Ian Post #9

I think it's important for WC staff to perform research because, as Bedford points out, WC tutors have to compel their students to improve their writing even when we don't always know how best to compel them. Further research will hopefully continue to clarify how best to tailor a session to every student's individual needs, but for now I feel swaths of information are still missing. I feel this particularly acutely with my PhD statistics student. I've talked about the difficulties of working with a student who is producing a type of writing that feels fundamentally different to the writing I normally work with (so, writing that revolves around mathematical formulas instead of language analysis), and I'd be interested to see research conducted on how to best serve the writing of mathematicians. Although I'm trying my best with this student, in my heart of hearts, I cannot believe that I am truly helping her "grow" as a writer - each week I think I'm merely serving to teach her a few meager lessons on grammar at best, or acting as a copy editor at worst - and that leads me to believe that math writing requires a different set of eyes than those you'd find in a traditional writing center. Other fields (business, education) have specialized writing centers to accommodate the specific needs of that field's writing, despite the fact that those fields feel inherently closer to traditional academic writing than math writing. So why not service math students, whose writing demands feel more alien to me, to the same degree of specificity as those fields?

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 30, 2018 at 11:41 AM

    A math writing center sounds like a really great idea. I remember taking statistics way back in the days of yore, and it is a very different kind of writing with different rules. But at the same time, I wouldn't call any of the lessons you're imparting meager. Like a ~math formula~ she's learning to plug those rules in when she can. That way she won't need as much help from a copy editor type person.

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