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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.”