By Priya Chandrasekaran
As a writer and a Writing Consultant, I probably think the word “revision” fifty times a day. Only “coffee” and “chocolate” enter my mind as consistently, and usually to distract me from revision.
However, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about how “revision” applies to my consultations. I’ve been thinking about how the process of revising the way I work with students happens alongside students’ revising their writing. And I’ve also been thinking about how the ways I modify and build on my experiences of working with students are not all that different from the ways writers learn language, or develop academic writing skills.
In many of my sessions, a student writer’s work invites me to see something—an argument, a theme, a preoccupation, an organizing principle—that somehow that student herself might not have identified. Depending on the session, I might articulate it for the student or I might open the space, in conversation or on the page, for the student to voice it first. Over the years, I’ve come to see that an important part of my role as a Writing Consultant is to be a mirror and reflect back a student’s thoughts with sharper resolution, and therefore to enable a student to see choices where perhaps before none seemed to exist.
Some of the most helpful feedback I have received on my writing has offered a similar kind of reflection. It struck me recently that this is also true for my consultations. I was observed by colleagues on two occasions over the past few weeks. Reading the moves I made with a few questions or suggestions reflected back to me on the written page, I could see my own consultation work with greater “resolution.” Since then, I have noticed myself consciously giving students more time to draft ideas, deliberately focusing on grammar in the key phrases of student texts, and taking a moment to start sessions with a deep breath. It’s not that these were things I didn’t do before or didn’t know were helpful, but I had gotten into patterns of missing, or not seeing, key opportunities—as we sometimes do as writers and educators.
Writing centers embody the understanding that, however solitary the process of writing and thinking can be and feel, we often need social interactions to engage in it. Paradoxically, though consultation is an interactive process, it can be solitary at times. In both cases, sometimes we need other people to be mirrors and reflect our labor back to us, so we can find choices in places we did not think to look.
Published December 9, 2015
