Like a lot of instructors, Tiffany Tyer has spent many hours this
semester poring over papers, penciling in advice to students about how
to improve their writing.
But Tyer isn’t an instructor. She’s one of the university’s first Undergraduate Writing Assistants (UWA).
The UWA program is a trial offering from the University Writing Center
(UWC) that provides talented undergraduates special training in helping
student writers and then puts them to work assisting W course
instructors and their students.
Undergraduate
Writing Assistant Javier Ortiz, left, a senior industrial engineering
major, conducts an office-hours consultation with a student in the
Spanish class in which he is working. He faces the challenge of helping
his peers improve their writing skills in what is a foreign language
for many of them.
Professor Boswell considers Tyer “a very key resource” for her students, and the fact that Tyer is an undergraduate is a plus.
“I think the students may see [consulting the UWA] as a less
intimidating way to seek help to develop their writing,” Boswell
observes.
In preparation for her current position, Tyer—like all the UWAs—had to
be accepted into English 485, a one-credit-hour course that reviews
writing fundamentals and key principles of writing pedagogy. Once on
the job, the UWAs enroll in a second semester of the course during
which they continue to refine their skills and share insights from
their experiences working with students.
Perhaps most beneficial to her, Tyer says, was the time the UWAs spent
last spring working in the UWC, first shadowing experienced consultants
and then advising students on their own.
“My biggest learning point was not helping students too much,” Tyer
recalls. “I wanted to proofread and edit for them and had to learn,
instead, to work with them to help them become better writers.”
Tyer says working with student writers has been eye-opening. “Every paper is different,” she says with a smile.
Although UWAs ideally will be assigned to a course within their own
major, that isn’t the case for Tyer this semester. The situation
doesn’t seem problematic for Tyer, however, who knows first-hand that
different disciplines and situations can call for vastly different
kinds of writing. She spent this summer as an intern at CNN Headline
News in Atlanta and got to try her hand at news writing—something she’d
never done before. She learned quickly that writing copy for TV is very
different than writing essays for a college course, but she adapted to
the situation, just as she’s caught on to the standards expected of the
management students enrolled in Professor Boswell’s course.
After commenting on several batches of student papers, Tyer is more committed than ever to helping student writers.
“Some of the writing I’ve seen I can’t imagine would be accepted out in
the workplace,” Tyer states, “so I think it’s really important that we
have programs to develop student writers.”
If you’re interested in nominating a UWA candidate or in having a UWA
assist with a W course, contact Dr. Valerie Balester at
v-balester@tamu.edu. |
|
Tidbits
|
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
— Carl Sagan
|
|
Fall 2005 