Writing as a means of critical inquiry is a cornerstone of Duke’s academic curriculum. Despite its vital role, writing is often thought of as a fixed talent — some do it with ease, others do not — but the reality is that good writing, as any other skill, can be learned. The teaching of writing is the mission of the Thompson Writing Program (TWP). TWP helps students develop as writers during their years at Duke and beyond, including by teaching undergraduate students to become peer writing consultants through its Writing Studio program.
Peer writing consultants come to the program from a variety of academic disciplines and are taught to provide collaborative, non-evaluative feedback to peers about individual texts and writing processes more generally.
“We work with writers at any stage — lots of writers come in with nothing drafted and want to brainstorm, while others may want to rethink structure and organization,” said Eliana Schonberg, Associate Professor of the Practice in Writing Studies in the Thompson Writing Program and Director of the TWP Writing Studio. “Our goal is to help writers create sustainable writing processes that will serve them through their time at Duke and beyond. Our amazing student writing consultants make this work possible!”
Tomas Esber is a graduating senior double majoring in English and Computer Science who works as a writing consultant at the TWP Writing Studio. Esber served as Vice President on the executive boards of Duke’s Latinx Business Organization and Latin American Student Organization and was the recipient of the 2024 Reynolds Price Fiction Award. He has also participated in two campus hackathons — the second of which won him the prize of runner-up for an app development — and he presented original writing pedagogy research at SWCA’s 2024 annual conference.
Jocelyn Chin also works as a writing consultant at the TWP Writing Studio and is a graduating senior double majoring in Public Policy and Philosophy, with minors in Education and Creative Writing. Chin has written for the campus publications The Chronicle, The Archive and Crux, and is a recipient of the 2024 Anne Flexner Memorial Award for Poetry, the 2023 Holton Prize for Educational Research and Duke Libraries’ 2022 Rosati Creative Writing Award. A member of DukeLIFE, Club Running and ASL Club, Chin is also a youth basketball coach in Durham through the nonprofit Coach2inspire.
We asked Esber and Chin to write about their experience as TWP writing consultants and, true to the creative writing spirit, the result is a fresh take on the Q&A.
[Tomas and Jocelyn sit on a bench on main quad. A giant bee flies around their faces.]
Tomas: Do you remember that time we saw each other at Zweli’s? Who were you with?
Jocelyn: I don’t remember who I was meeting, but Dean Sue was also in line!
Tomas: Who’s Dean Sue?
Jocelyn: She was my Legal Issues in Education professor; I loved her and her class so much! She was an amazing discussion leader and also a huge lover of cows. She has cow paraphernalia all over her home.
Tomas: Oh wow. That reminds me of my elementary school teacher, Señora Inmediato. She always said she was reincarnated, and in her past life she was a cow.
[Awkward silence. Maybe it would be better to switch to an interview format.]
What were you reincarnated from, from your past life?
Tomas: Craven Quad House C (an incongruous wall of stones)
Jocelyn: Some sort of fungi or moss!
What skills did you learn as a writing consultant and how will it influence your work post-grad?
Tomas: Some people think writing consultants are making direct edits to our writers’ papers, but we aren’t marking up their paragraphs and crossing sentences out in red pen. Instead, we’re helping writers become more self-reflective of their writing and writing processes.
I’ve learned how to get writers to come to realizations about their writing on their own; it’s a different learning process for the writer, and I think it sticks with them more than anything else.
Currently, I’m planning on working as a software engineer. I suspect this dialectic process I’ve been talking about — of navigating through ideas with my writers, building outlines together and so on — might translate over.
Jocelyn: As a consultant I’m able to practice identifying what someone visits the studio for, and how I can help them pursue their goal through writing. I think this practice will be really useful in law and education – my main interests. I'm applying to law school this fall. Meanwhile, I plan to work through College Advising Corps with Title I high school students as a college counselor. What’s important for me is getting to know people: what do they want out of their next few years? What are their silly quirks, desires and passions? Writing also plays a huge role in applications. Working in the studio definitely trains me for that.
What is a heart-warming memory you’ve made this final semester?
Tomas: My friend and I have had this fantasy since the start of senior year where we have a so-called “day of oblivion”: we head to an arbitrary spot in Durham with no plans at all, and spend the day talking to strangers, making music, wandering into the woods, etc. One day, we grabbed Mexican food, and ended up driving around for an hour, talking nonsense, then playing piano and singing at Duke’s Wellness Center. As I headed to class afterwards, it dawned on me: the day of oblivion, it had happened and we didn’t even realize! It makes sense: a day of no plans can’t be planned.
Jocelyn: During my 100-mile race in March, some of my club running friends helped pace me. Two of them (who ran in the ultra relay earlier that day) slept one hour, crawled out of bed in the dead of night, and met me on the roadside at mile 73. From midnight through daybreak, they took turns trudging a full marathon into freezing cold 40 mph headwinds next to me. The craziest part: I didn’t even ask them to join me! But looking back, without these two, and the rest of my crew, I have no idea if I would’ve finished the race. I’m so insanely grateful for my buddies.
Shouldn’t you get out of the interview format for the finale? I mean, come on. You’re on Duke Today only once, and you guys went with the standard interview format?
Tomas: Yes, I feel constrained.
Jocelyn: Yes, but we did start off with a screenplay format and broke the fourth wall by switching to the–
Sure. But breaking the fourth wall isn’t much of a novelty nowadays. Think Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or any Kurt Vonnegut book, ever. Let’s not even go back that far, Marvel’s “Deadpool” used fourth-wall-breaking pretty liberally, and this–
Jocelyn: Wait a second, who are you?
Tomas: Yeah, aren't you just supposed to be an organizational method for writing up an article in a question-and-answer response-style format when it’s actually the interviewees that are asking themselves questions in the absence of an interviewer?
Sure.
Jocelyn & Tomas: Okay.
Okay.
Jocelyn: Well. Do you take pictures?
What — that’s your question? Sigh. Okay.
