Writing Center Class Spring 2018

I'm familiar with different approaches in different contexts. As an instructor, I'm most familiar with learning to write, because even my content-based assignments receive extensive writing attention. As a student, though, I was and am more familiar with writing to learn. But I'm still displeased that as a student in English at the undergraduate, MA, and PhD levels, there was/is not more attention placed on learning to write. At this stage, this seems to be something professors take for granted. (I was recently told: "That's not how you title a dissertation chapter." And I responded: "Can you please tell me how you title a book chapter? I have never done this.") I think also in liberal arts required courses, writing to learn is prioritized in many (most?) disciplines. I'm not particularly persuaded by one form over another, though I have never succeeded in writing to learn language models. But I am partial to the idea that learning to write sho...

I'm more familiar with the LW approach to teaching writing, especially in the writing center when I am working with students whose content areas I'm unfamiliar with. Since I don't know anything about the TV show "Making a Murderer" or how spinal chord injuries affect heart rate variation, the only way I can help is making sure the words are doing what the author wants them to do. I try to understand the content mainly in vague, large ideas. By abstracting what the students tell me about the content they are trying to convey, I can help them structure the smaller, important words around the content words so that the writing supports the ideas. I often find myself saying things like "THIS concept x IS BASED ON concept w WHICH WE KNOW BECAUSE concept y AND THEREFOR concept p IS TRUE." So, I'm certainly not teaching WLC. I do think that the categories could do with some blurring. I liked the idea of the genre approach to writing, as Ortega outlines on ...

In my tutoring sessions, I've been most familiar with the 'learning to write' paradigm. I felt Ortega's statement that "...LW places at the center of attention the cognitive activity of the writer and her or his authorial voice" encapsulates the work my students have called on me to do. Whether they're working on a Peace Corps application, a psychology paper, a global health paper or a speech for Rhetoric, I've found my work can be described in Ortega's twofold statement: helping students put in writing first, their cognitive activity (their opinions, arguments, and questions) and second, their authorial voice (by airing confusions, doubts, and identifying needs for further research). In class, I'm wondering if we can have a discussion about the overlap between LW and WLL when it comes to students picking up specific language necessary for academic assignments. As Ortega writes, there is a difference between students "learning to write abo...

I would say right now I am most familiar with WLC. It’s pretty much what you do when you are in the process of writing a dissertation. However, it was not always like this. Before I came to the US, I did a lot of WLL. I used to go to the Language Center in my university in Spain. The language center felt more like a library, but you could write an essay, leave it in a mail box, and the language specialist would put it back in a different mail box with all the mistakes corrected. You never talked to the person who corrected your essay though. So I guess it was a very interesting version of a Writing Center? At that time, however, I found it fascinating J In addition, I would also facebooked a friend in Russia on a weekly basis and we would just write long letters to each other for the sake of practicing English. All this contributed to my WLL, and it all took place in Spain. Then, when I came to the States and started to take university courses, everything shifted to a LW per...

As an ESL teacher, most of my experience has been with Learning to Write and Writing to Learn Language. All the writing done in my grammar classes focuses on eliciting specific forms.   It’s necessary to evaluate their language proficiency, but in the real world they’re never going to have to write a paragraph focusing on relative clauses and passives, hypothetical conditionals, or deliberately switching between perfect, progressive, and progressive perfect aspects.   In my undergrad writing classes, the focus was partially on WLL (using vocabulary skills, reporting verbs, academic language etc.) but mostly it was learning to write especially for American academia.   I once taught a graduate writing course which focused on all aspects. They learned the way to write a research paper and wrote one in their field.   The challenge for me is that although I was grading their work, I wasn’t actually a part of their audience in regard to content.   I remember one pap...

I'm definitely most familiar with WLC in my own work. My undergrad in Philosophy emphasized this approach, often outright saying that grammatical accuracy is unimportant. The ideas took precedent over any thing else. My work in English has followed along these lines, though, notably, with much greater  emphasis on the grammar side (WLL? Kinda?). Poli sci also worked with LW because the form is so specific, frustratingly so. In my teaching, this semester is almost exclusively LW (specifically close readings). I have been essentially ignoring content in the papers they produce to see if they have figured out the structure of the close reading. Some WLL and WLC is a necessary (and happy) byproduct, but it is certainly not the main focus. I think incorporating all of these together will synthesize the learning process in a positive way for students, but it might overwhelm them to focus on so many things (especially if they are unfamiliar with one aspect, like how to write a close rea...