Another visit to the Writing Center

            When I visited the Writing Center this week to observe my consultant both she and the other consultant had appointments.  This was interesting to me because the week before they had been talking about how few appointments they were having and I had been wondering about it but I imagine the semester is picking up and students are starting to have more work.  I was somewhat reassured of the Writing Center’s usefulness after seeing that there were actually two students who had come in.

            So, I observed my consultant’s appointment and that was an interesting experience for me too.  My consultant said that it was a very good paper and so she did not have that much to correct in it.  She didn’t make too many comments during the appointment but I observed that her technique is to give small comments to the student as she goes along and I think she did a better job reading the paper because she was interacting with the writer while she did it.

            At the end of the appointment I asked my consultant a few questions about what her other appointments had been like lately because so far I have seen two students come in with good papers that did not need that many corrections.  I was surprised that she said she actually has had a couple of difficult appointments recently.  One student came in with a paper that just was not very good and was poorly organized and another student came to the appointment thinking that the consultant was going to fix her paper for her.  While we have talked about these types of students coming to appointments in class, the existence of such students became more real when I heard of actual situations involving them and now I realize more that I will probably encounter those students myself.