Presenters: Dr. Kimberly Becker, Dr. Sarah Huffman, and Kristin Terrill

KEYWORDS: technology, autonomy, self-editing 

Abstract: Technological tools have long afforded writing centers abilities that they would not have as solely brick-and-mortar institutions.  Nevertheless, the interdependence of technology and writing center support expanded exponentially when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. At the Center for Communication Excellence (CCE) in Iowa State University's (ISU's) Graduate College, staff and communication consultants responded accordingly with technological innovations. These state-of-the-art approaches not only supported the academic communication needs of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars but also contributed to the distribution of agency among students/postdocs, writing center professionals, and the targeted use of technology.

The Center for Communication Excellence (CCE) at Iowa State University (ISU) has a broad mission to support the academic communication needs of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars at ISU. The CCE provides individual consultations, seminars/workshops, boot camps, and peer review groups to the ISU community. This presentation will discuss a recently developed and piloted series of workshops that teach advanced writer attendees to apply technological tools to mitigate academic communication challenges and foster practices that encourage self-editing skills.  The three-part workshop series introduced and trained attendees on the use of the Research Writing Tutor (RWT: an automated writing evaluation tool), Grammarly Premium, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA: a linguistic database of eight genres). Each workshop establishes the interdependence of writing and technology as a practical approach for graduate students and postdocs to improve their writing before, during, and after communication consultations. The application of such technological tools allows writers to enhance decision-making authority (Caldwell, 2014) and promotes the distribution of agency among graduate students/postdocs, writing center professionals, and the use of technology. 

The RWT provides a global focus by individualizing automated feedback on research writing in a wide range of disciplines, enabling a deeper understanding and more independent use of genre conventions. Grammarly Premium affords users the ability to identify local errors, freeing up time in a consultation for a focus on content. Finally, the use of COCA employs both of Sardinha's (2016) categories of corpus-based approaches to language learning (phraseology- and register-centered). The workshop series explains the use of the tool for confirming feedback from Grammarly and for discerning formal and informal language use. 

Preliminary feedback from users of these technologies has shown that the tools allow writers to feel more capable of solving certain writing problems on their own. This in turn mediates the interactions between consultants and consultees and encourages accountability for the writing process. Overt instruction in the use of online support resources provides opportunities for academics to harness the power of data-driven strategies to enhance agency and demonstrates the symbiotic interdependence of writers, tutors, and technology.

References:

Caldwell, K. (2014). Dyadic interviewing: a technique valuing interdependence in interviews with individuals with intellectual disabilities. Qualitative Research, 14(4), 488–507.

Sardinha, T. B. (2016). Corpus-based teaching in LSP. In E. Martin-Monje, I. Elorza, & B. G. Riaza (Eds.), Technology-enhanced language learning for specialized domains: Practical applications and mobility (pp. 203-215). New York, NY: Routledge.