Hi everyone, Thank you for tuning into this OWL vidcast.
I’m Harry Denny, the faculty director for the Purdue Writing Lab and an Associate Professor
of English. In this slideshow, I’d like to give you a quick overview of how to use
the writing lab.
To start off, knowing when to get help can be really tough, especially when you’re
new to college or haven’t collaborated with a writing consultant before. Plus, we’re
all taught that writers work alone, sequestered away from other people. Well, for some of
us that’s true, but for other people, we have a different approach to writing that’s
more social, more about sharing or talking through what you want to express through writing
or with your documents.
Fortunately, for you, consultants in the Writing Lab have lots of experience working with different
kinds of writers, whether you’re new to college or whether you need help at any stage
of your academic career. The Writing Lab works with everyone at Purdue, from first year students
and other undergraduates to graduate students, faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and university
staff. We help people from all majors, in courses like anthropology, pharmacy, biology,
animal sciences, engineering, and education. Sometimes, even English courses. Like I said,
everyone is welcome.
This fall, the Writing Lab, like the rest of our world, is being affected by the coronavirus.
In an usual semester, we have three main ways to connect with writing consultants: You can
come for a face-to-face session, you can upload a document for feedback, or you can have an
online chat with a consultant. In order to maintain social distancing and keep us all
stay safe, to do our part to Protect Purdue, we are limiting the number of face-to-face
sessions we offer. We plan to have a limited number of sessions available in our main location
at Heavilon Hall, and Sunday evening hours in the Krach Leadership
Center. To learn about how you to make an appointment, check out the links at the end
of this powerpoint.
When’s the best time to come see a writing consultant? It’s really up to you. My best
advice is to have a session when you think a conversation is going to offer you the best
help. Do you need someone to help you understand an assignment, to think about your plan for
it, to imagine an audience, or to think through an argument? Do you have a draft of a document
and you have sections of it that feel stronger than others? Are you getting ready to turn
your document in (to a professor, to an employer, or somewhere else) and you want help editing
it? Do you have a document that a professor or someone has given you feedback on, but
you’re not sure what to do with it? For each of those scenarios, we have help for
you, and we’ve all been there, so we know how you’re feeling.
For your first session with a writing consultant, you might wonder what it’s going to be like.
Well, unlike this video, it’s going to be a conversation. For our face-to-face and online
chats, it’s a real-time dialogue where we ask lots of questions and offer advice when
appropriate, but we also give you lots of time to talk. For our etutoring appointments,
you’ll get a document back with inserted comments from your writing consultant. These
will also include a lot of questions and suggestions, and sometimes we even include links to resources
on the Purdue OWL that can help you. For sessions where you need help editing, we’re going
to ask you about your own strategies and what you know you struggle with. Sometimes, you
don’t have a strategy, or you don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s okay.
We’ll help teach you some strategies and encourage you to practice on your own. Our
goal is to help you become a better writer as you improve your writing in the moment.
Most important, we’re in this learning experience together.
You might wonder what you should bring to a session or share with a writing consultant.
As you might imagine, anything and everything you can contribute helps the consultant better
support you. That might mean you share your assignment, the syllabus, a grading rubric
that your professor gives out, previous drafts, or other materials. And it’s okay to not
know where to begin. We can talk you through questions that might make our conversation
better, more useful to you. What’s important is that you reach out and that you do it with
plenty of time before your document is due. If you wait until just minutes before a project
is due, there’s only so much we can help with. Even if that happens, we can help you
think about how to apply the lessons you’re learning to the next document draft.
Some people ask who our writing consultants are and how they get trained: All of our staff
go through a rigorous training program, sometimes in a regular academic course, sometimes at
their own pace as an independent study. We have both undergraduate and graduate consultants,
but they bring the same experience and background to collaborating with writers. All of our
consultants are terrific, and they’re all equally qualified to support you.
To wrap up, I’m really proud to serve as the faculty director of the Writing Lab, because
I get this amazing opportunity to work with writers across campus. I get to learn what
faculty are trying to do with writing, how they’re trying to use it to introduce students
to their disciplinary communities as well as teach a whole set of skills that will benefit
their students throughout life. I get to learn from students about what gets them excited
about writing as well as what frustrates and scares them. Everything that you teach us
about writing, about the languages you bring to campus, helps us become better teachers,
scholars, and citizens. And our writing consultants teach me every day about collaboration, empathy,
humanity, and the energy that being on a campus like Purdue always serves up. We’re all
facing unprecedented challenges in the coming weeks and months, but together, we can accomplish
just about anything. I look forward to seeing you online and in person someday soon. Thanks
for tuning in.