Author: Jonathan Diaz
Working in the writing center came as a surprise to me. When I began the Ph.D. program in English here at Baylor, I was coming off of my fourth year of teaching writing at the college level and was expecting to go straight into the writing classroom. Instead, I found myself meeting with students in the UWC. I quickly discovered that tutoring preserved one of my favorite parts of teaching: one-on-one conversations about how to make the most of the writing task. These conversations have taken on even greater meaning over the last year, as I’ve returned to the UWC during the fourth year of my program. As I shared advice and strategies with clients, I often found myself speaking to something I had been overlooking as I worked on my dissertation. As I prepare to leave the Writing Center to take a teaching position, I thought I’d share some pieces of writing advice that I’ve repeated most often over my years as a tutor—and that I’ve found most useful for my own practice as a writer.
Read your Prompt—or Make One for Yourself
A significant chunk of my time as a writing center consultant is spent reviewing an instructor’s prompt with a client. Usually, it’s not that the client has neglected to read the prompt, but that its content has been crowded out by all the work that they subsequently put into the assignment. This can leave a writer frozen, unsure of the next step in this process. Even worse, they can overlook the relative importance of different parts of their prompt. The solution for this is simple: read your prompt and keep reading it. Keep it open while you work on your draft so you can consult it quickly and frequently.
Depending on the situation, you may also find yourself facing a prompt that is minimal or nonexistent. In one sense, this has been my experience of writing a dissertation. Guidance for a dissertation comes from a document called a “prospectus” and ongoing discussion with a faculty director and committee. However, this guidance doesn’t necessarily translate into a clear set of objectives. As a result, a lot of my work this year has been to take this big-picture guidance and create “prompts” for a given day’s work: my notes app and physical notebooks are both filled with bullet pointed lists of concrete tasks. Just like a written prompt, I keep these nearby when I write, referring back to them when I feel stuck.
Remember: Sentences are Stories
The most embarrassing and formative moment I’ve had as a writer is when an editor returned a poem I had submitted and asked, simply “What is the subject of this sentence?” I was at a loss for an answer. The poem was an outburst of imagination, feeling, and memory—it spilled out from me onto the page without any thought of the sentence’s syntax, or formal structure. However, the editor’s advice was crucial: if I wanted my reader to connect with all of this imagination, feeling, and memory, I was going to have to make it possible to understand what was going on in an individual sentence.
At a basic level, every sentence is a story. It has a protagonist, the grammatical subject, and an action, the main verb. Every sentence in every piece of writing is a story about someone who does something. This is easy to see in some sentences: “the dog chases the squirrel,” but it’s no less the case when the sentence is “The correlation is concerning.” In this case, it’s just that the protagonist is the abstract concept “the correlation” and the action that protagonist performs is “the act of being concerning.” Thinking of sentences this way can solve all kinds of grammar issues, but it also can be a way to solve writer’s block. In the throes of writing my dissertation, it’s become more and more natural to ask myself: what’s the next subject? What’s that subject going to do? The task of writing often gets so crowded with our impulse to sound scholarly, to mimic the tone of other writers. Remembering the simple storytelling at the heart of our work is one way to get past these distractions and forge a connection with our readers.
Talk to Someone About Your Writing—Even Yourself
A good chunk of what I do as a writing tutor has to do with my expertise. I have knowledge about grammar, research tools, and APA formatting; but at other times, it has absolutely nothing to do with my expertise. Often, this becomes apparent as soon as we start talking over what the client wants from the session: when I ask what they want to work on, their answer is a little longer, a little more rambling. They’ll often pull out the prompt without me asking, or begin reading a section of their paper before I have a chance to ask where they want to begin.
In many of these cases, a writer comes in to the session with a strong understanding of their writing task and what needs to be done in order to meet it. The trouble is, they have so many thoughts about both of those things that it’s difficult to make a start. In these instances, any writing-specific knowledge I offer is secondary to something else: the space and time to verbally process the writing task. By simply having to summarize and prioritize all of their concerns about a piece of writing, a client uncovers for herself the necessary steps she will have to take to improve the piece of writing.
So much of what we do in the writing center is about making room for writers to reach these moments of discovery. In the process, we gain insight into the habits and tactics we can incorporate into our own writing practices. I’m excited to head out to a new space of writing and learning, carrying with me so many of these insights from my colleagues and clients at Baylor’s University Writing Center.
