help:

• “Alright, I wanted to discuss something in this sentence here.”
• “I have a quick question here…”
• “Could we take another look at this citation?”

So How Should I Act During a Consultation?

There are many ways to go about a consultation, so there are simply a few key things to keep in mind:

• Always keep in mind that your writer is a human! No matter how frustrating the consultation gets, be kind and clear in your language. If you are having issues with a student, ask for help or leave a comment for Dr. Gale in the CRF
• Questions are your best friend. Asking questions will give you insight on what’s going on in the writer’s head, while helping the student adopt the mindset you are trying to convey. Asking questions about thought process, meaning, and how they chose to communicate to the reader will be the most helpful
• You should always ask to touch the student’s computer, notebook, or paper draft. For reasons your writer does not have to disclose, they might prefer that you don’t touch their stuff

For these reasons and more, making a better writer is rooted in the writer themselves. It is important to make sure that the writer is making decisions about their writing, not copying down what you’re saying word-for-word. This is where questions come in; asking questions allows the writer to simply answer your question in the form of a correction on their paper on their terms. Muriel Harris (1995) fully explains this in the following quote:

“From the students’ perspectives, the more highly satisfactory tutorials were those in which the students were active participants in finding their own criteria and solutions… It appears that writers both need and want discussion that engages them actively with their ideas through talk and permits them to stay in control” (p. 31, emphasis added).

So if students should want to learn in order to have a successful tutorial, how should we frame how a consultation is supposed to go? In Steven North’s The Idea of a Writing Center (1984), he outlines the way to best help a  consultant work with any writer:

“[Writing Lab pedagogy] will not derive from a generalized model of composing, or be based on where the student ought to be because she is a freshman or sophomore, but will begin from where the student is, and move where the student moves… Tutors are not, finally, researchers: they must measure their success not in terms of the constantly changing model they create, but in terms of changes in the writer. Rather than being fearful of disturbing the ‘ritual’ of composing, they observe it and are charged to change it: to interfere, to get in the way, to participate in ways that will leave the “ritual” itself forever altered” (p. 439, emphasis added).

Starting where the student is, as North puts it, creates a space where the student is not judged for their writing quality or how refined their methods of writing are, but simply to help them for next time.

The reason why we are so much about the writer making their own decisions? Irene Lewis Clark outlines the concerns as follows:

“Of course, in most instances, the underlying aim of policies such as these is not simply to protect the writing center from charges of plagiarism, but
rather to enable students to become independent writers and learners, capable of generating and evaluating text on their own. From what learning
theorists say, students learn best when they discover methods and ideas for themselves, when they are active participants in the learning process, not passive recipients of information” (Clark, 1988, p. 7, emphasis added).

The big challenge here is surprisingly not avoiding plagiarism. While it is important that what the student writes remains completely their own, we want to create writers that can do so by themselves and create work that they’re proud of.

References:

Stephen North: The Idea of a Writing Center 

Irene Lurkis Clark: Collaboration and Ethics in Writing Center Pedagogy 

Muriel Harris: Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors

Ask if Anything Wasn’t Addressed or if They Have any Additional Questions

After you’ve read through each section, ask if the writer wanted you to address anything in the paper. Sometimes the writer will keep an eye on a sentence that they feel needs work, and asking this will give them the opportunity to ask about the sentence.

At the end of the appointment, ask these questions in more general ways.

End the Appointment at the :50 Mark of the Hour

In order to leave time for you to complete the CRF, make sure you finish discussing the paper before :50 of the hour. Letting your writer know before 45 minutes into the appointment is also helpful.

Some ways to politely conclude the appointment may include the following:

• “Our time is coming to an end, would you like to set up another appointment to work on this more?”
• “It’s getting close to the end of our appointment, are there any last questions you would like me to answer?”

Wish Your Writer Good Luck on the Assignment and Walk them to the Door

As your writer walks out, make sure you are kindly ending the appointment in a way that feels like an acquaintance would: be nice, but don’t let them stay too long (so you can do the CRF).