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Context

     As a PWR major, I was required to do at least two credits of undergraduate research in some area of writing. But once started working at Elon’s Writing Center in the spring of 2019, I knew that I wanted to incorporate writing center work into my research. In particular, I always had in the back of my mind the question of what benefits my Writing Center work would have on my personal and professional writing after college. These interests became realized when in the summer of 2019, the Writing Center director (Dr. Julia Bleakney) invited me to be part of a long-term research project with her, three other professors, and two other students called Rhetorical Training for Writing Beyond the University.

     The study began with sending out a survey in Fall 2019 to Elon students and alumni who had any connection to writing during their time in college--majors, minors, campus employment, student organizations, internships, etc. Based on when each student on the team was completing their research credits, I was not as involved in the creation of the survey as the others--I worked more on coding the data set for themes with the team the next semester. We analyzed the data in smaller groups and reported our findings in a way that we could pull together an article about the study as a team (although I was the only student who continued with the project long enough to work on the article). The article will soon be published in the Fall 2021 issue of Composition Forum.

Rhetorical Decisions

     In the analysis phase, I worked mostly with Dr. Bleakney on the data concerning student/alumni writing processes and feedback/collaboration because those aspects were most related to Writing Center work. We wanted to present both the quantitative and qualitative data from the survey in order to encompass the highly varied types of questions and responses we received, so we used tables and charts to show the number of respondents that mentioned different steps or techniques in the writing process while also adding in block quotes for a more nuanced look at the processes and the value of each technique mentioned.

    Aside from these choices, I had very little control over the rhetorical decisions made in the article. Because the research team was so large, we split up elements of the work and discussed the placement of graphs and organization all together. We had to follow a format that the journal would accept as well. Being the only student on the team at the time also put me in a position where making decisions about the article’s content and layout was difficult because I had much less experience in academic writing than the professors. However, my student perspective allowed me to be more involved in the revision process because I could give input on how to make the article understandable for a wider academic audience in addition to my MLA citation expertise from the Writing Center.

Reflection

    Having my name on a formal research article as an undergraduate is an honor and an accomplishment that I could never have predicted when I started college. The research experience taught me how to collaborate on a much longer piece of writing than I have ever written with a group before and showed me that having less experience does not mean that my perspective is invalid--in reality, the rest of the team valued my input as a student. I was also able to take the data from the survey one step further by focusing on the data from the 40 Writing Center alumni respondents (out of a total 130) and preparing conference presentations on that section of the study which interested me the most.