Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 21, No. 2 (2024)
Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations: A Training Model
Candis Bond
Augusta University
cbond@augusta.edu
James Garner
Augusta University
james.garner@augusta.edu
Abstract
In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training that we piloted in summer of 2022 to prepare newly hired professional staff to support STEM writers. The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants in-person over a two-day period before the start of the fall semester. Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Although we focus on professional staff, our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training graduate and undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses. As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we describe our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.
As the subject of numerous journal articles and books in the field, tutor training remains an evergreen topic in formal and informal writing center conversations alike. Much of this scholarship, however, focuses on training undergraduate peer tutors using a generalist training model (Fitzgerald and Ianetta; Gillespie and Lerner; Ryan and Zimmerelli). As Megan Swihart Jewell and Joseph Cheatle point out in their anthology, Redefining Roles: The Professional, Faculty, and Graduate Consultant’s Guide to Writing Centers, this emphasis does not reflect the reality of writing center staffing in the United States (3). According to the Purdue Writing Lab’s 2020-2021 Writing Centers Research Project survey, nearly 30% of participating writing centers (n=270) staffed professional consultants. Jewell and Cheatle define professional consultants as “writing consultants who are not primarily teaching and who are not enrolled as graduate or undergraduate students...hired to work exclusively (or nearly exclusively) in the writing center” (3). They suggest the lack of scholarship on professional consultant training and roles stems from false assumptions that these consultants arrive at their positions already familiar with writing center practices and prepared for the work they will do (“Introduction” 4-7). While professional consultants often do bring expertise in classroom teaching, writing pedagogy, and other skills relevant to writing center labor, scholars are beginning to recognize that these staff members also need training and mentoring to help them define and excel in their writing center roles (Allison; Fahle Peck et al.; Sharkey Smith; Jewell and Cheatle, “Introduction” and “Toward a Professional Consultant’s Handbook”; Shiell; Siemann).
Recently, at Augusta University, we hired our first full-time professional consultants. Home to the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University is known as Georgia’s “Health Sciences University.” Thus, the majority of students enroll in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), health sciences, and health professions fields, and, by extension, many faculty work within these disciplines.[1] Our center’s shift in staffing resulted from increasing demand for writing support from advanced undergraduate researchers, graduate and professional students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, most of whom are within STEM disciplines. Unsurprisingly, approximately 50% of our writing center’s consultations are held with STEM graduate students and faculty each academic year. While half of the writers who visit the CWE are STEM students and faculty, most of our staff—including undergraduate, graduate, and professional consultants—do not have extensive knowledge of or direct experience with these fields at the time of hire.
Part of our motivation for moving to more professional staffing was so that we could devote the time needed to research STEM disciplines and genres to provide more targeted and tailored support. Our undergraduate and graduate staff are only paid for consulting hours, so we are limited in our ability to pay them to conduct research. By contrast, professional staff consult approximately 20 hours per week, totaling 50% of their contracted labor. The remaining 50% of their contracted time is allocated to researching genres and disciplines to prepare for consultations, developing and presenting workshops, and pursuing scholarly publication. Another part of our motivation to pursue this training was that we wanted to advertise more robust support for faculty and advanced graduate and postdoctoral writers. Prior to hiring our professional consultants, we worked quietly with these writers, who could make appointments either with the director or, depending on the writing task, a graduate student, but we did not have the workforce to advertise these resources more broadly. With the addition of professional staff, however, we are now fully committed to supporting these populations in their roles as both researchers and teachers. As we onboarded incoming professional consultants, we realized quickly that we needed to provide some baseline training for working with STEM writers, especially STEM graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty, who face high stakes for publication and obtaining funding and often distrust writing support provided by those outside of their disciplines.
In her chapter “Faculty and Professional Consultants, the Writing Center, and STEM,” Catherine Siemann notes universities’ increasing emphasis on STEM education. She argues writing centers must adapt to this shift in university populations and curriculum and that a “professional or mixed peer-professional tutoring model becomes increasingly valuable” in these contexts because professional staff members “can bring a confidence to working with writing outside their own academic field that comes from the breadth and depth of their experience with student writing” (111-112). Siemann claims “the wealth of experience faculty and professional tutoring staff bring to the writing center makes these individuals exceptionally valuable for working with the sometimes-complicated tutoring situations that are typical of STEM programs and STEM students” (111). She aptly notes, however, that professional consultants’ impacts depend on the quality of their training. If time is invested in training professional consultants on STEM-specific rhetorical and genre knowledge, assignments, writing processes, and challenges and if, using Rebecca Nowacek and Bradley Hughes’s framework, these staff members are trained to work as confident “expert outsiders,” then they can have great impact (Siemann 113-120). We agree that professional consultants who work with STEM writers benefit from discipline-specific training, so we turned to the wealth of insights in the field of writing in the disciplines (WID). Thus, as we onboarded our incoming professional staff, we developed a training program based on the needs of our local contexts and writers.
In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training we piloted in the summer of 2022 to prepare professional staff to support STEM writers. The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants. Although we were focused on preparing full-time professional staff, we thought it was important to also include our graduate assistants, who do still work with advanced graduate writers and faculty from time to time. This seemed like a great way to foster an inclusive staff community while professionalizing our graduate employees. The training took place in-person over a two-day period just before the start of the fall semester. Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses. As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we discuss our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.
Our Model: An Intensive STEM Training for Professional and Graduate Writing Center Staff
Although writing is central to STEM disciplines, it is often subordinated to content and is not integrated into graduate curriculum or stressed in faculty professional development (Beaufort; Davies et al.; Emerson; Lane; Madson; Mallette; Moon et al.; Poe et al.; Winsor). Consequently, STEM writers may not identify as “writers” (Emerson “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe), and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty in these fields may face challenges when attempting to write, publish, and obtain intramural and extramural funding. Faculty in these disciplines may also feel ill-equipped to offer explicit writing instruction to students, especially graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (Emerson Forgotten Tribe; Moon et al.). Writing centers can partner with STEM programs to provide more support for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty writers. Offering consultations to faculty, especially, not only helps them meet publishing and funding goals; it can also model to faculty how they can mentor their research team members and students through the writing process. For both of these reasons, we work with both students and faculty at the Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence. We believe everyone can benefit from talking about their writing, even if they are already prolific writers with numerous publications and grants to their name. Our professional staff, therefore, need to be prepared to assist STEM writers who vary in ability and level of experience as they engage disciplinary genres for distinct purposes and audiences. Our intensive STEM training aimed to provide a foundation for doing this work effectively and with confidence.
Our primary reason for designing our training for professional staff was because these consultants were a new resource at our institution, and we wanted to empower and equip them to enter collaborative conversations with STEM faculty as peers and colleagues. We wanted to position our professional consultants as experts—writing specialists with extensive knowledge of both general writing concerns as well as STEM-specific writing needs. As mentioned, our professional consultants did not earn degrees from STEM fields, so they needed to get up to speed quickly on key concepts in STEM writing to cultivate trust and consult confidently with faculty. Although our training was designed with professional consultants in mind, , we invited our graduate consultants to join because they, too, work extensively with advanced STEM writers—graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and, from time to time, faculty. Our center tries to operate on a peer model, with professional staff working with faculty, graduate staff working with graduate students, and undergraduate staff working with undergraduates. However, we realized our faculty members occasionally meet with graduate students due to scheduling limitations, so we wanted to make sure graduate students had the opportunity to benefit from this training. By including them in our professional community of practice, we also hoped they would gain increased confidence, new skills, and new areas of expertise as writing specialists. The training thus focused more on STEM-related content and discipline-specific needs rather than concerns that might be more germane to graduate consultants (for instance, negotiating power dynamics with faculty).
The training totaled approximately 12 hours over a two-day period (see Appendix for schedule agenda), with activities running from 8am- 3pm both days. Participants received an hour-long break for lunch as well as several short breaks throughout both days, which were important for keeping everyone engaged and comfortable. Several writing center scholars have noted the importance of rhetorical and genre knowledge for STEM writers (Shome; Siemann; Walker). Most recently, in a mixed-methods study comparing the efficacy of writing consultations conducted by generalist tutors and tutors trained in writing literature reviews, Lucy Bryan Malenke et al. found that writers who worked with genre-trained tutors revised more effectively and offered more robust post-survey feedback than writers assisted by generalist consultants (92-94). Consequently, the first day of the camp familiarized staff with common genre and stylistic conventions of STEM disciplines.
Day one included sessions on principles of scientific style, the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion (IMRD) and Create a Research Space (CARS) models, common STEM genres local to our context, and using rhetorical genre analysis (RGA) as a consulting and teaching tool. In the afternoon, attendees read independently on the genre of clinical notes in preparation for a guest-led session on day two. The second day of the camp moved away from conventions to focus more on application. The day featured sessions on building trust with STEM writers, including a session on defining and using key terms in quantitative research and applying genre analysis through intensive genre exploration. Day two concluded with a guest speaker from our university’s medical school who had served as a writing consultant in the past. She provided a primer on clinical notes and ways our center could collaborate with the medical school. Both days included time for written reflection and group discussion. Below, we discuss content from both days of the training. Instead of moving through sessions in order, we have organized our discussion around major training themes, including staff reflection and discussion, linguistic and stylistic knowledge, and rhetorical and genre knowledge.
Staff Reflection and Discussion Sessions
We felt it was important to begin and end both days of the training with periods of staff reflection and discussion. We found beginning each day with discussion was helpful for setting the stage for the remainder of the training. The group discussions ranged widely, offering our cohort a chance to share about their successes and opportunities for growth in working with STEM writers. The inaugural reflections also allowed the presenters to adapt content to staff concerns as the trainings progressed.
At the start of the first day, all staff, including the director and associate director, reflected on the affective dimensions of working with STEM writers. Our professional staff were brand new—one had been at the university only one week at the time of the training and the other, only two months. The fields in which our professional staff completed their dissertations were rhetoric and composition and linguistics, and our graduate staff members were both completing master’s degrees in counseling. Though these writers had some familiarity with the stylistic and generic conventions of scientific writing, the STEM-focused projects they would be working with were not their primary fields of expertise. The training was also our first time gathering for professional development as a cohort. We wanted to acknowledge any emotions or concerns that staff may have at the onset so these discussions could shape our presentation of material throughout the training.
Consequently, day one began with a written reflection period that opened into a group discussion. We encouraged vulnerability and curiosity. Our discussion questions for the period were “What concerns do you have about working with writers in STEM, health sciences, and health professions?” and “In what ways do you already feel confident working with STEM writers?” These questions were intended to inspire our professional staff members and graduate students to begin reflecting on their existing strengths and areas for development when working with STEM writers. The strengths that they mentioned included an understanding of academic conventions, general knowledge of publication practices, and experience with writing as a process. Our new staff’s anxieties were predictable ones: the cohort noted their limited experience with STEM genres; the occasional complexity of STEM—particularly computer science—writing, especially formulas and research methods; and conveying appropriate confidence when working with STEM writers.
A few concerns emerged that were novel to our context. For example, asynchronous written feedback has been our center’s most popular consultation mode for graduate students and faculty, so consultants expressed some anxiety about the possibilities of miscommunication in written feedback. They also mentioned the difficulties that written feedback would create in fostering trust with STEM writers, given this modality’s affective limitations and the inability to communicate quickly back and forth. Our cohort’s observations about trust and asynchronous written feedback echo Mathew Sharkey-Smith's arguments about the professional consultant’s hybridity in asynchronous online consultations: “[I]n our work as professional writing consultants, we occupy a role between that of peer and faculty” (103). “Like faculty,” he continues, “we help students satisfy institutional curricular expectations in their writing, but like peer tutors our central purpose is to help students grow as writers. We never intended to be seen as quasi-faculty, but since our students perceive us as having authority...we have tried to use it to their benefit” (104). At Sharkey-Smith's institution, professional staff work primarily with students, albeit they are professionally experienced, returning adult students. At our institution, professional staff will spend a great deal of time working with faculty in addition to students. The hybridity of their role and the process of earning trust is thus quite complex: professional staff are peers of faculty in the sense that they also have advanced, terminal degrees in their discipline; they are authorities in the sense that they have expertise in writing pedagogy and rhetorical knowledge that the faculty writer may not possess; but they are also non-experts in the sense that they do not possess disciplinary content knowledge that the writer has. They also occupy staff rather than faculty positions within the university. The power dynamics at play in professional staff consultations with faculty and some post-doctoral fellows require nuanced awareness of positionality, expertise, and authority. It can be difficult to work through these power dynamics, establish trust, and gain the respect of the writer through asynchronous written feedback.
To kick off day two, the associate director led staff through another reflective writing and discussion session, offering five minutes to free write on what makes them trust or distrust someone with their writing, and describing and reflecting on both a positive and negative experience when they trusted someone with their writing. After the more theoretically focused first day, the second day of the training turned to application and greater reflection on ways our consultants might work with STEM writers. To this end, the broad theme of the second day was how our consultants can build trust with STEM writers, and how the strategies from the previous day might allow them to foster that trust. Participants discussed times, especially, when teachers, reviewers, and dissertation directors broke trust either with outright insulting comments or—the worse offense, our consultants agreed—simply not engaging with their writing on its own terms. But we also discussed ways that trust was built: when dissertation directors’ feedback demonstrated that they had read the writing carefully and thoughtfully and taken it seriously; when they balanced constructive criticism with praise; and when they read and responded to writing reasonably quickly. Even though our staff had limited experience working with STEM writers, especially faculty writing, they found this discussion affirming. It showed they had insight into and knowledge about building trust and helping writers grow of which they weren’t always consciously aware. All participants discussed ways they could use these themes about losing and earning trust to establish healthy, engaged relationships with STEM writers.
This reflection/discussion period preceded a short session with additional concrete strategies for earning STEM writers’ trust. The session walked consultants through some of the key problems they might run into working with STEM writers, who can be skeptical of the help they might receive from scholars trained in the humanities. We discussed technical strategies, such as becoming conversant in scientific terminology and the expectations of scientific style, as well as interpersonal ones, such as questions to ask and ways to leverage their own credentials and expertise. Then, the session talked through strategies to help consultants be more confident, curious, process-oriented, precise, and empathetic. This segment culminated with more discussion from our consultants about ways to translate these strategies into asynchronous written feedback, the preferred mode for consulting of the graduate STEM writers who utilize our services.
Linguistic and Stylistic Knowledge
To work effectively with STEM writers, professional staff need insight into how scientific writing works at the sentence level, as well as how numeric and symbolic text operates alongside written text to convey information and convey arguments. Our training included several content-oriented sessions on scientific style and quantitative research terminology to provide this training.
Elements of Scientific Style
Our first content session focused on scientific style, aiming to teach our consultants genre and discipline-specific features of STEM writing to focus their more general knowledge of writing center pedagogy. In keeping with Stephen J. Corbett’s acknowledgment of “the rhetorical complexity that any given tutorial … can entail,” our center trains all our tutors to conduct consultations by navigating the directive/nondirective instructional continuum according to each individual writer’s needs (39). Thus, much of consultants’ training in our broader approach to writing center work and instructional editing occurred prior to this session. We began the session with scientific style, because a deep understanding of scientific style and the ways it is distinct from writing in other fields is foundational for working with STEM writers.
While professional and graduate consultants are not expected to be content experts, knowledge of scientific style is warranted if they are to provide effective feedback and earn STEM writers’ trust. The director has worked at three health science universities over 15 years, and she has observed that one of the fastest ways to lose the trust of writers in the sciences is to lack knowledge of scientific style at the sentence level. She has also observed that many writing center staff members undersell their expertise in this area due to self-doubt about their abilities—they may feel they don’t have the authority or knowledge to comment on elements of scientific style if this is not how they write for their own disciplines. Or they may falsely assume the STEM writer is already an expert in scientific style and would be offended by the consultant’s input at the sentence level. This first session set the stage for boosting consultants’ confidence and helping them gain practical knowledge of common formal and linguistic features of scientific style.
The session began by introducing the rhetorical situation for STEM writing, which includes scientists conveying original findings to other scientists within the context of ongoing conversations about the research topic. (Our training did not focus on science writing for lay audiences, although that is terrain we may explore in the future.) Since the purpose of scientific writing is usually to convey original findings to other scientists who may use the findings to replicate the study or make changes to research, policy, teaching, or practice, the style prioritizes clarity and readability. Our session thus emphasized strategies for being concise, precise, objective, and cohesive—principles discussed at length in most scientific writing textbooks and style guides.
Pulling largely from Steven M. Griffies et al.’s book Publishing Connect: Elements of Style for Writing Scientific Journal Articles; Russell Hirst’s article “Scientific Jargon, Good and Bad”; and George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan’s classic article “The Science of Scientific Writing,” we reviewed reader-centric strategies for achieving clarity and readability. Consultants receive copies of Hirst’s and Gopen and Swan’s articles to read between workshop days. During the session, the director synthesized key observations about scientific style from these sources in a PowerPoint presentation, and consultants were given opportunities throughout to practice editing strategies and ask clarifying questions. We discussed jargon as a means of achieving precision, rather than as a means of elevating prose. We also dispelled the myth that passive voice is always preferred in scientific disciplines and showed how active voice can make writing more concise and precise. We spent considerable time on sentence structure, especially Gopen and Swan’s points about keeping subjects and verbs close together and intentional use of the topic and stress position, to equip our staff with concrete tools for teaching writers about concision and cohesion at the sentence and paragraph levels.
The session also pushed consultants to think critically about objectivity and to use a rhetorical perspective when deciding which principles—concision, precision, or objectivity—to prioritize in each situation. Most writing center staff understand scientific writing does not contain a lot of personal opinions or emotive adjectives. If you provide them with a sentence such as, “The caring teacher provided a thrilling lecture,” they will be able to identify the problematic adjectives and explain how it creates a subjective tone and ambiguous concepts (don’t we all define “caring” and “thrilling” differently, after all?). However, consultants may be less well-versed in more neutral adjectives and how they can negatively impact replicability or clarity of research. For example, Griffies et al. provide the following sample sentence as unclear due to subjective language: “"We use a simple model of the ocean's thermocline to describe the dynamical response" (7). In this case, the adjective “simple” is unclear because scientists define it differently depending upon discipline and it does not provide enough description of the model to be useful. Griffies et al. recommend the following revision: “We use an idealized model of the ocean's thermocline based on approximating the continuous stratification with two immiscible fluid layers to describe the dynamical response” (7). In this revised sentence, concision is sacrificed to achieve objectivity and precision.
Throughout our session on scientific style, we included both content and hands-on practice activities. After most of the major sections of the presentation, such as on ineffective use of jargon or sentence structure, consultants were given sample sentences to edit before discussing their revisions and sharing with them possible sample solutions. Additionally, we discussed strategies for conveying edits and revisions to writers while navigating the directive/nondirective continuum. However, for time, hands-on activities were more limited than we would have liked.
Providing examples like this is vital for consultants because it shows that scientific style is not a magic formula nor is it black and white; communicating effectively in the sciences requires rhetorical decision-making and careful consideration of audience and purpose. Similarly, choices about when to use active versus passive voice are usually dependent upon the author’s intended focus: if the action is the focus, as is often the case in a methods section, then passive voice may be preferred; however, in most other circumstances, active voice will be clearer and more concise, and thus will be preferred. Teaching consultants to consider principles of scientific style rhetorically prepares them to have similar conversations with writers. These conversations can help scientific writers increase agency over their text and become more attuned to the distinct rhetorical situations shaping their texts.
Quantitative Research Terminology
On the morning of day two, the director led a second session related to linguistic and stylistic elements of scientific writing, this time on quantitative methods and terminology. This session focused on quantitative research terminology and the role of equations, statistical symbols, and visual displays of data in scientific genres. Over the years, the director has observed that quantitative jargon and the presence of equations and visual displays of quantitative data can cause writing consultants anxiety, especially if they have never conducted quantitative research themselves. Significantly, she has also observed that a lack of confidence discussing quantitative methods and terms can lead STEM writers to lose confidence in writing consultants. She explained to attendees that knowing even just a little bit of quantitative “lingo” can go a long way toward earning STEM writers’ trust.
To provide staff with a baseline of this knowledge, this session provided attendees with a list of common statistical symbols and their definitions as well as information about programs, such as SPSS, R, Stata, MATLAB, and SAS, commonly used for quantitative data analysis in STEM fields. More time was spent on terms and methods that we see frequently in consultations, including the meaning of a p value and statistical significance and the meaning and uses of chi-square and ANOVA tests. We found tech journalist Stephanie Glen’s website Statistics How To: Statistics for the Rest of US! to be a comprehensive yet comprehendible resource for defining descriptive statistics and quantitative terms. We used several videos from this site in our session, including videos on p-values and ANOVA tests. We also found Colorado State University Writing Center’s consultant-created page, “Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Glossary of Key Terms,” to be helpful. In addition to discussing quantitative methods and jargon, we spent time discussing data visualization as rhetorical practice. Ethical and effective displays of data are persuasive and do not present data out of context; we explored examples of inaccurate data visualization to learn more about the subjective elements and rhetorical decision-making that goes into effective displays of data.
Rhetorical and Genre Knowledge
As demonstrated continually in scholarship on discourse analysis and WID, rhetorical and genre knowledge are key to consulting with scientific writers. As outlined below, we led several sessions on these concepts, first familiarizing staff with the generally useful IMRD format and John Swales’ “Create a Research Space” (CARS) model. Following our session on these more generalizable concepts, we narrowed our focus to several common genres they would encounter and the important skill of rhetorical genre analysis.
IMRD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) and CARS (Create a Research Space)
To provide staff with tools for more effectively reading and giving feedback on scientific texts, the associate director presented on two concepts central to our center’s approach to STEM writing: the IMRD format standard in scientific writing and John Swales’s CARS (Create a Research Space) model for academic introductions. We had two purposes in beginning with this section: first, to help our staff quickly acquire transferable knowledge that could be broadly useful for working with scientific and health disciplines; and second, to lay a foundation for our more specific exploration of common genres and rhetorical genre analysis. We concur with Joanna Wolfe, Barrie Olson, and Laura Wilder, who suggest that even though the features of disciplinary writing have become increasingly individualized and unique, commonalities across disciplines nevertheless deserve recognition (44). IMRD and the CARS model are common features that Wolfe, Olson, and Wilder would describe as macrostructures. During the portion on IMRD, the cohort was introduced in detail to the individual parts of the IMRD model, what their purposes were in scientific and medical communication, and how those pieces fit together to create a cohesive whole that reflects the scientific method (Hofmann 117). While our staff—particularly our PhD-holding professional consultants—were familiar with IMRD in broad strokes, this refresher session also explored ways that staff could employ more precise knowledge of IMRD when consulting with students and faculty in STEM disciplines. For instance, as the associate director has noted in his ten years working in writing centers with significant usage by STEM writers, even advanced doctoral students sometimes struggle with distinguishing the types of claims they should make in the results section from commentary that is appropriate for the discussion section. Thus, in addition to enhancing our consultants’ ethos with STEM writers, the purpose of this session was to equip them with more precise conceptual understanding to assist writers who use this common format for assembling articles.
Once we had familiarized our consultants with IMRD, we devoted attention to introductions. First introduced in 1981 as a four-category model before being streamlined into its current iteration, Swales’s CARS model is a generally useful tool for scientific writing and a mainstay of WAC/WID scholarship. Swales was a linguist who conducted a multidisciplinary study of scholarly introductions and identified three moves common to academic introductions: 1. Establishing a territory; 2. Establishing a niche; and 3. Occupying the niche (Swales 41). During our presentation, we looked at examples of these moves and then discussed as a group how specific writers achieved them. Since nursing faculty and students typically make up 25-30% of consultations each academic year in our center, the most in-depth example used an introduction from an article published in the Journal of Nursing Informatics. A nursing PhD student had recently published in this journal, and our center finds it helpful to make trainings align with real-life scenarios as much as possible. Looking at a nursing journal that our graduate student writers publish in gave consultants practical experience for future consultations. We recommend writing center administrators tailor STEM training to their own institutional contexts by using journals, genres, and disciplines that their staff are most likely to encounter.
Common Genres and RGA (Rhetorical Genre Analysis)
While examining macrostructures such as IMRD and CARS can be good starting points for working with STEM writers, they are not universal. The way STEM disciplines structure texts and make rhetorical moves is nuanced and varies by field and area of specialization. Consequently, we held a session on day one of the training where we introduced staff to common genres at our institution. This session immediately followed the IMRD/CARS session, allowing staff to see how scientific style, quantitative terms, IMRD, and CARS look in practice across disciplines. Common genres will vary by institution, so this type of session is an opportunity for writing centers to review past appointments to identify patterns. At our institution, common genres include research proposals; literature reviews; DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) and PhD Nursing capstones/QI (quality improvement) projects/dissertations; master’s theses in fields such as occupational therapy, nursing, and biostatistics; graduate coursework, including reading reflections, article critiques, and discussion posts; personal statements for medical/dental school and residency programs; professional cover letters and CVs; conference proposals/abstracts; and conference presentation materials (proposals, PPTs, and posters). We also see a fair number of grant proposals and manuscripts for publication from advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, including NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) proposals.
It was not feasible to examine all these genres in detail, but we selected some of the most common and reviewed prompts, rubrics, and model texts for each. Using information from the IMRD/CARS session, we spent time looking at research proposals to identify common rhetorical moves. We homed in on the literature review sections of these proposals since we see this genre frequently in our center. We also looked at samples from nursing and education to consider how health science disciplines differ from disciplines consultants may be more familiar with. Attendees quickly noted differences in use of quotations and paraphrases; use of signal phrases; style, formatting, and placement of citations; and depth of analysis of source material. Attendees were able to connect these differences to principles of scientific style discussed earlier in the day.
The section on RGA drew especially from Amy J. Devitt’s now-classic Writing Genres, Amanda Greenwell’s 2017 article on rhetorical reading guides, and Ellen C. Carillo’s work on reading strategies. Devitt’s efforts to redefine genre as neither a classification system nor as a formula but as “rhetorical and dynamic, integrating form and content, product and process, individual and society” provided important grounding for our approach to genre analysis (6). We wanted to provide our consultants with ways of understanding genre that attended to the interrelationships between writer, audience, text, and content. Participants learned strategies for reading with purpose by attending to generic features of the author’s writing task (Carillo), using the says/does approach while offering feedback during consultations (Carillo), and highlighting their own experience of and expectations from the text as readers (Greenwell). Carillo’s version of “says/does” annotation asks writers to first summarize what a paragraph says, followed by its rhetorical purpose in the holistic text. Greenwell’s emphasis on “readerly experience” in her discussion of rhetorical reader guides (RRGs) adds a third element to our approach to genre analysis: describing how the paragraphs or sections “orchestrate a reader’s experience” of the text, primarily by setting up readers’ expectations (9). When combined with our discussion of IMRD and CARS, this segment provided consultants with concrete strategies for helping writers address the dynamic and shifting complexities of genres and ways to unfamiliar genres in STEM fields. We found approaching RGA in this way useful for consultants in two ways: 1) it can help them read scientific writers’ dense, often jargon-filled texts more quickly and with greater ease, and 2) it can be used as a teaching tool in consultations to help scientific writers develop awareness of rhetorical moves and better align their writing with audience expectations and genre conventions.
RGA in Practice: Intense Genre Exploration
In addition to introducing common genres and providing instruction on RGA, the training provided staff with opportunities to apply RGA in practice through three sessions of intense genre exploration. For two of the sessions, we allowed staff to choose common genres they would like to focus on. They chose to explore personal statements for medical residency and an article published in the journal Biostatistics. For the third session, we focused on the genre of clinical notes. Although our writing center has not seen many writers working on clinical notes, we are seeking ways to work more closely with the medical school. The clinical note is a genre all medical students engage with throughout their training, so it seemed like fruitful ground for building new relationships with medical faculty and students.
For the session employing RGA with personal statements for medical residency, staff looked at two anonymized personal statements that had been submitted for asynchronous feedback over the summer. The group decided one was much stronger than the other based on genre conventions and audience expectations. We deconstructed both statements and then, as a group, brainstormed how we might provide feedback to the writer who had submitted the weaker draft. This exercise was helpful for giving consultants concrete strategies for working with writers in this popular genre. The staff chose to review a biostatistics article to become more familiar with the quantitative research terminology and use of equations and symbols discussed in our quantitative research terminology session. The group worked through RGA of the text and spoke at length about the rhetorical function of numbers and symbols, as well as ways we might advise writers working on similar texts with confidence. This session helped staff understand why equations and numbers are important in technical fields, as well as ways they might still provide writers with helpful commentary even when they don’t quite grasp the mathematics at play in the text.
Our training concluded with an invited guest speaker, a second-year medical student who had previously worked as a writing consultant in our center. Because the speaker was uniquely positioned to understand both our mission as a center and possessed discipline-specific knowledge pertinent to the medical field, we asked her for an overview of some of the types of writing she has had to do in her medical program. Perhaps the most common genre of writing that medical students on our campus complete is the reports that they make when encountering patients, called clinical notes.
The clinical notes that medical students must complete orient them to the documentation practices that they must become proficient in as professionals. Under the guidance of a preceptor, students learn to write detailed reports containing several interconnected parts, including the patient’s name, chief complaint, past medical and surgical history, hospitalizations, assessment plan, and more. As our speaker explained, what medical students tend to struggle with most is writing the portion called the history of present illness (HPI), a concise narrative that details the patient’s current concerns. There is no standard format for the HPI—it can be written in paragraph form or in bullet points. Medical professionals tend to rely on the mnemonic OLDCARTS (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/alleviating factors, Radiation, Temporal, Severity) for gathering the information to be presented in the HPI. During the session, our speaker taught staff how medical students practice these clinical notes, what preceptors tend to want in terms of specificity and clarity, and what makes an effective clinical note in a professional setting.
Discipline-Specific Training and Faculty Support
Before we conclude, we want to address the value of providing discipline-specific training for consultants who work with faculty. The periods of intense genre exploration boosted staff confidence and helped them embrace their role as writing experts capable of working with advanced STEM writers, including faculty. In an undergraduate peer setting, students may be tempted to defer to the peer consultant as an authority, and the most prescient challenge may be tipping the balance of power back to the student. In consultations with advanced graduate students and faculty, however, the opposite dynamic is more likely: faculty may enter the relationship skeptical of the consultant’s expertise and ability to help, with the balance tipping unhelpfully to the writer’s side of the scale. The consultant needs to have a higher baseline of disciplinary writing expertise and be equipped with tools for making strategic moves to earn writers’ trust and establish the consultant’s authority as an expert to create a collaborative, mutually respectful dynamic. While STEM writers, many of whom are seeking prestigious grant awards or publication in highly-indexed journals, bring their own expertise and authority to sessions, they are simultaneously seeking expert advice on how to better communicate with audiences so they can achieve their purpose and articulate the significance of their work—and the stakes are high. For professional consultants, this means developing deep, nuanced rhetorical awareness of disciplinary audiences and generic conventions, as well as disciplinary ways of knowing and doing.
Meghan Velez argues that knowledge of STEM disciplines—not so much knowledge of the content of a field but rather a sophisticated understanding of how disciplinary texts function in “real world” applications—can make consultations with STEM writers more effective. It can also earn STEM writers’ trust and facilitate buy-in. Although her study focused on undergraduate writers and peer consultants, her findings have relevance for professional writing center staff who work with STEM writers:
In my observations, STEM writing tutors do leverage rhetorical knowledge in tutoring sessions, but they appear to do so as a means of connecting with students on a disciplinary level as much as to construct their own identities as writing instructors or experts. In other words, STEM writing tutors’ rhetorical knowledge does not exist as a separate domain from tutees’ disciplinary knowledge; instead, the two are intertwined. In writing consultations, STEM tutors engage in disciplinary socialization, drawing on and constructing co-relational identities with STEM writers that are based on their mutual experiences and participation in disciplinary communities. (56)
We do not expect our consultants to become STEM content experts, but we think that discipline-specific training can prepare professional staff to “leverage rhetorical knowledge” in ways that forge connections and “intertwine” disciplinary and rhetorical knowledge.
On the other end of the spectrum, while consultants must become adept at presenting themselves as writing experts while deferring to STEM writers’ content expertise, they may also need to be ready to recognize the writing expertise of these writers. As Lisa Emerson points out in her book The Forgotten Tribe: Scientists as Writers, faculty in STEM can be “among the most sophisticated and flexible writers in the academy...and since their writing is most often collaborative and multidisciplinary, their practices may be more socially complex” (8). Despite this sophistication and expertise, Emerson argues that humanities disciplines have not recognized STEM faculty as writing experts. Keeping this in mind, we hope our training helps consultants become more aware of the different types of writing expertise both parties bring to sessions: the consultant brings writing expertise, and the writer brings disciplinary content knowledge. Sometimes, the professional consultant may be the primary expert in writing and rhetorical knowledge, but not always. STEM writers may also bring quite a bit of writing expertise to sessions. Balancing expertise with a sense of mutual appreciation is essential for productive sessions. Professional consultants who do not have background in STEM fields should, of course, not aim to become masters of these disciplines in the way their writers are; despite this, they can devote time to RGA and research on disciplinary practices to connect with writers and assist them as they navigate disciplinary communities.
Conclusion
At the end of our workshop, we concluded with a freewriting activity and discussion answering two questions: 1) What was most useful from the sessions? and 2) What do you still want to learn more about? To the first question, our professional staff and graduate consultants reported that this intensive, two-day session prepared them with some helpful resources for meeting the needs of the diverse writers they work with in STEM fields. Staff reported in the final, informal discussion of the day that the segments on the features of science writing, the CARS model, and the strategies for reading papers were the most useful parts of the training session. Attendees shared that seeing examples of common genres and learning how to use RGA to prepare for and conduct sessions made them feel better prepared for consultations with STEM writers; it also made them feel more confident going into these appointments. Overall, exposure to common genres and specific information about scientific style seem critical for helping consultants develop expertise that they need to consult confidently with STEM writers, whether graduate students or faculty.
There is, of course, always room for improvement, and we aim to revise this session in the future so that we can strengthen it for incoming staff and graduate students. A general criticism that we received from attendees was that they wanted more interactive sessions throughout the two-day period, which occasionally skewed more lecture-heavy than the directors initially planned. For instance, when we asked our attendees for feedback on the principles of scientific style session, they noted it was the most helpful session overall but would have been improved if they had had a full session’s worth of time after the content-heavy portion to practice on sample papers and through role play. Similarly, during the sections on rhetorical reading and genre analysis, attendees wished there had been more time in the training to review and analyze model texts. We plan to include more time for RGA as well as increase the number of interactive application sessions in future iterations of our training. Given the amount of material covered, we also may consider expanding to a third day. To measure professional consultants’ learning more accurately, we would also add a more formal feedback mechanism to the final day.
The feedback our attendees shared is helpful to the directors as we redesign this training later. We have also been able to use attendees’ feedback to build some of this activity into our ongoing professional development meetings throughout the year. We hope that these insights offer writing centers at STEM-focused institutions—particularly where non-faculty staff work with faculty writers—ideas for navigating their sometimes-difficult roles as expert outsiders. Certainly, our local context affected the genres that we emphasized, but as disciplines become increasingly atomized and disciplinary conventions become more specific, writing consultants need strategies for quickly acquiring knowledge of discipline-specific writing expectations. However, given the often-reported skepticism toward professional staff’s competencies and suitability to assist with writing in STEM genres, any STEM writing training also needs to acknowledge the power dynamics at play. More research is needed about how to help professional writing consultants negotiate the difficulties that can arise from trying to create a climate of mutual respect with faculty, particularly faculty outside of their disciplines, but the authors hope that this article might serve as a starting point for that conversation.
Notes
For brevity, we use the acronym “STEM” throughout the rest of the article to encompass all three of these areas.
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Appendix:
Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence STEM Training Schedule
