Shadowing #2

This week I had a pretty interesting shadowing experience. My consultant had an older client, a middle aged woman who is a student in the law school. I was pretty surprised to see her at first, I know that we help older people but I never thought that it happened on a regular/normal basis. When I realised that she was indeed at the Writing Centre for help, I was intrigued about how the session would play out.

For one, I found the content of the lady's paper interesting. She was writing a fictional letter to someone (I suppose the lawyer for the opposition) about a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, and she was on the side of the company that did the firing. Through the course of the conversation I gained some insight into the world of human resources and employment policy. This made me think about the things that we as consultants can learn from the people who come to see us. Beyond just theoretical considerations about writing and what a good paper looks like, we have the opportunity to delve into fields that we might not have otherwise. I know we talked about this a few weeks ago, but that was in terms of whether or not we are qualified to assist these writers, a point which I will evaluate later. I think it's cool that we can glimpse into other disciplines, even if all we get is a snippet of (potentially biased) information. Philosophy, law, religion, biology...the list goes on. This might sound kind of strange but I'm excited to have that kind of opportunity, there are plenty of valuable, or at least thought-provoking, things that we could read.

Regarding whether or not I think the consultant was qualified, I did notice some difficulties at times. However, these were minor if you consider the help she was able to give. The problems were mainly about technicalities, the consultant was confused a few times about the proper layout for the letter and some of the legal phrasing. I don't think these are enough for me to say that we shouldn't work across disciplines though; she was still able to work on clarity, expression and persuasiveness.

As a final note, the consultant showed the same amount of respect and courtesy to this older student than the one I observed her with last week, although perhaps she was a bit more suggestive rather than directive with her comments. I also thought it really interesting that they both had pens and wrote on the paper.