I started my labors for Molly Voorheis (writing this piece), by simply asking fellow consultants what they do; I started inductively and avoided asking them to tell me about "working with learning disabled students" or "putting a student at ease," for example. I wanted to hear about how they actually practice their job and how they could imagine practicing it.

The results surprised me. I got a lot of responses from consultants which were careful, intelligent, and scrupulous, but few of them dealt abstractly with consultant activities. There were many "common sense" observations and descriptions but little "theory." I wondered why this was the case (though I knew full well that the to-the-point responses might just be a result of not having a lot of time). Still, I wondered why it was difficult to theorize about consulting, and if this difficulty could shed light on our job.

And I think it can. What seems at first just a gap is actually very descriptive. To understand the complexity of what we do we have to reconsider "common sense," a term which explains what much of our consulting work is based on. I have heard the term used as if it were opposed to thinking or analysis, but such an opposition, while handy, is inaccurate. What we know comes from practice and this experience of consulting, along with the stories we tell of it and our memories of it, becomes our common sense. That is, our knowledges are often the accumulation and consideration of a great many specifics. We were not trained to be consultants in some "official" and "correct" fashion. We have no textbooks nor terribly intricate jargon. What we know comes from attending to how students sigh and shift in their chair; how they write and don't write; how they articulate their predicament and misperceive, and on. We learn from repeating back to the student what we have heard him or her say, and from listening to the kinds of questions the student can ask. In a sense all of our expertise is experiential, practical--it arises from and is articulated through examples. Our ways of knowing are as hands-on as can be; we learn about consulting from the activity of consulting as we attempt to become proficient at this skill.

Our job is dense, very active and interpretative, but it is hard to talk about it "theoretically," partly because it is impossible to predict the decisions one makes in any consulting session. Unpredictability is a symptom of consulting's complexity as an interpretative act--as any consultant knows we are "reading" at several different levels simultaneously. Even the level at which we approach the student's work, as Leslie Loeffel noted in her response to my questionnaire, is in itself a variable which demands a great deal of attention from us. This unpredictability is a side effect of complexity. I could imagine a researcher trying to draw an excruciatingly elaborate flow-chart about the sorts of decisions one must make when consulting which would ostensibly "explain" what we do--though I think most consultants would resist that sort of reductive move, partly because we are often not just trying to "solve" the problems of the text or the consulting session: we ourselves are exploring, posing problems for the student and for ourselves. Such a model, though appealingly graphic, would have to avoid the complexity we feel is central to what we do. Moving in rigid sequence from one necessary step to another usually works when repairing a car, but it would not work for consulting, nor is that approach what we wish to convey to students about writing.

An example of this complexity is found in our most familiar activity: consulting with students one-on-one. In this situation, as JoEllen Kwiatek pointed out, students often carry the tacit assumption that we should be dealing with pure written product, not process. We come up against expectations that encourage us to just "fix" the piece of writing, as if we were vets who were paid to take a document, clip its ears and dock its tail, and thus produce a more conventional appearance. Compositionist Patricia Bizzell refers to this old attitude--one many of our students still carry with them--as the assumption that writing is different from thinking. All a teacher can and should do, the assumption dictates, is put the expression of thought in the right order, since the thinking is assumed to exist in a whole and coherent form somewhere "in the head," apart from the text. This is a misperception, of course, since writing is the act of composing meaning. But our task, because of this assumption, is therefore dual: to ask students to pay attention to their unspoken assumptions about what writing is, and to make some very fast (thirty minutes!) concrete suggestions about the piece. And we have to do all this in a manner which will allow the student to focus on her writing, not the consultant's "corrections." I guess it's not surprising that I found our first response is not to theorize about our work but to describe how we engage in it.

Often consulting is a process whereby we try to construct an image of what could be done with the student and her text, or, as JoAnn Cooke suggested, the goal is to present the student with a "menu" of possible responses, not to define The Correct Response (again, students often expect us to provide these sorts of easy answers). It is fair to say that one of our jobs is to make complex what is often a simplistic understanding of the text and of writing, while we simultaneously try to simplify writing for a student who may have an overwhelmingly complicated picture of his/her text. Thus our endeavors are at cross purposes to themselves sometimes, and we depend on that intricacy in order to have a meaningful effect on the student's writing. Rosemary Mink refers to this as having to "re-complicate" the student's text. We could just edit, or punish, or praise, but what an approach like that would gain in ease it would lose in significance.

It occurs to me that another difficulty of theorizing about consulting may have been the tricky fact that as writing consultants we do not work in response only to positive evidence. Many times it is the unsaid--the question not asked, the time a student does not meet your glance--that directs us. It is obviously very hard, though not impossible, to describe positively what is known negatively. It is also difficult to talk about how we attend to body language, tone of voice, and expression. We are in a strange and artificial setting in those close, white rooms in the basement, and attention to understated clues directs us to the text at hand in subtle ways.

"Why we talk about our job in practical terms" leads to questions about what we do and what sort of knowledge we have of what we do. What kind of self-understanding have we accumulated from our years of experience dealing with very different classes, teachers and students? Certainly we understand our role in a fashion different from the way an engineer understands her role: Ours is a more tacit knowledge (there are few formulas for example), the goals are less clear, and our practical wisdom is more blended with the thinking from many disciplines and experiences, such as ESL (Sharon Ahlers), counseling (Leslie Loeffel), and parenting and teaching. Our self-knowledge is also unusual because what we pay attention to in a session is not primarily our role in the process, but the student's. Unlike a lecture class, for example, our own presence is not the most interesting part of the consulting session. We don't claim knowledge the same way; we don't "possess" what we do, exactly. The text, after all, is the student's, not ours; we are there to share in it, not to appropriate it. And although our practice is both important and intellectually forceful, it's simply not as salient as a lecturer's practice is. When we consult we enact what we know, and it is difficult to speak about our work from a remote or objective perspective.

JoAnn, like many consultants, discussed how she asks a student to read the text he or she has brought to consulting meetings, quietly modeling the act of listening to a text read aloud. And some sort of modeling was central to almost all responses I received. Tom Townsley, for instance, implied modeling when he suggested we expand the mentoring relationships between teachers and consultants (a mentor, it seems to me, is first of all a model). Everything we do could be seen in these terms: We model reading texts, analyzing them, questioning them; we model when we give support to a writer for taking chances, when we confront his or her assumptions, and when we listen to what is written; we model invention strategies, notetaking strategies, inquiry strategies--and on. It is fair to say that we are quite good at using ourselves as examples of how a practiced person observes a text and writer. Or maybe there is another way to say it: we model the sorts of attention necessary for any kind of writing, an it's this, more than error recognition, that we teach.

Consultants are also expert, often, at starting from what a student knows, rather than from what she does not know. We have to. We don't have time to teach a lot of new facts, for one thing, and furthermore our first priority is to teach students to recognize what they can do. This means, as several consultants noted, starting with feeling, since feeling is always available. Our students have learned somewhere to devalue the boredom, surprise, dismay, excitement, and anger which comes from an assigned text, to think of such feelings as meaningless. In fact, they assume often that nothing the student first feels is supposed to be legitimate, that the feelings (which an experienced reader would learn from) are irrelevant. I'm not suggesting this should be the case; I'm pointing out that this is an assumption students often arrive with. When we ask students to pay attention to felt places in the text they often balk because it is easier, I think, and certainly more familiar for them, to simply expect any "academic" understanding of a piece of a work to be abstract from their feeling and experience. Of course, if this academic sort of understanding is remote when a student reads "official" texts, it is doubly remote when a student reads her own writing. The task becomes to teach the student that she is always in touch with feelings, (which is producing the text as a meaningful object), and that the student's own text is as able to provoke feeling as any other.

It is good to elaborate about our job, I think, because the effort that goes into our work is often unrecognized. It is easy to say that because we depend on common sense our work is easy, but I'd claim that our common sense is the hard-won kind that any craftsman--a cooper, farmer, or writer--can take pride in.