What does a writing consultation typically look like?
Writing Center clients meet one-on-one with one of our trained writing consultants. Typically the student (or professor) comes in with a working draft of the assignment and sits down with one of our consultants. The student and consultant discuss what the student hopes to accomplish from the meeting and then read through the paper together with those goals in mind.
Often we address “higher order concerns”, or big picture elements, (such as thesis development, organization, audience and purpose,) before “lower order concerns”, or sentence level elements, (such as sentence structure, spelling, grammar, and citation). It would do no good to fix all the grammatical errors in a paragraph, for instance, only to discover after that that paragraph no longer provides useful evidence for the student’s thesis and needs to be cut.
The consultation is student driven, so rather than directing the student on what edits to make, the consultant responds to the work as a typical reader, and then discusses with the student various options for accomplishing the student’s goals. Again, our goal is to provide a non-evaluative atmosphere where students learn to take ownership of their work and practice writing skills that can help them not only on the immediate assignment, but in the long term as well.