Quoting the Academe in Writing Conference Explanations

Writing conferences are rich pedagogical settings to explore explanations. In contrast to teachers, writing consultants are usually peer tutors, straddling the roles of instructor and fellow student (North, 1984). This creates a unique situation where consultant-writer dyads must interactionally manage questions of expertise and authority (Carino, 2003). One way consultants manage this is through intertextuality, or the voicing of others. When consultants explain writing concepts, they often juggle many voices, from those of professors to authors to the writers’ own texts. Of particular interest in the present paper is the voice of the academe. A main institutional goal of writing conferences is to help students improve their academic writing; therefore, at various points in the conferences, consultants explain the norms, language, and expectations of the target academic discourse community. While this intertextual nature of writing conferences has not yet been explored, we can expect that in order to help writers learn the target “speech genre” (Bakhtin, 1981) of the academe, consultants must inevitably connect their current explanations to prior discourse. In some ways, consultants act as information conduits, helping writers understand what is expected of them by professors or other readers of their work.