2025 Theses Doctoral

Fostering Voice in Writing Conferences: A Conversation Analytic Study of Consultant Practices

Frantz, Kelly Katherine

Writing consultants must manage a delicate balance: upholding a writer’s voice while helping them shape it to genre expectations and academic language standards. Neither writing center theory and pedagogy nor research on consultant-writer interactions has explored how they achieve this balance. The current study addresses this gap.

Through a conversation analysis of writing consultations led by experienced consultants, this study explores how consultants encourage the development of writer voice while, simultaneously, helping writers adhere to academic discourse expectations. Data come from 29 hours of video-recorded one-on-one writing consultations at a graduate writing center. Participants include 7 peer consultants and 28 graduate student writers. Data were transcribed and analyzed following conversation analytic (CA) conventions. Findings revealed three primary consultant strategies for fostering voice: invoking the reader, prioritizing writer meaning, and encouraging writer-directed solutions. To invoke the reader, consultants embody and voice the reader experience to locate problems and initiate revision sequences. To prioritize writer meaning, consultants elicit writer explanations of the text and verify their own understandings of the text. To encourage writer directed solutions, consultants preserve writer language, provide flexible solutions, and provide incremental solutions.

Through detailed analysis of consultant-writer interactions, this study specifies the interactional competencies of writing consultations and reconceptualizes the concept of voice across disciplines. It offers practical strategies for writing tutors and educators concerned with fostering writer voice.