By Joey Yearous-Algozin
Normally, my role as a Writing Center consultant is to help students with tangible writing skills: thesis or paragraph development, topic sentences, and argument organization, to name a few. These are skills that we can work on together during a session. More importantly, the writer can take these skills with them, continuing their development on their own away from the Writing Center. This means that most of my conversations with students revolve around pragmatic skills designed to improve a given piece of writing and inform the future writing process. However, sometimes the most important moments in a given session happen when the student/writer and I are not actually looking at their paper.
In a recent session, I was meeting with an undergraduate student, let’s call her JT, with whom I have had the opportunity to work a couple of times. JT is confident in her own assessment of her writing and generally knows what she wants to improve during a session. This means that I normally just read her paper over with her and offer advice on a specific skill, such as the ones I mentioned above. However, during our last meeting, we finished up early and JT started asking me about my own drafting process. Basically, she asked if I had any advice about different ways to start writing. Did I always start with an outline? A definite thesis? Or, do I free write first, hoping that ideas would emerge from less structured thinking and go from there? Do I write the paragraphs in the order they appear in the paper, or did I move around, writing one section now and another later, bringing them together at the end?
More than definite answers to these questions, our conversation bounced between the different strategies, landing on the realization that no two writing situations, much less assignments, were identical. Ultimately, JT left the Writing Center more committed than ever to embracing flexibility in her writing and to viewing writing as a process that remains very much in flux. To this, I would add that what happened during our session was not just planning how to approach writing in the future, but an essential part of the writing process itself. Moreover, it is precisely this writing off the page and in conversation that builds communities of writers, without which our work would not be possible.
Published May 5, 2015
