Dear Future Writing Associates,
We’ve been WA-iting for you! It’s Annabel and Kyra coming at you from Hobbs on October 25, 2021. The warm bagels are definitely waking us up on this chilly morning. Now that we have a handful of WA conferences under our belt, we thought we’d share some of our reflections and advice with you!
First off, congratulations on being a WA! This is a great accomplishment, and take some time to celebrate that. Being a WA is an important responsibility on campus, and you’re serving as a role model for students in not just writing but also work ethic, time management, and critical thinking, but remember that being a WA is supposed to be fun. Take advantage of the fact that you’re now surrounded by fellow WAs who will be helping you through the process and keeping you company in the Writing Center. Get to know the comfy couch-chairs in the ground floor of Trotter where you’ll be holding a lot of your meetings. (Revel in the fresh fruit in the fridge — you won’t get fruit that good anywhere else on campus!)
Even though you may be younger or less versed in a specific subject compared to your WA-ee, your feedback is still valuable! Oftentimes the circumstances of a process such as peer-editing and student-to-student feedback is conducted within the boundaries of a shared class, so it is understandable to worry that inexperience in a field will affect the helpfulness of your critiques. However! An outside perspective is always helpful to the writing process. In fact, having less knowledge of a topic can allow a WA to focus more so on clarity, structure, flow, and other elements that are critical to every piece of writing. A case can be argued that being more familiar with the requirements of academic writing within the confines of a particular field means that the WA is more able to focus on key topic-specific elements. As noted by one interviewed WA in the Inquiry Project, “Generalists vs Specialists” (Litton 2010), generalist WAs may be able to separate themselves from content points and more effectively give feedback to overall structure points; they are less distracted by content concerns. In the case for topics WAs feel especially uncomfortable WAing, providing a brief synopsis of key elements of successful writing in that field may help boost the WA’s confidence and thus reduce the impact that nerves could have on the feedback process (Havilund-Blunk et al. 2015).
My main takeaway in my first couple of conferences — and something that I wish I had thought about earlier — is that it’s ok to not know the answer to every question. Depending on the WA-ees’s previous experiences with the Writing Center or their overall expectations of the conference, the WA-ee might think that the conference will consist of you, the WA, telling them exactly how to change their paper and which words to delete in order to get an A. In fact, a previous Writing Center inquiry project showed that often first-time users of the Writing Center expect conferences to be primarily directive rather than collaborative, which may put you in a situation where a student asks you how to strengthen an argument and you don’t have a perfectly packaged, easy-to-implement-and-explain answer for them. This is fine! One of the best parts of WA conferences is that they’re conversations. If you share your perspective but you’re not sure if it’s the best option, you can say that to your WA-ee and then discuss possible alternatives to what you proposed. Ask questions of your WA-ee, get to know their thought process, and think about what you would do in their position. Remember that ultimately, you are qualified to be a WA, and not knowing the answer to a question doesn’t take away from that.
You got this! We know that you will do a great job and learn so much from these experiences regardless of your background in writing! (Saving the worst — best? — pun for last) You’re going to be WA-some!
Much love,
Kyra and Annabel