Interviewer: Today I am here with Leslie Dennen the director of the Writing Center at USF. Leslie, thank you so much for being willing to do a short interview.
Leslie: Thank you for inviting me.
Interviewer: I'm wondering if we can just start off with something really simple. If you can just tell us a bit about yourself, what kind of courses you teach, what kinds of things you do at the Writing Center. We'll get into the Writing Center per se a little later, but just a bit about your background. I know a lot of people listening to this probably know who you are, but there's probably also several people who have no idea who you are.
Leslie: Well, I got my master's in teaching English as a second foreign language from San Francisco State, and I got my doctorate from USF in the Education Department in the Learning and Instruction program. That was 2005 or something like that. I've been directing the Writing Center, I work in what is now called the Rhetoric and Language Department, That department has gone through several incarnations. It used to be called Expository Writing and a bunch of other things. We've also formed alliances with various other programs and departments.
Now we are with Public Speaking, it's not called ESL anymore, it's called AEM, which is Academic English for Multilingual Students and the Rhetoric Department, which teaches first year, for lack of a better word, composition courses. We don't call them composition now it's called written communication. There's all this different terminology to mean the same thing, which is freshmen comp. I've taught international students' writing. I've taught first-year writing, first and second semester at various different levels and now I'm teaching an oral and written combination course for freshmen students.
Interviewer: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. What we want to do in this interview is have a brief exploration of the Writing Center. Some faculty are familiar with it, they know it exists, but not really what goes on in the insides and other people who are new faculty have maybe no idea that it exists at all. Could you just give us a short overview of what is the Writing Center, what kind of services does it offer, and who is it for?
Leslie: Before I do that, let me say one more thing. I also teach a one-unit editing class that focuses on specifically editing and proofreading. The reason I bring that up is because so many people have the idea that writing needs proofreadings or grammar. There's all these terms like editing grammar, proofreading, that really mean "help me with my writing". Students have the misimpression of that. Teachers, sometimes instructors also will say, "Oh, you need to go to the Writing Center and get your grammar fixed," or something like that. We may look at the paper and there's no grammatical problems at all in the paper.
It's just this catch-all phrase for "help me" basically. When students come to the Writing Center, I would say 99.9% of the time, we ask them, "What can we help you with," and they will say grammar. Now that may or may not be the case. We are objective. Our goal is to help students become better writers in a short sentence. They bring us a paper from any discipline at any level. We help students that are international students. We help students that are doctoral students, any class, any discipline. However, what students should realize is that we are there to help them with one or two writing issues per session.
We are staffed by faculty preceptors, not by student tutors, which most Writing Centers at most universities have student tutors. Ours is not completely unique, there are some others that have our model, but it's the rarer model that hires adjunct faculty to help students with their writing. Our purpose of a Writing Center session, which is a 25-minute session is to, maybe if the student brings the paper in, it really depends if it's an early draft, maybe to help them focus with their thesis statement. What kind of support are they going to bring in, mid-process, maybe what is their organization, do they have topic sentences, is there enough support?
Then maybe a final draft is their-- Then we can maybe go over the sentences depending on what level they are would dictate what level of conversation we have with the student. Part of our job as preceptors-- or we call ourselves consultants because nobody seems to know what preceptor means, but it's not like a teacher. Even though we are teachers, we take off our teacher hat and we put on our consultant hat. The metaphor is not so much taking the sick paper to the doctor to be fixed as it is if you would go visit your financial consultant. Your financial consultant might give you advice, but it's your money and so you ultimately are responsible for it.
We want to encourage students to have agency over their paper where they're to be readers, not there to tell them what to do. Certainly not there to fix their papers for them, but to be educated readers to look at the paper and say, "I understand this, but this part is a little bit unclear. A lot of times the session might be just talking. What do you want to accomplish here? How do you think you might go about that? Sometimes students are unclear about what the assignment is. We can read over the assignment and help them with just general interpretation of language.
If it's very unclear to the student we try to send the student back to the teacher because we really don't want to interpret what the teacher wants for the student. We don't want to get in between the teacher and the student. We want the conversation to go from the student to us or from the student to the teacher, but not us to the teacher. We don't want to be-- In that sense, we're not really a teacher service. We're not a TA service. We're not the Writing Center police. We don't want to report on who's seen us and who hasn't seen us. We want to be there for students and we want them to use us and to learn how to use us in the best way.
Interviewer: A couple of things I'm hearing when you describe this, 25 minutes seems probably long enough but also relatively short. Then you started a while back by saying about 99% of the students came in and said they need help with their grammar. What I'm putting together from those two bits of information is it would seem one of the key things for the Writing Center working well for a student, is to really think ahead of time. First of all, bringing a limited amount to be read. Maybe if it's a 20-page paper, you can't read the whole-- Limited amount to be read, but for them to have a better description, a better analysis, a better sense for the consultant of what the real issues are.
Obviously they're trying to do that. They're not being-- How do you get out of that-- It's easy to tell a student only bring in three to five pages or something like that. That's more of a mechanical thing, whatever the page length is, but what kinds of ways can we as instructors help students better think about how they bring the problem to you? If I go to the doctor and I say the problem's in my foot, but really the problem is somewhere else, their hands are tied.
Leslie: Exactly, that's actually a good metaphor to use. It's so hard to generalize because there's so many different types of sessions that we have with students. We might have a student come in with a 20-page paper, but say that student is a grad student and they're writing some sort of master's thesis or project and they want to know if it makes sense, if the first and the second part makes sense with the third part. That would require on our part to scan through the pages quickly.
Interviewer: It's big-level feedback.
Leslie: Big-level feedback and so it's not impossible to bring in 20 pages because we might need those 20 pages to see where the paper's going and what kind of feedback to give them. Maybe for a freshmen paper or beginning paper, it's only a five-page paper or something like that. We might do a little bit more specific work on a specific paragraph or a specific conclusion or if the paper's finished, we might be looking at sentence-level error. We're doing micro feedback, we're doing macro feedback and a lot of it depends on what the student needs, but it also is helpful if the student knows what they need. [laughs]
Like I said before, a part of our job is to train them to be able to speak about their writing process and be able to articulate what they're trying to do in their writing and at what stage they are and what they want us to focus on specifically. Those kinds of questions we should be asking students in the beginning of the session so that we can focus in and give them the feedback they need at that point. Of course, a lot of times they don't really know and so it takes a little while to use us over a year or two. A lot of times by the time students are seniors or if they're graduate students, they come in very knowledgeable. Then they say, "Well, this is my project. This is what I'm trying to do. I've gotten this far, but I'm having trouble trying to work this part into the paper," and we can have a very fruitful conversation.
Other students, particularly this is with students that want sentence-level editing, they'll complain that they didn't get through the whole paper. "We didn't get through the whole paper. It was only 25 minutes. It's not enough time. We didn't finish." Now that statement-- I don't know what the word is, but it's a misconception of what we do. We're not there to get through the whole paper. That's not our purpose. We're there to help students with one or two things so that they can go away and implement those things into the rest of the paper, into future papers. If they can't do that, we haven't helped them. I know it's difficult with the ESL students because sometimes they can't edit their whole paper on their own and that's understandable.
At this point, I probably should mention there are three overlapping but not identical agendas happening here. A lot of times, the agenda of the instructor is to have students bring in excellent papers so they don't have to wade through bad writing and it's more work for them so they send them off to the writing center. It's the agenda of the student to get an A on the paper. They bring their papers because they want an A. If they don't get the A, then they're unhappy. Neither of those agendas is our agenda. Instructors should keep this in mind and let students know this too. It's not our agenda for them to either get an A or for the paper to be perfect. What we're actually working with is the student writer him or herself.
I don't want to say we don't care about the paper, but that's not our goal to have a perfect paper. The paper is the means by which we help the writer become a better writer.
Interviewer: If I put this in slightly different words, it reminds me of in some other fields they talk about, instead of always giving literal feedback about every mistake that happened, giving strategic feedback. The idea of strategic feedback is if I show you a key repeating pattern, then you can learn and fix the other things yourself. Would that be closer to what you're talking about? You're really giving them strategic feedback about how to think, how to behave, how to organize as a writer, rather than going through every little thing that might exist in a paper.
Leslie: In a perfect world, yes. We want to give them tools. Tools that they can take away and use in the rest of the paper, in future papers, wherever. It doesn't always work out like that, but understanding that is one step towards utilizing the Writing Center in the right way.
Interviewer: It seem one bad approach would be if a student or a student prompted by instructor comes to you 12 hours before the paper is due because you guys are going to do all the finishing touches on their paper. What you're doing isn't mechanical in that sense and that would be a wrong way to conceptualize how to use the Writing Center in a productive way.
Leslie: Well, one time-- this was years ago, but a student got an e-mail from his professor, which he showed to me. The professor was outraged that the student had gone to the Writing Center and left with a paper that still had spelling errors in it. That's just such a gross misconception of what we're there to do.There's spellcheck, for crying out loud. We're not there to edit their papers or make sure they're error-free. I think that's probably the biggest message that I would have for both faculty and students is that we're not a fix-it shop.
Interviewer: That's a big thing.
Leslie: That's a big deal.
Interviewer: I want to move a little differently. This comes out in a little bit of what you said, it seems for a Writing Center to work really well, there needs to be some implicit collaboration with the faculty. Implicit meaning the faculty understand what you really do versus not. I think beyond understanding what kinds of things you do and you don't do, I'm guessing there's probably other kinds of things that faculty can do that would help the Writing Center staff work more effectively with students. I'm wondering what those things are or if they exist. Maybe it's just putting in their syllabus what the Writing Center really does. I'm just thinking about that implicit collaboration. How can faculty help you more?
Leslie: There's a couple of things. I would say the first thing is to make sure that their assignments are clear. We have a faculty resource link on our website page, the Writing Center web page that has some tips for how to write writing assignments. Just make the objective clear and the parts of the paper that are required clear. Maybe even give a student a couple of different models for maybe not the entire paper, but parts of the paper that you want them to-- or a rubric or a grid. There's a lot of different ways to make up assignments. Just to make sure that the student understands what he or she is being asked to do. That would be one thing.
Another thing might be to have students-- If they come to see us, some faculty members give them extra credit or something like that. I think one thing that might be really helpful is to have the student write up a short paragraph or a short notation of what they worked on in the paper, what they learned, and how they're going to use that in the future. That helps cement in the student's mind what they actually did. It also gives the feedback to the teacher about what the student is struggling with or working on. Those are two things that I can think of off the top of my head.
Interviewer: Great, thank you very much. You mentioned this before that you serve both undergraduate and graduate students. I'm wondering, are there any services provided for graduate students that differ from the services for undergraduates? I'm sure the intent and the basic approach is the same, but are there any differences?
Leslie: The graduate students usually need a lot of help with APA. I think that's probably the biggest request that we get mostly from the nursing department, but also from the education students. I would say the difference is probably in the quality of the conversations that we have with them. We've been helping different people with their studies and with their dissertations. There are several people on staff that have done dissertations in APA or have done research in APA. Those people probably would be a little bit more helpful if they're writing a dissertation to say, well, you need to get your research questions clear here. This is not your definition of terms or you're using it in a different way here. Those types of that are specific to dissertation writing or specific to research writing, we can help them with those things.
Interviewer: They can request and get somebody who's savvy in those areas?
Leslie: If they're really doing something that's at the dissertation level, they should request. Although everybody is some kind of writer and has some kind of writing background, a lot of times the people that are in the Rhetoric Department have more background in MLA than APA. It depends on what discipline the studentÕs paper is in.
Interviewer: Another question I have for you is-- I've probably told my students the wrong thing at times. Maybe all of us are guilty of that.
Leslie: [unintelligible 00:18:56] to the Writing Center [laughs].
Interviewer: In today's world, it's becoming more true with undergraduates and it's certainly true with graduate students that it's often inconvenient for them to physically come to USF for a bunch of understandable reasons. I'm wondering what ways you can work with students, when it's not easy for them to physically come to USF? For instance, if they come here once every two weeks or if they're an undergraduate who maybe lives in the dorms, but besides classes, they're working in the mission at some store to pay for their tuition. It's difficult for them to come here between 9:00 and 5:00 kind of thing.
Leslie: Well, we're open from 10:00 until 8:00.
Interviewer: Oh my gosh, that's fantastic.
Leslie: Monday through Thursday. We're open until 5:00 on Friday. We have drop-in hours in the library from 1:00 to 4:00 Monday through Thursday. We are open until eight o'clock four days a week. We don't offer phone conferences with on-campus students, but off-campus students. Now, we have campuses in San Jose, in Sacramento, in San Ramon, Pleasanton, and one more, Santa Rosa. For students that are off-campus, we can give them a phone conference. We've tried various ways. We tried Skype, nobody wants to do Skype. I donÕt know why, it just doesnÕt work. We realized that we really donÕt need to see each other.
Interviewer: No, not with this. Actually that might be a distraction when you're trying to look at your writing.
Leslie: ItÕs not that important. What we need to do is see their documents. Let me tell you about our Writing Center web page. We have a Writing Center webpage, the best way to find it is just type in "Writing Center" in the search box on the USF website. ThereÕs lots of links on the right-hand side that give our philosophy and the protocols and things for students and thereÕs also writersÕ links that have lots of resources for writers. All kinds of citation stuff and resources for instructors and all that stuff, but also on our webpage tells them how to do a phone conference and they would either e-mail their paper at where we could look at the front desk or print it out and we'll look at a hard copy.
Lately, weÕve started experimenting with Google Docs and the cool thing about Google Docs is that we can see the edits that they make when they make them. WeÕre on the phone to them. They call up. They switch us over and really-- just like a regular Writing Center conference. We have their paper in front of us, weÕre on the phone. A lot of these students I might add are adult students because theyÕre at the branch campuses. Their writing concerns are different than a freshman. We can have a very productive conversation with them because they know what theyÕre talking about. TheyÕre experts in their fields. A lot of them are working adults. They know what theyÕre talking about.
They just need a little help articulating that in an academic way because they havenÕt been in a school for a while. We can pull up their document on Google Docs and then we can talk to them and depending on what weÕre talking about, see how theyÕre changing it or we can actually make comments and they see our comments. ThatÕs nice. ItÕs a simultaneous conversation.
 Interviewer: Google Docs rocks.
Leslie: Google Docs rocks except in one area and that is it screws up the formatting. One time I had a nursing student who wanted specific help in formatting and I was looking at her document like, ÒYou need to have a space here and this needs to be indented," and she goes. ÒI did do that.Ó I was looking I go, ÒWell, itÕs not here,Ó and she goes, ÒWell, when I uploaded it, they changed it.Ó Then she had to just send me a PDF so I could see the actual paper. Google Docs is not good for formatting issues, but very good for content issues. One time I was on the phone with somebody who has an accent and we were talking about some change in wording that she made and I said, ÒWell, IÕd have her read it back to me and when she read it back to me I couldnÕt tell by the way she was pronouncing it what sheÕd changed.
[laughter]
Leslie: If IÕd been able to see it on the screen that would have worked really well for that.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, Leslie, this has been wonderful. IÕve asked the best questions I know how in the moment, but IÕm wondering, if there are any other issues or information that would be really helpful for faculty to know about the Writing Center that we havenÕt talked about already?
Leslie: One thing that comes up and itÕs going to be coming up more and more is students' log times-- international students who are at the graduate level, master's students or doctoral students who are from other countries and theyÕre very smart, very intelligent, very knowledgeable about what theyÕre studying, but theyÕre doing papers that are 30, 50, 100 pages long.
Interviewer: Which is difficult when itÕs not your language.
Leslie: ItÕs difficult. Conceptually, their papers might be brilliant, but they need editing because their final thesis has to be native perfect. Those students need to hire an editor. That is well beyond what we can do. In other words, the learning curve is too steep for them. They donÕt need to sit there and figure out whether to use "of" or "as". Some propositional thing, some phrasing thatÕs particularly in English usage or something like that. TheyÕre too far along in their academic career to mess with that small itty-bitty stuff. They need an editor and we canÕt do that. I just wanted to throw that out there. There are limits on what we can do and at the very high end, they just need to hire somebody to go through their document and edit it.
Interviewer: YouÕve raised a good case example although there might be others too for other types of students. By the way, youÕre reminding me of this, are there editors that your center actually recommends? That comes up once in a while.
Leslie: No. [chuckles]
Interviewer: ThatÕs fine. Well, Leslie, thank you so much. This has been really interesting to listen to everything you say make sense, but IÕve learned things about the Writing Center that I didnÕt know before either. IÕm going to change my tact with my students a little bit, theyÕre places where I was on board and places where I was a little off. I think everybody whoÕs listening to this it really-- I think it helps everybody, faculty, students and obviously your center if we all have a shared understanding of what you guys do and why you do.
Leslie: I just want to extend a welcome to all USF students on-campus and off-campus. Please come on in and see-- just have a conversation with us and we love to look at papers. We have fun with them and we really enjoy working with students. I donÕt want to sound too negative about we donÕt do this or we donÕt do that because we do do a lot. ItÕs just the more informed people are, the better we can work with them. We really would like to work with anybody who'd like to come and see us.
Interviewer: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for the generosity of your time.
Leslie: Thank you.
[00:26:49] [END OF AUDIO]


File name: Leslie Denner on Writing Center.mp3
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