Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)

Reading the Online Writing Center: The Affordances and Constraints of WCOnline

Pratistha Bhattarai
Duke University
pratistha.bhattarai@duke.edu

Aaron Colton
Duke University
aaron.colton@duke.edu

Eun-hae Kim
Duke University
eunhae.kim@duke.edu

Amber Manning
Duke University
amber.manning@duke.edu

Eliana Schonberg
Duke University
eliana.schonberg@duke.edu

Xuanyu Zhou
Stanford University
xz277@stanford.edu

Abstract
While online synchronous writing consultations predate the COVID-19 pandemic by at least a decade, the contingencies of the pandemic have left many writing centers scrambling to shift to online-only or hybrid formats. Amid such sudden changes in operations, center administrators and consultants often miss the opportunity to examine the tools that facilitate digital consultations. After analyzing trends in the foci of consultations at the Duke University Thompson Writing Program (TWP) Writing Studio pre-pandemic, early-, and mid-pandemic, this article offers a “critical digital pedagogy” reading of one the most popular online writing-consultation platforms, WCOnline. Close reading the aesthetics and features of WCOnline—such as the whiteboard, LiveChat, and video windows—we highlight the software’s implicit pedagogical biases. In response to these close readings, we offer a set of best practices for maximizing the pedagogical affordances of WCOnline, paying particular attention to rapport building, gestural language, written chat and notetaking, and textual annotations.

Like many writing centers, the Duke University TWP Writing Studio found itself forced to shift entirely online in spring 2020, and the emergency switch led us to stick, operationally speaking, with what we knew: WCOnline’s text-chat platform, already in place for the 10% of our appointments that occurred synchronously online pre-pandemic. With breathing space over the summer—and with half a semester of Zooming under our collective belts—writing-center consultants and administrators subsequently decided to incorporate WCOnline’s audio-video functions for the 2020-2021 academic year.

When rushed, without prior training, to transpose consultations onto digital platforms like WCOnline, the specific affordances, limitations, and assumptions (pedagogical and otherwise) of those platforms can go under-examined. This is not only to suggest that synchronous online consultations will not replicate face-to-face consultations—neither better nor worse, just different—it is also to say that the tools consultants rely on for virtual consultations come loaded with values that themselves merit substantial analysis. What does it mean for consulting pedagogy, for example, that WCOnline provides a chat-box next to the writer’s document (see Appendix A, Figure 4)? How might the mere presence of the chat-box affect a writer’s expectations for a consultation?

In this article, therefore, we examine Writing Studio usage data to determine whether the layout and functions of WCOnline may correlate with trends in the main foci of writing consultations. We pair this examination with an interpretation of WCOnline from the perspective of “critical digital pedagogy”: a method of “looking under the hood of edtech tools” to identify the aspects of those tools that bolster, modify, or “wor[k] directly at odds with our pedagogies” (Morris and Stommel). To do so, we close read not only the functions but also the aesthetics of WCOnline, interpreting how features such as visual layout and relative element size (e.g., the size of the live-video window vs. the size of the whiteboard) may implicitly privilege certain pedagogies. And in describing and evaluating the affordances and limitations of WCOnline—and modeling how consultants may undertake such work themselves—we hope to make possible rich and necessarily complex considerations of how writing centers and consultants can best integrate, or limit the use of, WCOnline’s digital consultation platform in their daily operations and consulting practices.

To understand how WCOnline tacitly encodes pedagogic biases in its various features, we turn to the heuristic of framing. The term was first coined by Gregory Bateson in his seminal work on meta-communication, where he argued that any act of communication entails the passing of a message and of an interpretive framework (67). In a media-theoretic sense, one can consider a frame as a window, and our consultation practices frame the learning situation much in the same way that windows frame a view, bringing certain aspects of a writer’s practice into focus while cutting out others.

Similarly, one may consider how windows have historically been instruments for painters to introduce perspective—and with that, a point of view—into their paintings. An expansively framed window, in the context of our present inquiry, would be one that enables writers to see past and future learning contexts, putting their writing assignment into perspective. In this way, the idea of framing-as-window centers the writer as viewer rather than examining only the frame qua frame. How, then, we might ask, can we play with WCOnline’s different frames—the whiteboard, the video-box, and the live chat—not only in order to negotiate the software’s pedagogical biases, but also to deepen writers’ perspectives on their writing processes?

Following Bateson, scholars have asked how a learning context might be framed to encourage knowledge transfer, that is, to communicate to students that what they learn in one context may be applied to other, future contexts. Engle et al. make a distinction between a bounded framing of learning experiences, which takes those experiences as one-time events, and a comparably expansive framing, which keeps in mind “opportunit[ies for students] to contribute to larger conversations that extend across time, places, people, and topics” (603). Eodice et al. similarly argue that an expansive framing enables students to take full ownership of the assignment at hand, to focus on what is “meaningful for them—not for their parents, instructors, or employers” (5). An expansive framing fosters “learning that connects to previous experiences and passions and to future aspirations and identities” (5). In other words, an expansive framing puts the assignment at hand into perspective for the writer, positing the writer as an agentive participant, an author not just of their ideas but also of their evolving self.

This observation about expansive framing and its effects on writerly agency is directly relevant for writing centers, considering the field’s focus on long-term development. Importantly, we contend, an expansive framing of a consultation should not be reduced to discussing a writer’s process (what we refer to in this article as “meta”-level writing foci). So, in considering WCOnline, we seek to understand which of the platform’s framing practices are most conducive to developing writers’ senses of authorship and which may inhibit a writing center’s pedagogical aims.

Examining the Foci of Online and In-Person Consultations

In a comparative study of the conversational content of face-to-face and online writing consultations, Wisniewski et al. find with statistical significance that online sessions are more likely to focus on micro-level concerns than face-to-face sessions (282). To determine how session foci were, or were not, shifting in our own center during the transition to online-only consultations, we examined session data from client report forms that were completed as standard practice after each consultation. To arrive at our broad categories, the research team of three graduate students, one undergraduate student, and two faculty first individually sorted all foci into “micro,” “macro,” or “meta” categories. We then discussed points of disagreement and arrived at consensus categories for each of the foci, keeping in mind that these notes did not indicate the amount of time spent in a session working on any particular focus or foci. In considering these categories, we took into account both the ways in which we, as writing consultants, interpreted them in sessions and the ways in which writers interpreted them. For example, while some members of the research team considered “citations” to have meta properties, the consensus was that most actual writing consultations treat citations as a micro issue rather than a discussion of disciplinary orientations or epistemology. (See Appendix A, Figure 1 for the final categorization of foci.)

After determining the categories for each focus, we exported the WCOnline client report form data into Excel and divided the data into three time periods: 2017 fall - 2019 spring (the pre-pandemic face-to-face and text-only online session), 2020 spring (the transition to online-only, still with text-only online sessions), and 2020 fall to 2021 spring (the online-only year in which consultations incorporated audio and video components). The pre-pandemic face-to-face and text-only sessions (2017 fall - 2019 spring) totaled 7,829 appointments; 2020 spring totaled 848 appointments; and 2020 fall - 2021 spring totaled 1,633 appointments. Excluding placeholder appointments, e-tutoring appointments (asynchronous online sessions only available to students located outside time zones within North America and constituting less than 5% of our total consultations), and missed or no-show appointments, we tagged appointments as “micro,” “macro,” and/or “meta” if at least one foci from a category was selected by the consultant on the WCOnline client report form. For example, if, in a client report form, the consultant checked “grammar,” “citations,” and “talk about my writing process,” the session was tagged as “micro” and “meta” even though two “micro” foci and only one “meta” foci were checked. The percentage of appointments under each focus was calculated by dividing the number of appointments tagged as micro, macro, or meta over the total number of valid appointments within the time interval. (See Appendix A, Figure 2 for the distribution of foci in client report forms over each time period; see Appendix B for total foci selected in consultation reports over each time frame.)

Based on Wisniewski et al.’s research, we expected the shift to entirely online sessions to be accompanied by a change in consultation foci, but our data did not manifest such a shift. While Wisniewski et al.’s research was conducted in a writing center offering a range of in-person and online options to students (263), our data suggests that, when given no choice as to modality, writers’ priorities remain their priorities. We found no statistically significant difference in the foci of consultations between a mostly in-person (note that only 10% of appointments pre-pandemic were synchronous online, probably because these sessions did not offer audio-video capabilities to students) and an entirely online year.

“Reading” WCOnline

Given the parity of foci across online-only and mixed years, the most urgent question for writing centers operating in-person and online is not “how do online sessions affect writers’ concerns?,” but instead “what are the best practices for working with writers online?”: a question that we believe is best approached through a critical digital pedagogy analysis, and specifically a close reading of the software’s layout. In searching for answers, we keep in mind Rejon-Guardia et al.’s conclusion that using online consultation features works most effectively when all participants discuss (and ideally agree upon) the purposes of consultation tools and the goals of the consultation (219). We thus consider WCOnline as software qua software, and as one consultation tool within the range of consultation tools available to consultants both online and in-person.

A close reading of WCOnline’s visual layout begins most logically with the first thing a writer sees when they log into the system and before they join their one-on-one consultation: the scheduling page. Here, writers are greeted by a multi-tiered edifice with neatly lined windows as seen in Appendix A, Figure 3.

From one perspective, seeing the “faces” of writers through these windows—that is, the appointment slots already occupied by other writers—could help writers to think of themselves as part of a writing public and their writing practice as exceeding the scene of their own writing. However, the specific arrangement of the windows into efficient rows and columns could also produce the opposite effect. The scheduling interface may simulate the experience of tightly packed cubicles, giving the writing center a sense of organizational bureaucracy as opposed to community. Whether this potentially bureaucratic orientation might encourage writers to adopt a more instrumental attitude and focus on lower-order concerns is an important and open question that we will explore more fully below.

During a writing session on WCOnline, the writer and the consultant can video conference, use a “chat” feature, and view the whiteboard space, in which both participants have equal cursor control (see Appendix A, Figure 4 ).1 Just as the online writing consultation in general creates a frame for collaboration, the shared whiteboard space can craft a frame for the goals, mechanisms, and outcomes of the writing consultation. Scholars such as Rabu and Badlishah have argued that shared typing spaces can inspire a discussion of writing that focuses on lower-level thinking as opposed to higher-order thinking on issues such as structure, organization, and argument (539). In WCOnline, the visual centering of the whiteboard space, with the whiteboard disproportionately large and placed in the middle of both writers’ and consultants’ gazes, increases the likelihood that both will attend to the prose written or copied onto the whiteboard rather than converse with each other about goals, process, or other higher-order issues. Thus, in our critical digital pedagogical reading of WCOnline, the whiteboard space, in creating a media frame, can implicitly steer the consultation to grammatical, syntactical, or stylistic issues in writing.

Overshadowed by the whiteboard, WCOnline’s video interface sits in the top-left corner of the screen, with one participant stacked above the other, as seen in Appendix A, Figure 4. The two video windows tightly frame the faces of the writer and the consultant, cutting out their bodies and body language. Of particular consequence is the invisibility of participants’ hands. As Laura Feibush argues, the deictic gestures of pointing, grasping, and ordering not only communicate messages within writing consultations, but may also emphasize writing’s status as a craft. In other words, gestures frame the writing process as an act of construction, signaling to the writer that they are, in fact, the engineer of their own ideas. In the absence of such a framing, writers may be less likely to consider their writing assignment in relation to their own scholarly and personal goals. Writers may treat the consultation as a one-time learning event and thereby focus on lower- rather than higher-order problems.

Despite the constraints of the compact video screens, the WCOnline layout may be preferable to an alternative layout that would maximize the participants’ video windows. For one, a wide-angled video interface risks drawing participants’ attention to unnecessary details and movements in the other person’s environment. Further, environmental details signal information that may establish a hierarchy between participants. As Yergeau et al. note, videoconferencing may reveal participants’ class status to each other by putting their homes and workspaces on display.2 Thus, an additional merit of the compact video interface, and the enjambed framing, is its self-awareness as a medium. Unlike the more wide-angled view of traditional video-conferencing softwares such as Teams and Zoom, WCOnline’s video interface makes no pretensions to showing everything captured by a user’s camera, signaling to participants that the presence of another—and the discourse between the writer and consultant—must be created rather than taken for granted. However, despite the benefits of this self-awareness, the maximized whiteboard and minimized video interface may also make it more challenging for consultants to engage the writer in conversation when the whiteboard dominates the consultation.

WCOnline also offers participants the option to use the audio feature while disabling their video. This function may alleviate what Erin Bardner and Gloria Mark describe as the “evaluation apprehension” caused by video interaction (160). In offline social interactions, the gaze of the other beckons one to act and respond. But as Heath and Luff (1993) note, video-mediated interactions, despite participants’ “mutual visual access… [may dampen their] ability to successfully perform gestures and other forms of bodily conduct” (48). Put differently, video produces a need for one’s gestures to be seen that it simultaneously disavows. Heath and Luff contrast videoconferencing with not just face-to-face interactions but also with other technologically mediated communication, such as the telephone, suggesting that it is the visual rather than the sonic aspect of videoconferencing that introduces an element of incompleteness to virtual interactions (13). Like the telephone, WCOnline’s interface, if used solely with audio enabled, instills in participants a desire not to be seen but to be heard, a desire that Heath and Luff suggest is less likely to be thwarted in a virtual setting. With video enabled, however, the gaze of the consultant remains fixed on the screen—and from the writer’s perspective, on the writer and their text—potentially causing a sense of surveillance.

Best Practices for WCOnline

Exploring WCOnline through the framework of critical digital pedagogy asks writing center consultants to reexamine long-established customs and practices. In what follows, we shift from critical digital pedagogy critique to considerations of how certain practices that occur frequently during face-to-face consultations may or may not transfer successfully on WCOnline. We also ask how we might adapt our practices to maximize the tools and resources available on the platform.

Rapport Building

When we shift to an online synchronous consultation, the ‘setting up’ and ‘settling in’ time—during which the consultant and writer get acquainted with each other, the space, and the occasion of the consultation—alter. Online, this phase may either be skipped entirely or replaced with what may feel like a stilted, limited, and streamlined introductory moment. However, omitting introductions entirely and proceeding directly to agenda-setting impedes the ability of consultant and writer to build rapport.3 Given, as previously discussed, that the screen may impose a barrier to connection, attention to bridging these possible physical, cognitive, and emotional gaps becomes crucial.

To enable a successful online session, we suggest that consultants preserve the opening small talk that happens during a face-to-face consultation. Consultants may ask the writer for their preferred name and about their day, week, or semester/quarter. These first few minutes will enable both the writer and consultant to get comfortable in the digitally mediated environment and to orient themselves for the consultation.

Gestures, Faces, and Silence

As in all online environments, some of the immediacy of reading facial or gestural cues might be lost in WCOnline. Additionally, we have found in our own practice that conversational overlaps might occur more frequently online because it may be more difficult to gauge in an audio video session whose turn it is to talk. Smoother conversational flow can be facilitated by spacing out each speaking ‘turn’ in longer intervals.

Common consultant backchanneling cues that demonstrate active listening—such as “uh-huh-ing,” nodding, or smiling—may not transfer as easily in an online consultation. Even eye contact turns tricky in a virtual context because it is unclear where, exactly, one should be looking. Should one look at the other person’s eyes, the computer camera, or the screen in order to feign a realistic eye contact that is, in fact, almost impossible to achieve (Feibush, 2018)? One way to alleviate this sense of disjuncture, arising from a screen-saturated context, is for consultants to practice what Feibush calls “gestural listening”: a form of active listening that highlights nonverbal communication cues. These “embodied listening behaviors” include eye contact, posture and body positioning, and hand gestures (Feibush). Considering that WCOnline’s small video window further minimizes what is already typically a shoulder-up view of the participants, consultants may want to consider exaggerating physical cues related to listening, perhaps using larger hand gestures to signal positive feedback, such as a thumbs up, or offering verbal expressions of enthusiasm.

The role of silence also changes in online consultations. While silence can be a source of discomfort even during in-person consultations, that sense of discomfort can be heightened online due to the difficulty of reading facial expressions through the screen. It might be more difficult to recognize, for example, whether a silent writer is confused about a consultant’s question or is instead taking a moment to reflect before answering. Given this context, we encourage consultants to understand silence as an opportunity to give the writer space to think rather than as an awkward moment that needs to be overcome. If we are to work with silences rather than against them, consultants should also bear in mind that most elements of consultations tend to take longer in a virtual learning setting. If, in a face-to-face consultation, a writer might pause for ten seconds to respond to a question, our experience suggests that in an online consultation, we may need 20 seconds.

To give writers the time and space to reflect without feeling like they are under surveillance, consultants can offer writers the option to turn their camera and/or audio off for thinking periods. Additional complications can also arise from interruptions stemming from the writer’s environment—family members, pets, Internet trouble, etc. Reminding writers at the beginning of a session that they are free to pause and turn off their camera at any time can alleviate writers’ concern about these types of interruptions.

Textual Annotations

Online consultations require a great degree of care when it comes to marking text. Perhaps due to the conspicuous presence of the whiteboard space during online consultations, as well as the ease of typing compared to handwriting, consultants can unconsciously find themselves intervening directly into the writer’s text more often than they would during face-to-face consultations. A 2012 study conducted by Wolfe and Griffin found that online consultations result in “a decrease in the number of notes participants took about planned changes to the text and an increase in the quantity of new text generated during the session” (83). Thus, the question for us becomes, “who is generating new text?” In other words, consultants should keep in mind whether or not their annotations are motivating writers to take active ownership of their writing and learning. In order to maintain the writer’s engagement, consultants might consider questions within sessions similar to the following research questions posed by Wolfe and Griffin: Who is driving the flow of conversation? Do consultants’ annotations outnumber writers’ own? And what type of document marking is taking place (e.g., editing, generating ideas, note-taking for future changes to implement) (68-69)?

While the annotation tools of WCOnline (the capacity to bold, underline, italicize, and cross out text in the whiteboard) are pedagogically beneficial, consultants must be aware not only of how much they’re annotating but also how they are preparing writers for their annotations. In a face-to-face consultation, a writer can see the consultant’s next “move” when the consultant raises their hand with the pen; and if a writer has concerns, they have a chance to forestall or influence a consultant’s intervention before it happens. During online consultations, however, a next move isn’t likely to be visible to a writer until the text has been altered in some way. Thus, we recommend that consultants clearly verbalize what type of markup they intend to implement and for what purpose. A consultant, for example, might indicate an annotation by saying “I am going to underline what I think is your thesis” or “I’m going to bold areas I have questions about so we can come back to them later.” (For examples of these strategies in action, see Appendix A, Figures 4 and 5.)

In instances such as these, participants toggle productively between auditory and visual registers, switching from verbalizing ideas to testing them out on the page. For example, when a writer reads their writing out loud, in all likelihood hearing for the very first time how their words sound, the consultant may also annotate the writer’s text using the bolding, underlining, and italicizing features, giving the writer an added sense of how their words appear to another set of eyes. That these processes occur in parallel is also significant. Parallel processing of the writer’s text construes the consultant’s annotations as an act of exchange rather than of instruction, visually signaling that the consultant is listening to the writer. Thus, if used judiciously—that is, annotating to signal attention and emphasis rather than evaluation—the whiteboard can enhance collaborations between writer and consultant.

LiveChat

Writers sometimes struggle to translate their ideas into written words and may find that they are more articulate verbally than they are on the page. This disparity has less to do, perhaps, with writers’ comfort with the verbal medium than it does with the natural distancing and perspectives that writers find when they verbalize their ideas. Thus, what makes in-person consultations particularly fruitful is the opportunity they afford writers to talk about their writing, to separate their writing more generally from the particular piece of work they have come to a writing center to discuss.

Online consultations, too, can produce this effective separation by encouraging students to use WCOnline’s LiveChat feature.4 If the whiteboard can be considered a window through which writers might look into their assignment, then the chat-box can be considered a window through which they might look out—that is, a chat-box dialogue distances writers from their work and allows them to reflect on their writing practice. However, unlike an in-person dialogue, the chat-box encourages writers to write not just to represent their ideas, but also to gain perspective on those ideas. In this way, the LiveChat can be especially conducive to meta-dialogues about the writing process.

Synchronous chatting opens a different type of linguistic exchange than face-to-face and video conferencing conversations. LiveChat often relies on a form of digitally mediated language, which David Crystal refers to as “netspeak.” Netspeak is characterized by “highly colloquial grammar and non-standard usage,” in addition to the incorporation of “emoticons, abbreviations, uncorrected typing errors, and a heightened use of question marks, exclamation points, and ellipses” (Crystal qtd. in Werner and Scrocco). For consultants, these ostensibly informal tools can establish intimacy through a demonstration of shared digital literacy. If the consultant thus establishes a positive and informal tone, then the writer too may feel more comfortable actively using the LiveChat feature without being overly concerned about their grammar or written voice in this space.

However, when generating actual text, it may be more effective to ask the writer to write the sentences onto the Whiteboard rather than the chat box. In these situations, the chat box can function as a virtual notepad where the consultant can transcribe the writer’s words. When a writer is casually thinking out loud, the consultant can jot down the writer’s not-yet-fully-formed ideas without worrying about typing full sentences and with the possibility of emphasizing certain words using exclamation points. Additionally, active use of the LiveChat as a virtual notepad might mitigate some of the shifting annotation patterns observed by Wolfe and Griffin (74), for instance, that online sessions involve less notetaking and more text generating than face-to-face sessions. Using the chat box as a notetaking forum is especially advantageous since WCOnline automatically saves transcripts that writers can return to at any time. Capitalizing on this archival feature, the chat window can also be used effectively for consultants to share handouts or website URLs with the knowledge that writers can easily access them later (see Appendix A, Figure 5).

Conclusion: Theoretical Considerations

Wisniewski et al. suggest in their recent study that the foci of online writing consultations tend to trend toward lower-order, sentence-level concerns (274-75). While our data disagrees with Wisniewski et al.’s (i.e., there was no statistically significant change in foci during the pandemic), we concur that the design of online writing-consultation software may steer consultations in a lower-order direction. However, our critical digital pedagogy reading of WCOnline suggests that such biases can be averted. Specifically, we suggest that with attention to the software’s visual design and judicious use of the WCOnline’s features, consultants can in fact adapt WCOnline to serve the same array of pedagogical purposes available in face-to-face sessions.

As we contend, online consultations only seemingly deprive the writer and consultant of a shared space. If they remove us from the intimate space of the writing center, they erect in its stead a proliferation of digital sub-spaces. The whiteboard, the chat-box, the video screens, and even the scheduling page are all spaces that writers and consultants co-inhabit. Our perception of these spaces is only ever partial, mediated as it is by various frames, and these spaces are admittedly without the immediacy and plenitude of physical spaces. But rather than think of the different levels of mediation as raising barriers, as introducing sensory gaps into our interactions, we can choose to think of them neutrally as recoding our sensorium. When we narrate our actions to make them more “visible,” enact gestural listening, or engage in the parallel processing of a writer’s text through visual and auditory channels, we effectively relearn the uses of our senses for effective collaboration. Thus, as we transpose consultations into the digital space of WCOnline, we may have to transpose our sensoriums critically as well, re-evaluating and re-mapping our centers’ values in the process.

As online sessions are likely to continue to make up a significant portion of our work, shifts between in-person and online consultations may also become more frequent. While the tools for online consultations continue to evolve, we must continue to develop not only our familiarity with digital tools, but also our capacities to interpret those tools critically and thus deploy them in ways that bolster our pedagogical aims regardless of modality.

Notes

After the drafting of this article, WCOnline added a screenshare feature that was not available at the time of our research.
Note that while in certain videoconferencing softwares such as Zoom, participants can blur their backgrounds, at the time of this article’s drafting, WCOnline had not incorporated such a feature.
We recognize that for some writers, removing physical barriers to accessibility may in fact support their ability to build rapport with consultants. Even in situations where the online setting may be preferable, ensuring time for both consultant and writer to settle into the session seems crucial.
Note that WCOnline’s LiveChat feature is especially important when technical issues prevent a session from incorporating audiovisual elements.

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