Having spent the last year working outside the Writing Studio, I’ve come to realize and appreciate more fully what it is exactly that makes this line of work so fulfilling. Some background info: I’ve been involved with private tutoring and writing center consulting for the past 5 years now and I’m going into my 4th year of teaching. I’ve been working with writers individually and in groups for much of my professional life, and I find the most rewarding capacity to work with writers is in the WS.
Before this semester started, I reconnected with an old writer of mine (from 2012-13). But some info on how we came to work together: She came to me a few weeks into the 2012 fall semester, an ESL PhD student in Engineering, looking to improve her communication skills in English. She’d worked with other consultants, but, as you’ve surely experienced, some consultants have a stronger connection with certain writers. We worked together twice a week for the duration of that academic year and developed a strong professional relationship that became a friendship. The opportunity to develop strong professional relationships with writers with such different interests and backgrounds is the first thing that makes this vocation so fulfilling.
During our pre-semester meeting this year, she told me that she had published the articles she was developing in our sessions in the top-tier journals in her field (ah, the reproducibility afforded to us by prepositional phrases [passive voice is the best]). The scholastic year we worked together (plus an additional year or so working with another consultant) provided her with the skills, confidence, and competency in English to produce the quality of work she set out to create.
Additionally, every week she spent hours upon hours outside of our sessions reading advanced English texts, harvesting unfamiliar words, and experimenting with more sophisticated idioms and syntaxes. Working with someone so brilliant and motivated 1) makes my job exceptionally fulfilling, and 2) brings the beauty of language and writing to the fore, even in the most desiccated of academic disciplines. And how refreshing it is to find art again here.
I mention this last point because it’s so easy for me to find myself lost in texts that obscure the very thing I love (sure, there can be pedagogical value in this...). Sometimes I find myself so far removed from writing-as-art, as a mode of expression or catharsis, that I question why I pursue this advanced degree. I don’t think I’m alone. But that’s why the Writing Studio is consistently rewarding. It’s so important to remember why it is I do the things I do. Probably the same for you, too.
So I left USF for a year and now she’s on her way out. She’ll do brilliant things with her career. But before she left, she referred equally brilliant and interesting/interested colleagues to work with me. Again I’ve got the opportunity to work with a student of language, someone that just last week spoke of the artistry in academic writing and how it bleeds into all other modes of communication. Once again I find myself in awe at my writers and how inspiring/inspired they can be.
By Ryan Blank, PhD Rhetoric and Composition
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