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Context

    In addition to participating in the larger study at Elon titled Rhetorical Training for Writing Beyond the University, I hoped to do more focused Writing-Center-based research in order to fulfill my required research credits for my PWR major as well as furthering the interests that I was developing in my on-campus job. These ideas combined well because of the 130 total respondents to the Rhetorical Training survey, 40 identified themselves as Writing Center consultant alumni. This significant portion of the data set provided the perfect niche for me to find more data on the Writing Center and attempt to answer my question of how my work there would impact my personal and professional writing after college.

    After re-coding and analyzing this data throughout the fall of 2020 under the guidance of my research mentor and Writing Center supervisor, Dr. Julia Bleakney, I sent applications to three spring 2021 conferences--TutorCon sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Writing Center Association, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and Elon’s Spring Undergraduate Research Forum (SURF)--and was accepted to the poster sessions for all of them. The conferences were all held online in various formats due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I used the same poster for all three conferences and adapted my presentation style based on the format of each one.

Rhetorical Decisions

    When designing my poster, I looked at past student submissions for CCCC and SURF, which led me to a three-column layout for ease of reading and discussion. I used a relatively standard format for ordering elements of research on the poster: introduction first, then a brief literature review (not as important in a 5-minute poster presentation as in an article), then methods, quantitative and qualitative data, conclusions, and finally references. I chose the unique purple gradient background to make the poster memorable but not overly distracting, and I used the green and pink elements (which complemented the purple nicely) to link ideas in the qualitative and quantitative data. For the quantitative findings, I contrasted an expected demographic element (gender being overwhelmingly female) with an unexpected one (year of graduation going back nearly ten years). I chose the center graph to show that most respondents had multiple campus writing experiences that worked with their Writing Center work to shape how they write after graduation and put the last two graphs about types of writing composed side-by-side to show the variety of writing that alumni were doing. On the qualitative side, I picked the quotes that I thought best exemplified respondents’ wide range of benefits that they said they received from Writing Center work and used the most enthusiastic quote--“Always read those emails aloud, y’all! Thanks, Writing Center!”--for the title of the poster. That quote also became a talking point in Q&A sessions because the respondent who wrote it stated that they were a graduate student in mathematics, in contrast to the many respondents who worked in English- and communications-related professions.

Reflection

    Despite some of the challenges that came with online presentations, such as figuring out different types of technology and reformatting my discussion for each session, my poster worked well for all three conferences. I was able to talk about each element easily and received many positive comments and insightful questions from students and academic professionals from all over the United States. My poster also comes up fairly quickly on Google when someone searches my name, which will hopefully be a positive for future employers.