Is There a Person in This Text? Synchronous Online Writing Instruction and Personhood as a Collaborative Gesture (2011)

Keywords

Synchronous, Website, Online persona, Technology

First Paragraph

When writers come through the doors of the Main Writing Center (WC) at UW-Madison, it’s worth considering how we instructors can process many bits of information about them. Before we meet, we’ve typically reviewed instructor records to prepare us for the session in the here and now. When we meet the writers, we then notice how they appear to us as persons. We observe their faces as they register the activity at the WC. We sometimes find them hunched over a laptop computer while they sit and shift, perhaps lost in thought over a personal statement or literature paper. The point—and during such encounters our senses are processing much data—concerns how instructors, via their amazing powers of observation, can process a world of information about the people who have come to work on their writing, in an effort to help them more completely with their writing.

Citation Information

Type of Publication: Blog Post

Author: Christopher Syrnyk

Year of Publication: 2011

Title:Is There a Person in This Text? Synchronous Online Writing Instruction and Personhood as a Collaborative Gesture

Publication: Another Word