The Feared Classroom Workshop
The most feared task of writing consultants: the classroom presentation. Perhaps it is the boredom expressed in every student’s face when you pull up a presentation on editing. It could also be the blank stares you receive when you ask for feedback on which form of punctuation is better. Either way, classroom presentations are one of the most challenging aspects of working as a writing consultant. It doesn’t help that the presentations can usually be characterized as the following: boring, long, and containing grammatical terms that even you have never seen. After performing a series of less-than-exciting workshops, I (along with another tutor) was assigned the daunting task of revamping our writing center’s entire collection of classroom workshops. This ranged from grammar to editing to correspondence. It was not an easy task: the layouts had to be exciting enough to interest students yet professional enough that people would take us seriously. There needed to be visuals and pictu...