madison zuñiga – Sculpting words

Four recently published articles offer unique insight into how work in the writing center extends beyond traditional support for academic essays. During my years as a writing consultant, I’ve always been most interested in the alternative perspectives and strategies that can be applied within the writing center environment.

1. Erin O’Day’s Multimodal expertise training for writing center tutors

O’Day’s thesis offers practical methodology for writing center consultants to support multimedia messaging, and identifies principles of design for four common mediums: visual, audio, video, and web-design. I find this research valuable for writing centers to have access to, as I believe such training would benefit both the writers seeking multimedia support and the consultants themselves.

O’Day notes how, in our digital age, multimedia literacy is increasingly valued and even required for long-term career and academic success. If writing centers are able to offer competent support for posters, slideshows, websites, then they could be aiding students with the development of far-transfer skills that are exponentially relevant. The training required to prepare consultants for “multimodal expertise” might be intensive, but if strategically implemented across semesters and school years, I can imagine it being a light and temporary burden that offers substantial, long-term value to the consultant. 

For example, the Concordia Irvine Writing Studio enacted an e-portfolio assignment over the course of the 24’25’ academic year. Consultants were expected to create an online presence via website or portfolio that compiled their achievements and goals. This was intended as a professional development opportunity, but I’ve found it to be additionally instructive in basic website interface and design, knowledge which I can apply to multimedia projects which I encounter in the writing center. 

The relevance of O’Day’s work lies in the willingness of writing centers to accommodate multimedia assignments, and in the quality of the multimodal training they receive. I firmly believe that such training can be accomplished with minimal difficulty, and with the incentive of interest, variety, and professional development. Though I may be biased as someone who studied art, I also believe that training in appealing and effective design is intrinsic to good communication, and is thus linked closely to the work already accomplished in the writing center.  

As an aside, I would also want to see O’Day’s work in multimedia curricula for writing centers extended to contemporary research on artificial intelligence, as developments in AI have major implications for all multimodal work.

O’Day, E. E. A. (2021). Multimodal expertise training for writing center tutors. English Department Theses. Paper 28. http://hdl.handle.net/10950/3835.