{"id":13655,"date":"2022-10-04T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-04T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=13655"},"modified":"2025-01-30T14:43:17","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T20:43:17","slug":"show-your-workflow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/show-your-workflow\/","title":{"rendered":"Show Your Work(flow)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Joseph Franklin, New York City College of Technology<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am writing this at a bamboo table and simple folding chair combo. I am using Microsoft Word on a Mac laptop mounted on a Roost laptop stand and using a Logitech ERGO K860 keyboard that supports my wrists. I am playing instrumental music by Grandbrothers through Sennheiser PXC 550 noise canceling headphones, and I have notifications turned off on all devices. These tools (and others) have been curated to suit my preferences, my body, my budget, and my writing life. It took time to find them: time which I wish I\u2019d dedicated earlier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much better does your text become if you have the right chair to work in? A desk at the right height? Good noise canceling headphones and the right study playlist? Citation management software like Zotero or a tab manager like Toby? If you color code your notes or use the right layout on a physical planner? If you commence or quit caffeine? If you have green space you can visit or functioning air conditioning? If your pet is there with you? The impact on a text of these various tools is not known but it is also not nothing, nor is it insignificant. But are we talking about these tools enough in our writing center work? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Joesph\u2019s desk with laptop, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, sticky notes, water bottle, pen, and a left-hand-friendly notebook<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By making space to talk about tools with writers in our work, we\u2019re giving voice to embodied and material forms of knowledge in a meaningful way. In the last thirty years or so, the emergence of digital writing shaped conversations around equitable access to literacies and tools (King; Shipka; Zeni). More recently, the pandemic has writing center folks deeply re-examining the tools we use to facilitate our interactions with writers (Mayo). Not talking about tools in our work with writers means that there is much less of a detailed trail weaving back from a strong final draft to the actual places where we start. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing Workflows<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My usage of the term \u201cworkflow\u201d in conversations about academic writing comes from Tim Lockridge and Derek Van Ittersum\u2019s 2020 book Writing Workflows: Beyond Word Processing<\/em>. This book encourages us to dig deeper into articulating the \u201coften omitted tools, material conditions, and activities of writing.\u201d Their claim is that while the shift from focusing on writing products to writing processes has given more awareness toward individualized composing, \u201cwe don\u2019t regard our personal mediated preferences and practices as a shareable form of knowledge beyond the individual narrative.\u201d What that means is that we\u2019re not talking enough, or in enough detail, about what we actually do when we write\u2014perhaps because we assume it is only useful to us. In our classrooms and writing centers, we\u2019re leaving out much information about the devices and spaces that collaborate in our writing. Those are the often omitted tools. <\/p>\n\n\n

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\"What<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There are usages of the term \u201cworkflow\u201d that are entwined with discourses on productivity, efficiency, and marketing new products. Such a sense of workflow as something to be mastered, fixed, and commodified is not the discourse in which Lockridge and Van Ittersum locate their work. Instead, they highlight workflow as a path for exploration. By taking on \u201cworkflow thinking\u201d and breaking \u201cany particular task into a series of smaller steps,\u201d writers can then search for the tools and practices that might<\/em> improve their work rather than stick with ones that hinder them. I think it is this sense of critical exploration that should inform how we bring workflows into the writing center; first in tutor training, then in sessions with writers, and lastly in our materials. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bringing Workflows to the Center<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To bring workflows to the writing center, let\u2019s begin in the beginning: tutor training. And what better way than to make some stuff? I encourage writing centers to ask tutors to compose a multimodal workflow map. <\/strong>According to Lockridge and Van Ittersum, a \u201cworkflow map\u201d is basically a series of audio\/visual depictions of what one uses to do work. This map can include images (for example, of a planner or the PDF with highlights or a (humble) screen recording like I made below that depicts reading and taking notes on an important article):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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