Conference Proposal

Over breakfast (and I'll admit, a good deal of gossip) this morning, Sandy and I discussed the upcoming PNWCA conference. Sandy and I are in a unique position here in Washington because we run writing centers on campuses where there aren't any lower division composition classes to keep our centers full. Since we work at branch campuses of CWU, all of our students are juniors, seniors, and graduate students (most having completed Associate's degrees elsewhere before transferring to CWU). We've been noticing that students who visit our centers have writing issues that are unlike those of students who are taking composition classes.

We're calling our presentation for the conference "Re-Developmental Writing: Rediscovering a Lost Art." This morning we hashed out the basics (enough to put together the proposal) and came up with a few metaphors and a simple structure that should make our proposed presentation a welcome addition to the conference program. We plan to talk about strategies for working with student writers who have advanced beyond basic composition courses and who are doing well in their academic programs, but who have forgotten some of the skills they learned in composition classes, and who therefore need to be reminded of these skills so that they can adapt them for use in their own disciplines. Since the theme for the conference is "Are we having fun yet?," we've come up with a format for the presentation that I think people will enjoy, but which I'm not going to spell out right now because the proposals aren't in yet, and I don't want anyone to steal our idea!