Today Trixie led our WRA 395 class. After some class discussion, we were broken into two groups to collaboratively write a letter to one of two authors whose work we had read for class. In our group we started talking about the importance of being able to read the client and how to interact with them. This came about from discussing Carol Severino's "Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands." In her section "Contact Dialects" in which she discusses how to speak to certain students, such as using youth expressions for younger clients, she uses the example, "Like your paper would be, like, really awesome, you know, if you, like, stuck in some cool quotes from some famous dudes." AHHH! I'm pretty sure I'd just slap the consultant who gave me that advice! Everything about it--from the multiple use of "like" to trying to show that the paper would be strengthed by quotes from "famous dudes"--makes me cringe! I feel as if that whole sentence is far too informal, even for the "hippest" client. It's one thing to not act like a pompous jerk using a large vocabulary to intimidate the clients and make them feel as if we're superior to them, but I think it's inappropriate to be that informal/annoying. This led to a discussion about how to judge how informal our language should be with a client. How embarrassing would it be to try to be all "cool" and informal only to find that the client is not amused and has a much higher vocabulary? Especially, if then you switch back to a more formal voice; then the client will just think you're a fake and not trust you. That's when Trixie stepped in and told us to just be ourselves, easy as that. And then she said that in order to judge the type of client we're working with, we should spend several minutes just talking to them about the paper, instead of just jumping right into reading the paper. I thought that this was great advice but I haven't seen it employed very much in any of the sessions I've been involved in. I think it's definitely a technique I'll try in my next co-consultation and see how it goes.