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Home » Archives » Fall 2009 (Volume 7 Issue 1) - Professionalization and the Writing Center, Part I
Consultant Spotlight Fall 2009 / Consulting
Praxis interviews Sydney Boyd, an English and applied music major and a writing consultant at University of Idaho Name: Sydney Boyd Age: 22 Writing Center: University of Idaho Writing Center
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Size of School: approximately 12,000 students enrolled
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Year in school and area of study: Senior with a major in English literature and applied music
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Number of years working in writing centers: Two and one half years Job title: Writing Tutor Describe the work you do in the writing center: I help people write, from brainstorming to fine-tuning and from 100-level English papers to graduate dissertations. Describe the training you’ve participated in: Tutors at the UI Writing Center are required to take an internship class. As an intern, I learned writing and teaching strategies for working with students, particularly ESL writers. I presented my final paper for the course at the Annual Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference in March 2008. How do you normally start a consultation? I feel it is critical to establish a brief rapport with the person I am tutoring, not only to discern the type of tutoring they need and how I can best help them, but also to make them feel comfortable before sharing their writing. Thus, I usually begin by asking why they felt the need to talk to someone about their writing. Describe your consulting style: My style is adaptive. When I began tutoring, I had a stricter sense of who I was as a tutor, but I quickly learned that no one student is the same, and no one approach should be either. My favorite kind of consultation is . . . when the student is engaged and enthusiastic about learning how to improve their writing. My greatest strength as a consultant is . . . my approachability. I am an open, friendly person who can easily put a person filled with writing anxiety at ease. My greatest weakness is . . . explaining grammatical and language rules to ESL students. I often find myself wanting to say “I don’t know why it is, but it just is.”
What I like about working in a writing center is . . . when the intellectual light bulb turns on, especially when I have a hand in it. What I don’t like is . . . the occasional inaccurate expectations of what I can do for a student as a tutor–my tutoring cannot guarantee an A; I cannot edit your paper for you; I cannot help you very much thirty minutes before your paper is due. My oddest consultation was . . . with an ESL student who chose me to work with because he was in a women’s psychology class, and he wanted to work specifically with a white female to get a first-hand perspective. What advice would you give to beginning consultants? Always remember the main goal is to help students learn–do whatever makes that happen–and keep writing priorities straight: don’t focus on comma splices when a thesis doesn’t exist. What kind of writing do you do? I mostly write literature analysis papers, but I have dabbled in creative writing as well. How has working in a writing center affected the way you write? I have become a better writer in every way. There is no better way to learn something than when you’re responsible for teaching it as well. How has working in a writing center helped your professional development? I have learned to work intimately with a plethora of different people and how to quickly discern what style I should adapt to best help them. What else do you want to tell us about yourself? In addition to my affinity for writing, I have a passion for music–I have played the violin since I was six and began college as a violin performance major. My two majors have complemented each other very well, and I hope to continue building my interdisciplinary skills by studying opera’s influence on 18th-century literature at the graduate level. ‹ Bringing "Abnormal" Discourse into the Classroom
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Engaging Peer Tutors in Voicing Insights from the Tutorial Process ›