Building Expertise: The Toolkit in UCLA's Graduate Writing Center

Abstract

This study of UCLA’s Graduate Writing Center (GWC) analyzes the strategies that allow consultants to adapt to the discipline-specific, technical documents that graduate writers bring to the center. The author’s observations of new-consultant training and interviews with new and experienced consultants illuminate the tensions between expertise and insecurity—the feeling that accompanies a real or perceived lack of expertise—among graduate students and consultants. Because of the expectations of content, genre, and disciplinary knowledge at the graduate level, the GWC provides a rich site for studying the role of expertise in writing consultations and considering the role of expertise-building in new consultant training. The findings focus on what the author calls “expertise-based tools.” These tools blend both conventional strategies, such as modeling and managing expectations, with potentially unconventional strategies, such as masking one’s own expertise or even relying on past experiences reading science fiction. Consultants employ these strategies to address the complicated relationships between expertise and inexperience at the heart of graduate students’ roles as writers and new members of academic communities. The article concludes with a discussion of consultant training how GWCs can position themselves as safe spaces for graduate students to build expertise and rehearse their roles as experts.