Online writing consultation continues to advance from mere asynchronous email systems to more technologically rich synchronous venues. Technologies, such as chat rooms and video conferencing software, to even more immersive and interactive virtual environments, have created complex and rewarding spaces for writing consultations to take place. However, most professional conversation, training, and research for online writing consultation focuses on two aspects of online writing consultation—technological knowledge, often fixated on learning to use a technology to teach, and pedagogical knowledge, knowledge about writing and tutoring practices, which are often based in traditional face-to-face tutoring processes. This study looks at how writing tutors come to understand the interactions between pedagogy and technology by considering their talk both in reflection of their development as writing tutors in addition to their online consultation sessions. Following a small staff of 7 writing tutors from their training onto their tutoring session and in their reflection of their practices, this study utilized both multimodal discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis to learn more about how they shaped their practices when working online. By analyzing tutors’ ways of talking about their practices, how writing consultants come to recognize and understand their pedagogical approaches through the lens of a tutoring technology, and how they interact with and utilize a technology meaningfully based on their pedagogical methods, assists in developing more comprehensive training for online writing consultants
