One of the most fascinating sessions I attended was “Author v. Audience: Whose Needs are we Addressing?”. Based on research by two undergraduates from Grand Valley State University, the session applied Linda Flower’s theory on reader-based and writer-based prose to writing consultant questioning strategies.

According to Flower, all writers start out writing for themselves—writer-based prose—and have to rewrite and mentally shift their audience in order to write well with their audience in mind, creating reader-based prose. This is a process that all writers must go through. I was familiar with Flower’s work because I read her article in Language Studies and Intro to Professional Writing, and I researched the educational theories behind her ideas in Educational Psychology.

Fisher and Worm, the two students running the session, renamed “writer-based prose” to “author-based prose” and “reader-based prose” to “audience-based prose.” They then divided these two ideas into four overall questioning categories typically used by writing consultants: author-based content, audience-based content, author-based form, and audience-based form.

After noting where every question at every session at their writing center fell on this spectrum, they found a few patterns. First, most consultants seemed to start out asking author-based content questions (What do you want to write about?) and then shifted into audience-based form questions or comments (You need a comma here.). Along with this general shift, consultants often started out with facilitative discussion questions before shifting into directive statements.

During the discussion that followed their presentation, we realized that, ideally, most consultations will go through all four-stages, starting with author-based content, then audience-based content, then author-based form, and finally audience-based form (forming a “Z” on the above chart). Shorter sessions often jump from start to finish due to limited time or resources.

By forcing consultants to think about their questioning processes, we are forcing ourselves to step back and analyze what our clients may lose by us only focusing on certain types of questioning strategies. The session allowed me to start asking my clients different types of questions and created a great discussion at our next Writing Consulting team meeting as well.