My high school Jazz band director is one of my favorite people. A stereotypical dad if there ever was one, many of his passions are related to music, fish puns, and unusual metaphors. One of his more prolific metaphors is his self-made role of the “Jazz Sherpa.”
The idea is that in any one of his Jazz ensembles he can guide and support its musicians, but he can never perform in place of them, much like a Sherpa can never climb a mountain in place of someone else. This is a bit of a fun idea so I thought it might be interesting to think about our roles as Writing Center consultants in a similar way. Here are some ways that we’re also (Jazz?) Sherpas:
1. We can't climb mountains for writers
The temptation for consultants to take on the heavy burden of rewording vast swaths of text is present in many conferences. We are compassionate people; it seems only natural for us to help another by doing the hard work ourselves. Despite this innate desire we have to seize a writer’s work and polish it off the way we think it should be, we must remember that we cannot climb mountains for our clients. Not even the best Sherpa can climb a mountain for you. Climbing a mountain, like writing a paper, is a task that requires the help and guidance of others, but is ultimately a personal responsibility. To that end, we should remind ourselves frequently that we serve writers, while writers serve their writing.
2. Each writer faces unique challenges
If I went to climb Everest today and my Sherpa gave me a pack that weighed half as much as I did, I would not make it to the top (I wouldn’t make it to the top regardless of the pack, but). I have the upper body strength of a seven-year-old, and while plenty of people could probably handle that pack, I certainly could not. A good Sherpa wouldn’t let me take more weight than I could realistically handle.
The point: different writers will need to be challenged in different ways. It’s easy to look solely at grammar and uncomfortable wordings in every paper. It’s easy to look solely at the organization of a paper and read through it quickly before sending a writer off. The reality though is that writers will struggle differently, and a one-size fits all approach to conferences doesn’t serve writers well. We know to focus on the higher-order concerns related to the organization and reasoning present in a paper, what we refer to at the Coe Writing Center as “big rocks.” When it seems like a writer has these big rocks taken care of though, it’s okay to challenge them with some of the smaller concerns too.
3. It's our responsibility to prepare the way
First and foremost, the Sherpa’s job is to give climbers the perspective and support they need to reach the summit. If a Sherpa gives me twenty different routes to take, I’ll probably end up getting lost because I wasn’t quite sure which way to go. Sometimes it is easy to overwhelm writers with dozens of suggestions until ironically, they might be even more confused about where to go next with their papers.
It might be better to focus on just a few major points throughout a conference that writers can evaluate for themselves and use to develop their own work. Write the big ideas down for a client, or better yet, try to get them to write down their biggest takeaways. We cannot climb the mountains for writers, but preparing the way for them to climb the mountain themselves is at the heart of what we should do every conference.
Perhaps the title of “(Jazz?) Sherpa” has a slightly more heroic appeal than the bland “consultant.” Regardless, hopefully the image of consultants helping guide writers up mountains of words, fuelled by Jolly Ranchers and hot chocolate is an image that will let us see what we do from a fresh perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment