Hannah Hecht's Blog

I just realized that I can still do one more campus event journal, so here goes. Earlier in the semester, I went to the International Writing Centers Association conference in Orlando, Florida to present a project on our Morningside Writing Center’s collaboration with the local Sioux City high schools. While we were there, we attended a bunch of sessions educational and writing center theory that pretty much taught us how to better serve our clients. The most useful ones, for me, were a couple of sessions that were dedicated to teaching tutors how to better serve ESL (or ELL, or whatever the politically-correct term is) students. One of the sessions talked about how tutors and educators ought to view ESL students’ writing as “writing with an accent.” As long as it makes sense, we ought to make sure to spend more time on higher-order concerns such as organization and content rather than word-by-word construction. The presentation kind of reminded me of some of the stories that we read that were written by writers whose first language was not English. For example, Zitkala-Sa’s writing read with a bit of an “accent,” both because of her sentence construction and the content and metaphors that most Caucasian Americans would not have thought to come up with.