View from the center
At the writing center we’ve learned that students benefit from discussing writing with their peers.
Working at the University Writing Center is like seeing the state of writing at Texas A&M through a wide-angle lens.
We conduct more than 5,400 consultations a year with students at all levels—from freshmen to doctoral candidates—who come from all colleges and departments. We help with everything from English 104 papers to wildlife management plans.
As we work with your students on the writing you’ve assigned—as we question, advise, cajole, and cheer them—they are teaching us as much about writing as we are teaching them.
Some of what we’ve learned from our work might surprise you.
Talking about writing helps.
The cornerstone of the UWC philosophy is that talking about writing helps writers improve, even if the person listening is not an expert on the subject matter. Over and over our experiences in consultations prove that moving back and forth between speech and writing not only improves the quality of the assignment at hand, but also helps writers become more confident and self-aware.
One part of our job as consultants is to act almost like stenographers, parroting back what students say in the course of a session. It’s a matter of helping them translate from a quick and familiar mode of discourse (speech) to a more deliberate and less practiced mode (writing.)
It’s surprising how often in the course of a consultation students will say out loud the exact words they’ve been struggling to put on paper. It’s often the high point of a session. The consultant points to a garbled passage and says, “What are you trying to say here?” The student starts in, describing the ideas he or she had in mind and eventually says aloud the words that were so elusive in the writing process.
When the consultant repeats the sentence back, the student is astonished to find the words were there all along, waiting to be discovered.
Hard work doesn’t always translate into good writing.
Consultants often feel a palpable sense of frustration from writers who are on their third or fourth draft but still can’t write the paper they know their instructor expects of them. Quite simply, some students come to Texas A&M with inferior writing skills, deficits that can’t be overcome in a semester or two—and certainly not in a 45-minute consultation. Consultants know it’s impossible to tell how much effort has gone into a paper merely from the way it sounds.
Sitting side by side in a five-foot by seven-foot consultation room, consultants can’t help but sympathize with students who are putting forth maximum effort, yet still falling short of their mark. When UWC Consultant Melissa Carlsen describes her worst session ever, it’s not one with an uncooperative or hostile student, but rather one where, even after 45 minutes of intense effort, the determined student still couldn’t convey his ideas.
Luckily, most of our students do make progress, and we celebrate all of their hard-won victories, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
You say “error.” We say “stylistic preference.”
Jordan Fisher, an undergraduate writing consultant, recalls working with a student who said his professor had forbidden his students to use any introductory clauses or phrases in their papers, because he felt today’s students rely on them excessively.
Other professors consider the split infinitive to be the gravest of writing sins, even though grammarians have been arguing over whether it constitutes an error since at least the 1920s and the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has pronounced it acceptable. (Still other professors couldn’t identify a split infinitive if their tenure depended on it.)
Literature professors prefer everything written in present tense, while historians use past tense. Some disciplines forbid passive voice; others all but insist upon it.
Students, baffled by the seeming randomness of these distinctions, tend to gravitate to the extremes, either ignoring the “rules” completely or adhering to them slavishly in all situations, like the students who write personal statements without using the pronoun “I.” The reason? A high school teacher once told them the first-person pronoun was too informal for “good writing.”
Consultants, meanwhile, believe that good writing is writing that meets the needs of its audience, which is why they commit this line to memory: “There is no set rule on that; you’d better ask your instructor.”
Students can (and do) learn to correct their surface errors.
Research in composition shows that most direct grammar instruction fails to reduce students’ rate of error. The one exception is instruction given at “point of need.” In other words, grammar is best taught when students are smack in the middle of the writing process, which makes consultations fertile ground for impromptu grammar lessons conducted by peer consultants.
We see it every day: The consultant points out the missing apostrophe in a possessive, and two or three lines later, the student corrects another possessive without prompting. At other times, students stop and ask us, “Shouldn’t there be a comma here?”
It’s not that students don’t care about grammar and punctuation; it’s just that the rules are voluminous, variable, and confusing, and the window of opportunity for teaching those rules is narrow.
Some students also have to unlearn habits they’ve picked up along the way. “I never know where the commas go,” a student will say, “so I try not to use any.”
At that point, the consultant reaches for the UWC handout on commas, explains the rule involved in that particular sentence, and tries to convince the student that punctuation is not the enemy.
International students are often better writers than they (or you) may realize.
Many English as a Second Language (ESL) students have an extensive knowledge of grammar—often more than their instructors. What these students don’t have is a command of idiomatic English. They may not know, for instance, whether to use “the” or “a” before a noun, or they may be confused about why we might say we’re “immersed in” a topic but not “immersed into” it—even though we might “dive into” that same subject.
With every sentence they write, ESL students must navigate rules a native speaker doesn’t even realize exist.
These students can also be hampered by their limited English vocabulary. Mark Twain once said “the difference between the almost right word and the right word” was “the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” When ESL students don’t know the English word they’re looking for—the one perfect word to convey their precise meaning—their idea, no matter how insightful, is as good as lost, destined to be either misunderstood or ignored.
At the UWC we find that what ESL students need most is reassurance. They need to be reminded that the subtleties of idiomatic English and a richer vocabulary will come to them with time and effort. As Emily Richter, an undergraduate consultant, says of working with international students, “If you take the time to look past their surface errors, you’ll usually see the content is all there.”
Students need to learn time management as much as they need to learn grammar.
One of the first questions a consultant is likely to ask during a session is “When is this due?” Unfortunately, the answer is often given in hours, rather than days.
When consultants walk out of their sessions muttering that there wasn’t much they could accomplish since the client’s paper was due in 30 minutes, they sound for all the world like weary instructors bemoaning the sorry state of students today.
Working at the writing center makes us believe in the power of multiple drafts. We see how writing improves when students have the opportunity to leave it and come back later with fresh perspective.
We hope that someday students will learn to leave extra time for revising, editing, and proofreading, but until they do, requiring preliminary drafts greatly improves the chance that their writing (and thinking) will be better.
Even our own consultants, who see the value of revision firsthand every day, sometimes need to be coerced into producing drafts. They are, after all, students and therefore not immune from the typical student demons of procrastination and over-scheduling. Consultant Melissa Carlsen, for instance, admits to writing many of her papers just in the nick of time, but remembers one occasion when she was required to produce a rough draft.
“It was the best paper I ever did,” she concedes.
Writing helps students learn.
We see our share of disgruntled and apathetic students at the UWC. But the great majority of our clients are willing to put forth tremendous effort on their writing. As they work, they are engaged and focused.
Walking by a consultation room and seeing two students—one consultant and one UWC client—bent head-to-head over an essay on the Manhattan Project, discussing anything from the use of semicolons to the discovery of plutonium, can go a long way to further your faith in the power of learning.
