Thoughts on Today's Session

I know I briefly mentioned a bit of these ideas in our discussion at the end of the class period, but I figured I could elaborate on them here.

Until today’s session, I had a slight preference for the paragraph-by-paragraph approach when reading through a paper with a writer. This preference was largely based on theory and imagined scenarios, but most of my own visits to the writing center have involved advisors who also follow this approach, and their generally consistent ability to provide helpful feedback has made it somewhat natural for me to drift toward a similar method. I really liked how the paragraph-by-paragraph approach allows the advisor to provide feedback to the writer by re-stating what is understood to be the paper’s points and predicting where the paper seems to be headed, but after today’s session, I am starting to reconsider this preference.

The writer I advised today had been to the writing center many times in the past, and because of this, he knew what he preferred. After the pre-textual stage, he very willingly volunteered to read through his paper so that he could look for errors and awkwardly-worded sentences. He was definitely interested in revising his writing, so I was able to let the session flow very naturally. Even as he continued reading at the end of the introduction, I didn’t find it necessary to stop him, so it wasn’t until the end of the paper that we began the most significant part of our discussion. I was a little surprised at how easy it was for me to follow along with his argument as he read it aloud—I wasn’t worried about examining the text itself because it was out of my sight, so I simply listened and took mental notes as we went along. Then, in our discussion afterward, I found myself remembering almost his entire paper, which made it very easy for me to point out places that worked well already as well as places that needed further clarification. Because I understood what he was trying to say in his essay (as a result of the complete read-through of the paper and some of our pre-textual discussion), I think my advice was much more meaningful than it would have been if we had taken a paragraph-by-paragraph approach. I was able to help him improve the clarity and flow of the paper in certain places because I had the complete image of it in my mind, whereas the paragraph-by-paragraph method I used in my previous session with a 101 student seemed to force me into giving potentially-awkward feedback when I really just wanted to see how the rest of the paper played out. I know this is only my second session with a student outside of our class, but I would definitely consider it to be more of a success than my first, and I have the somewhat unexpected change in direction to thank for that.

Thinking back over it all now, I have come to some general conclusions. First of all, I definitely think sessions should be allowed to flow as naturally as possible according to the writer’s direction, only to be altered by the advisor when it is absolutely necessary. I know this is not always possible, especially when working with writers who are less interested in their session and/or paper, but I still think it is my ideal approach when possible. Even for these less-interested writers, we can perhaps try to encourage them to share their thoughts by finding discreet ways to reinforce the value of their ideas. (That statement reminds me of the article I chose to summarize—I’ll have to write a post about it in the next day or so.) This writer-directed session concept is also tied into my newfound appreciation for the whole-paper approach—instead of attempting to force sessions into a paragraph-by-paragraph reading, I think it may be best to find a sort of natural flow here as well. To state all of these ideas simply, I guess I now have further solidified my belief that sessions should be conducted in a very personal, flexible manner—I don’t think there is any one approach that could consistently succeed in all sessions without a willingness to adapt.