Writing Center at Large: A Conversation with Eliana Schonberg, PhD 

Though we pondered building an outdoor consulting yurt during Penrose re-construction, the University Writing Center packed up its tables and pencils and moved to the Driscoll Ballroom in June 2011. With the staff settled in their temporary home, and only occasionally counting the days until the library renovations are complete in December, we sat down with Writing Center Director Eliana Schonberg to learn more about the move and what else is new in the Center this year.

TP: What changes have you noticed in the Writing Center since the move to Driscoll?

Eliana: Very few, actually. We're still offering the same collaborative consultations we always have. In fact, this fall we had 1,477 consultations, 45 more than last fall in Penrose. Our sessions are still conducted by a mix of graduate and undergraduate student consultants (all of whom take a graduate-level course in writing center theory and practice) who talk with a writer about his or her goals and how to achieve them successfully in a text. We haven't seen any dramatic changes in the writers who see us either: half of our consultations this past fall were still with graduate students, as they have been for several years now, and we still see writers from a wide variety of departments.

The main difference for us is that because our walls no longer go all the way up to the ceiling, we've all gotten a bit more self-conscious about noise. The Writing Center consultants are a pretty lively bunch, so they've had to try to lower their collective volume. We're trying to keep it to a dull roar most of the time.

Speaking of the consultants, can you tell us a bit about who's working this year?

We've got 20 really terrific and smart folks—13 grads and 7 undergrads. Because we work with writers from all across campus, we try to recruit as diverse a group of consultants as possible, and I'm delighted because I think this year is our widest range yet. Among the undergrads, we've covered economics, environmental chemistry, sociology, psychology, marketing, business administration, Spanish, English, biology, art, gender and women's studies, and one self-designed major. The grad students are studying intercultural communications, communication studies, poetry, fiction, literature, religious studies, and international studies.

So what's the most frequent question writers come to you with?

That depends on whether you ask them before or after their session. When writers sign up for appointments, they usually say they want to work on "editing" or that they "just want someone to read it over and see if it makes sense." If we look at what our consultants report having addressed in a session, "clarity" is the topic most frequently mentioned. However, our second most frequent topics are "content" and "organization." Because our sessions are truly collaborative, those topics are coming from the writers too; once a writer starts reading through a text and discussing it with a reader, she frequently decides there are areas she wants to reorganize or change entirely. But if you ask most writers before they see us, "do you plan to change the organization of your text today?" they'll inevitably say "no!"

What's one thing most people don't know about the Writing Center?

The artwork you see on our walls was made by our consultants as part of their writing center pedagogy class. To expand the ways in which we think about different writing processes and our work with different types of writers, we experiment with depicting a consultation visually. Sometimes the most complicated sessions make the most interesting, and the most abstract, pictures. And no writers have recognized themselves yet.

For more information about the Writing Center, please visit the Writing Center website.