Ryan Fallert
To get around our online space, forced upon us by COVID-19, we have gotten used to Zoom with a capital Z. We video chat using this service, and have gotten used to the routine of camera-on, unmute self, share screen, reshare screen to enable audio: Zoom. Even when we aren’t using Zoom, the brand has been lexicalized as the generic verb for video chatting. Where Skype used to be the verb of choice, Zoom has filled that space. Using such a service as WCOnline is still an act of zooming with a lowercase z, insofar as we are video chatting. Therefore, our practices are modified and perhaps commodified by that process. We are seen, if at all, through the lens of lexicalized copyright, and that tints any understanding of our purpose in the writing center. And students don’t even have to use their zooming video capacity. They can instead just type, communicating sometimes in a conversational tone, and sometimes in the tone of someone frustrated. They are frustrated by another moment of online communication wearing them down, frustrated by having to speak to yet another member of academia who tries to help them, frustrated by having to interact with another agent of the institution. Without the physical space of the writing center to welcome students with ideas of peerness, cooperation, humanization, and collaboration fundamentally built into the concrete blocks which manifest the structure of that space, perceptions of our objectives and abilities to help are slowly losing form. We are now corporate. Unseen. Disconnected. We need to practice pedagogy more actively and more intentionally to face these online challenges.
Institutional editing is not what we do, and it’s not what we’ve ever done. But I consciously feel that we are seen this way the longer we stay in this online space. Redirecting the conversation from editing to learning is easy in person, but comes with the heavy weight of “no” online. Empathy is harder to convey, and sometimes harder to even feel. Benefits for the writer becomes service for the writing. So how do we possibly counteract Zoom fatigue, online frustrations, and the changing perceptions of our space in front of us?
Ramp everything up to 11. Now, that’s perhaps a silly way to phrase this when we’re talking about the systematic misperception of our work, but I mean what I say! If emotion and empathy are difficult to convey, then we need to make our intentions explicit. We can express praise *explicitly* at meaningful opportunities. What might usually seem like overdoing it may feel like sincerity as our message passes through the tangled web of wires which outputs a blurry and bit crushed audio/video signal. As Marcia Toms describes, “Giving students insufficient praise might prevent them from reaching their full potential as confident writers” (qtd. in Thurman). Heather Thurman continues, “Likewise, inauthentic and vague praise can lead to ineffectual revisions.” Therefore, we need to make our positive reinforcements explicit when in an environment which is so actively wearing all participants down and which confuses and loses some meaning of communication.
We can show active listening by overacting our nonverbal communication, such as by being clearly seen nodding while a student speaks. As Sarah Choi indicates in her blog post “Faces in the Writing Center: Microexpressions as a Source of Information,” “What many do not realize is that the face is a rich source of information and a key component of day-to-day communication, whether the interaction be in person, through a video call, or even through a photo—the presence of the face itself (and naturally, the expressions on the face) is what makes voice calls ‘feel’ different from video calls.” Despite the different environment, facial expressions still present a wealth of information to a partner in communication, and making those expressions and actions clear can only benefit the communicative process.
And for text-only communication, we need to emote differently. Do not be afraid to liberally use exclamation marks, and to use some colloquialisms, and to use some common abbreviations and acronyms like ‘btw’ and ‘lol’! The tutee cannot tell that you are laughing out loud, so tell them! Even if you aren’t, lol and acronyms like it act as our nonverbal communication; they fill the space that is normally taken by facial expressions and tone of voice and body language. According to research done by Michelle McSweeney, a professor at Pratt Institute and the CUNY graduate center, “‘lol’ only occurs… [when] the literal meaning of the message and the intended function (illocutionary act) are not directly aligned.” When we say what we mean, a student understands, but when we speak indirectly without using these colloquialisms, for the purposes of politeness or humor or empathy, that student will not understand the nuances of what we are saying! So don’t be afraid to use some ‘lol’s and some ‘lmao’s to bridge the emotive and empathetic gap.
We need to overdo emotion to show baseline emotion. We need to overdo compassion to show baseline compassion. We need to overdo everything to reinvigorate our sessions and to humanize our virtual space as one of peerness and care, not one of commodity, institution, and detachment. Working in an online space is not working in a shared physical space, so we need to change our practices to suit the environment. We also need to adapt to different styles of learning to best help students. These strategies are the most effective I have found for counteracting the perceptions of the writing center as somehow corporate, and somehow lacking in empathy. So ramp your sessions up to 11, and recreate peerness today!
Works Cited
Choi, Sarah. “Faces in the Writing Center: Microexpressions as a Source of Information.” FLOW, 25 March 2021, https://hofstrawritingcenterblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/faces-in-the-writing-center-microexpressions-as-a-source-of-information/. Accessed 29 March 2021.
McSweeney, Michelle. “lol i didn’t mean it! Lol as a Marker of Illocutionary Force.” http://michelleamcsweeney.com/lol_mcsweeney.pdf. Accessed 29 March 2021.
Sturman, Heather. “The Importance of Positive Reinforcement.” Praxis, 29 July 2020, http://www.praxisuwc.com/praxis-blog/2020/7/14/the-importance-of-positive-reinforcement?rq=praise. Accessed 29 March 2021.
About the Author
Ryan Fallert is an undergraduate Junior studying at Hofstra University. His majors are Linguistics, and Rhetoric and Public Advocacy, and he has worked at the Hofstra University Writing Center as a tutor for two years. He is currently assisting with a research project related to Writing Center Studies, and is in the process of beginning his Senior thesis, which will incorporate research practices and theory from all three of his academic areas of interest.