Who Knew?

My time in English 383 has been an enjoyable one thus far. I have found the readings to be interesting and attention-grabbing and the activities that we have done in class have been helpful. I have found myself picturing how I would handle certain situations if hired as a Writing Consultant.

The aspect of English 383 that has surprised me throughout the semester has been the amount of training that potential Writing Consultants must all go through before gaining a spot on the fourth floor of Weinstein. I suppose that I had known that the Writing Center didn't just pick students on a whim to advise their peers' writing, but I didn't realize the extent of the training that so many Consultants before me have gone through.

This week, I observed Maggie Burch in the Writing Center. It was amazing to me to see the things that we have been discussing in class come to "life" right before my eyes. She took the time to find out what the writer hoped to get out of the session and paid attention to the professor's comments, two aspects of being a Writing Consultant that have been emphasized over the past six weeks. I think that, like so many other skills that one learns, I got a much better idea of what being a Writing Consultant means by seeing the actual process, rather than just learning about it in the classroom.

I have learned so much, as my peers before me have, from only a month and a half of class, and I am sure that my knowledge will continue to grow as the semester progresses. I am now more excited than ever to begin my career as a Writing Consultant here at the University of Richmond. I can't wait to start.

Grammar Snob

My father is British. He is your prototypical Englishman and loves when "his language" is spoken and written the way it was meant to be. Being my father's daughter, I have inherited his fondness for proper grammar, which has been both a blessing and a curse during my academic career.

One of the aspects of becoming a Writing Consultant that I have struggled with thus far is that we are not meant to fix every grammatical or spelling mistake in the papers that we read. I understand why we must restrain ourselves, but I must admit that I have had difficulty doing so in the first two commentaries that we have done in class. I think that I must, and will, find a happy medium between being the grammar snob that I am and using a writer's grammar mistakes as a long-term writing tutorial.

Personally, I find it difficult to pay attention to a paper that has a glaring number of grammatical and spelling errors. I would love to find out if professors have the same difficulty that I do when students do not have a grasp on grammar rules. I believe that most of them would agree with my claim that an overwhelming number of errors can detract from the perceived intelligence of a student. For example, I recently read a peer's paper in which he had spelt pamphlets 'pamflits'. The ideas of the sentence and paragraph were good ones, but I could not take the paper as seriously as I would have if he had spelt the word correctly.

I think that addressing sentence-level concerns will be one of the more difficult tasks that we are faced with as Writing Consultants. As we saw in Bartholomae's "The Study of Error" and the videos from "The Fix-it Shop", most students find it difficult to see their own errors. I believe that an effective tool would be to write out examples of sentences with errors similar to those made by the students, in hopes that they would be able to find the errors in the "consultant's" writing that they could not find in their own.

I wish that I knew a more effective way to show my peers the importance of proofreading their papers for glaring grammatical errors. Being a business major, I cannot tell you how many horror stories I have heard of potential internships or jobs lost due to obvious language problems. I hope that I can learn a way to show my peers that these rules do not simply affect your life at UR, but could affect your life after as well.