By Amanda Gallogly & Carrie Aldrich
Nearly three years ago, Amanda walked through the Collaborative Writing Consultancy door for the first time. Though she had been supporting writers in a professional capacity for over a decade, she had never sought similar help for herself. With a draft that was feeling like three papers tangled into one, it was time for a fresh pair of eyes. On the other side of that door was Carrie. She was an experienced writing center tutor, but wasn’t used to tutoring native English speaking graduate students. As a first year doctoral student just starting to take on the identity of a literacy researcher, she was excited to talk with a peer about shared methodological and theoretical interests, but she wasn’t sure she could help Amanda, who was further along in their program.
The session was productive for both of us. Several commonalities led to almost instant rapport: the experience of giving birth overseas (Amanda in Chile and Carrie in Saudi Arabia); the sleepless intersection of doctoral studies and parenthood; and our own insecurities as academic writers. Even more valuable than the ideas Amanda took away for her paper was a connection that continues to grow on personal, professional, and academic fronts. Until last year, neither of us had ever co-written anything. Today, we’re working together to collect data on an IRB-approved study of graduate student peer writing support, more committed than ever to the idea that, together, we can produce stronger work than we can alone.
| Carrie writes: Amanda has the amazing ability to move forward without editing. She writes by throwing as much at the screen as she can, including multiple word choices when she can’t decide. At the moment, she was working out an important idea, and expanding the draft in multiple directions at once. My brain was too tired to do any real thinking, so I tidied up her sentences. Later, she messaged me: “I love what you did with this sentence!” All I had done was correct typos and make word choices. She moved our idea forward, but needed a collaborator to do so. I try to imagine Bakhtin’s response: He’d shrug and say, “The word is half someone else’s.” | Amanda writes: Carrie can pick through the brain soup that I throw at the screen and see meanings I can’t yet see for myself. When I’m lost in a tangle of ideas, in love with superfluous phrases, and in danger of spiraling off into too many directions at once, she reins the narrative in and gets things back on track. A couple of weeks ago, something unexpected happened: Carrie wrote a sprawling first draft, filled with intellectual flights of fancy, and I created the outline. Writing is frequently a solitary endeavor, but it can be dialogic as well; the deep sharing of both product and process that our collaboration facilitates has allowed us to model for one another as we grow into our writerly selves. |
Amanda and Carrie are both doctoral students in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at the University of Iowa and graduate assistants at the Collaborative Writing Consultancy, a peer writing support service designed specifically for College of Education graduate students. Amanda also tutors at the University of Iowa Main Writing Center and at the Iowa City public library. Carrie teaches in the College of Education and is developing a peer writing group for College of Education graduate students. They share obsessions with foreign travel, poststructuralist theories, and fuzzy animals.