Consulting: Week 1

(Alternate title: The Post I Totally Spaced on Friday--Whoops!) 

First week as a consultant! I feel like next week has got to have some scary consultations in store, because this week was mostly fun, easy, and encouraging. I’ve had three consultations, all with willing writers. Only one had even remotely significant grammar issues, and all were interesting for me to read and comment on. 

I’ve noticed already a few things about my consulting style. The first is that I feel most comfortable with a laid-back style, and I noticed myself always trying to put the writer at ease. I think this is mostly selfish: I’m most at ease when they seem comfortable and like they’re engaged in the session. I realize this might be a weak point for me when I encounter reluctant or hostile writers, since this will probably make me more uncomfortable than they already are. I’ll have to work on strategies I can use to help myself feel comfortable when I confront those kinds of consultations. 

Another thing I noticed is something I expected: I tend to talk too much. I found myself starting sentences as statements, and then realizing that they were statements, and then starting over to phrase my statement as an open-ended question. Besides making for a few awkward sentences, this also made me aware of how often I speak versus how often the writer speaks. This is something I’ll have to work on--especially being aware of using more questions when I do talk. 

The other thing I’ve noticed is I’ve appreciated the ability to refer people to resources for lower order concerns. For instance, all three of my writers this week wanted to talk about citations, and listed it as a concern in their appointments. However, because I knew I could show them a resource online (I keep going back to Bedford St. Martin’s MLA… it’s so good), I felt comfortable setting the agenda early on in the session to address higher order concerns first, and had great extensive conversations with two of the writers before we ever got to citations. In the final 10 minutes or so, with two of these writers, I pointed them to the web page and walked through their in-text citations and reference pages, using the website to model how to check your own citations. I felt really confident that those two writers walked away with tools to work on their own citations in the future, as well as a really solid revision plan for their paper’s organization and focus. 

My last consultation of the week was the roughest, but it was still a pretty good experience. It was rough for a couple reasons: 1) the writer had a peer-review worksheet from class that I had to fill out (in other words--agenda set, no time for higher order concerns, and I knew I’d spend a good amount of time working on filling out the page and a half sheet rather than talking with the writer), and 2) I had a great little coughing fit in the middle of it and had to grab water before I could keep going (yayyyy). Also, this was the paper that had some grammar issues that were in the way of clarity, so between the grammar issues, the citation issues, and the extension peer-review sheet, I felt like we spent this entire half-hour session on lower order concerns (which, really, we did). Since the review sheet basically set the agenda, it made it difficult to do what I knew would be best for the writer. For instance, with basically 3 minutes left in the consultation, I was rushing to fill out the form while keeping the writer involved by letting him know how I was filling it out. The second to last question was a higher order concern question: something like, “What do you feel was missing in this paper?” This question came so late in the game, but I felt the need to answer it honestly to help the writer with revision. I also felt horrible giving the writer a thought on a higher order concern that late in the game. So I told him how I felt there may have been a missing connection (a “how” question) in his paper, but downplayed it, feeling like I didn’t have time and didn’t want to frustrate the writer. That was frustrating for me, because if I had been able to set the agenda from the beginning, I think this question would have taken up much of our time, rather than word counts, grammar, and citations. I think if I come up against one of these peer review sheets in the future, I’ll try to flip it, answering all of the questions but focusing on them in the order I think would be most helpful to the writer.