When Times Get Though

In my most recent tutoring experience, I suddenly became aware of not only how important it is to tailor your lessons to each student, but also to deal with the difficult students we don’t expect. As I was tutoring this international student, I recognized some of the typical characteristics we have studied in the session. Her paper lacked clear transitions and rarely possessed sentences that were analytical or connected her thoughts together. She was also reserved and was clearly embarrassed or less than pleased at having to ask for help. However, instead of being offended by her curt way of speaking or her serious demeanor, I was prepared for all these problems and was aware that her writing style and way of being were a reflection of both cultural differences and miscommunication. However, what I was not expecting was her unwillingness to work with me and her desire to have me do a lot of the work for her. As I worked with her, it slowly became clear that she had expected that I would not just provide advice, but would provide answers as well. At one point, when I was explaining to her that she needed to add more quotes and analysis, she said to me “I’m an international student, I don’t know how to do that.” Because the student was an ESL speaker, she not only didn’t have lots of confidence in her ability to write, but also thought that it was an excuse to allow me to do it for her. Although I was surprised, I continued with the session as best I could. I think that we often discuss the challenges we face as writing consultants with grammar, writing and commentary, but think it might also help us to keep the conversation going about how to deal with students when times get tough.

Pondering on Progress: What I have learned this semester

When I think about what I have learned this semester, it is almost hard to believe how different my approach has become. I have been working as a tutor for a long time, both with international students and English speaking students. Although I would like to still think I was helpful before, the way in which I handle a situation has become revolutionized. When I first started tutoring, I thought mostly about the way in which I would handle the situation if it was my paper that I was writing, whether that would be how I would formulate a thesis statement or how I would structure my own paper. Then I would try to get a student to model his or her paper in this way. Although I think that modeling can be a very effective method when working as a writing consultant, the problem with my approach was that it meant I was not focusing on each student’s individual needs and working with their style. Now, when I first sit down to work with a student, I first try to assess what the student’s top priorities should be, then also figure out what they want to work on and what they feel are the overall weaknesses they feel they need to improve on. Then when I am reading their paper with them and I come across a rough patch, I try to make it a dialogue about improvement, not just me dictating to them what they should be doing. Not only does this help prevent my point of view from influencing their paper too much, but it also helps to engage them more and make the session a constant conversation about writing their work, and what they want to express. Another large difference to my approach now is that I feel I have learned how to make the session that much more effective by preparing myself appropriately. It is interesting how much of a difference it really makes when you have read the student’s paper ahead of time and focused your thoughts by writing commentary. Knowing exactly what you need to address in the session not only makes you look more professional as a consultant, but also gives you the ability to prioritize. When I don’t do this, I find that I end up giving each student much more sentence level focused suggestions or broad general tips rather than addressing the most important concerns of the paper. I think there is also a certain pressure that each student feels when they are conducting a session. I know that I personally feel nervous in a consultation and am so concerned about wasting a student’s time that I am distracted when trying to reread their paper at the beginning. This way I am completely organized ahead of time so that no matter how nervous I get, I always have my commentary to help me refocus.

Even though I spend much of my time tutoring international students, I think it is in this area that I have seen the greatest change in my approach. Working with international students is always a challenge because it is necessary to have a separate approach altogether. Learning about the different facets of this approach has helped me to specialize my approach even more. I think the information that I have learned that has made the largest impact is becoming aware of not only the differences between ESL students and native speakers but of differences among ESL students from various areas. I think that more than anything, being aware of this has helped me to completely tailor my sessions to fit the needs of each individual student.

ESL with Arabic and Japanese Students

In a sports game, you only have so much time on the clock, your actions directly affect the people you are working with and overall, what you want is to succeed. Therefore, knowing what the weak spot is of the person charging towards you gives you an unparalleled advantage that can allow you to succeed and succeed well. Similarly, as the article, “Influence of cultural and linguistic background on the writing of Arabic and Japanese students of English” by Bouchra Moujtahid explores, having previous knowledge of the ESL student’s anticipated weakness before a consultation can allow you to have the most effective session possible. Moujtahid narrows in on the examples of both Arabic and Japanese students to highlight the ways in which the lessons, rules and guidelines of one’s native language and culture directly affect the ways in which he or she write.

Having worked directly with several Japanese and Arabic students, I have found that Moujtahid’s experiences are not only similar to my own, but that his conclusions posses crucial information that could have been pivotal to my sessions. I think for any consultant, acknowledging that the student being helped is not stupid, lazy or wrong, but is just following different rules, allows the consultant and the tutor to work more cohesively together. Moujtahid emphasizes this saying, “the difference between their native language and the language they are trying to learn are the cause for most errors.” Understanding this then allows the tutor to not only address the problem as it pertains to the paper, but the root of it as well. As a result, “knowing certain mistakes a student is more likely if they come from a particular country can help make you more aware.” It is only after an interaction such as this that a student can learn to fix these mistakes on his or her own in the future. I think it can often be lost during consultations that the sessions themselves are not just for one paper, but serve as learning environment as well, teaching students how to be stronger writers across the board.

A few weeks ago, I was helping a man from Egypt studying English who was clearly struggling with many of the same issues Moutahid details in his article. He had a tendency to smile, nod and remain positive even when he did understand a particular lesson. As a result, we would move forward only to realize he wasn’t soaking in what we were doing. Within his writing, he liked to repeat himself over and over, even if the claim he was making in one sentence had previously been made and was by no means furthering his argument. The article addresses this very issue saying, “Arabs tend towards exaggeration, emotionalism, overstatement and what is sometimes called “‘purple prose.’” Understanding that this is the case makes it much easier to not only be prepared for such repetition, but to explain to a student how it becomes distracting to a western reader. At the time, I was a little lost as to what to do. He was clearly nervous and I didn’t want to further embarrass him by suggesting lots of changes and left the session unsure of how useful I had been. Thinking back, I think if I understood Moujtahid’s idea that, ““In Arabic writing “there is a greater emphasis upon the form of the expression than upon the content which is being expressed,”’ I would have known to specifically address issues concerning structure in western writing that could have helped to reduce his repetition.

Recently, I have also worked with a Japanese student who I have previously mentioned in my blog. Reading this article’s commentary that Japanese feel that other forms of communication are “more sincere than language” and therefore, find it necessary to convey their meaning in another way, was very interesting. I very much found this to be the case, as there were times when quotes were placed randomly without analysis, explanations, transitions and ties were left out and the student looked at me as if I was slightly stupid when I explained that I didn’t understand certain connections.

With this said though, he states at the end of the article, “These differences between Arabs and Japanese are exactly what students of the two cultures would predict.” Despite my agreeing with him, I have considered whether or not we should also be aware of the assumptions we are making. Although I completely agree that anticipating common errors can help both the student and the tutor be more successful, I think it is still important to take each session with a case to case approach.

After reflecting on this article, I do also begin to wonder whether or not writing style is not only the direct product of not only what is typical in a particular area, but also encapsulates or represents a culture’s ideologies.

ESL is not as easy as ABC

“Do you understand what I mean when I say…” is a common phrase I use when tutoring ESL students. Although, often, the problems my students have arise from having been taught a different grammatical principle or not understanding how to organize a paper, it became clear to me during a recent tutoring session with an ESL student that some of the problems students face come from a more fundamental problem. As a result of this, not only can it make your session more difficult as you struggle to find the right approach, but can cause the student to become frustrated or to tune you out.

During my most recent session, a student with whom I had met a few times before to discuss more informal assignments came to see me with his paper. Although this student is more advanced in terms of his language skills than many of the students I have seen, I was amazed to find that he had absolutely no idea how to write an analytical paper. His assignment was to talk about one book with another book’s perspective in mind for his FYS class. In its essence, his assignment was the typical, "compare and contrast" the arguments of two different books style essay. With that said however, his paper lacked a thesis, a real argument and left me more confused about the topics of the two books than when I started. What was most interesting about this experience was that his mistakes were very different than any I had encountered before. This hit me immediately as I began to read his introduction paragraph, as I was surprised to find that it gave no indication of the argument of the paper, but was merely a summary of one of the books. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli speak to this type of problem in chapter five of their book, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, when they say, “Other cultures approach a problem by giving a detailed history first, information that other writers might find unnecessary.” Although caught off guard, I did my best not to discourage the student, but to work with him to help him understand the importance of an introduction paragraph to the paper and to explain to him that although it is ok to have a little bit of summary, there are also many other things that need to be included.

Another example of why this paper was unusual compared to the style of western writing I am used to was that, throughout his paper, he would interject questions in italics as if to provoke a certain thought from his audience. However, the problem with this was that the very questions he was proposing were the same ones he needed to be answering himself through his argument. Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli explain that, the purpose of writing can be different for an ESL student, as they were often taught that writing had a different meaning or was supposed to bring forth a different type of reaction than what the western style of writing teaches. With this student’s paper, it seemed like it stemmed towards the “exaggeration and emotionalism” that Ryan and Zimmerelli mention as being typical. I discovered that the student was less trying to argue a particular point or claim than he was trying to retell certain details of the story in a more beautiful way, while forcing the reader to make the conclusions on their own. This is very similar to many of the concepts we discussed last class having to do with cultural backgrounds influencing a student’s style of writing. I think it is important to be aware of a student’s academic past to understand where their weaknesses might be in order to best help them improve.

With this said however, I was still very unsure of how to proceed, not wanting to offend the student, but also knowing that this was an unacceptable standard of organization and argumentation for almost all professors. I therefore, took Ryan and Zimmerelli’s advice that “culture determines acceptable ways of presenting information and in a tutoring session, acknowledging cultural differences often means explaining appropriate rhetorical patters for standard academic English.” Once I realized that the student was unaware of the mistakes he was making, we worked together to recreate the outline of his paper. Using ideas he already had written down, but not flushed out, and put them in a new order on a separate sheet of paper. In order to be able to do this, I definitely had to employ a more dialectic approach, constantly asking him questions and making conclusions based on what he had written and how he answered to then ask my next question. This way, despite the peculiarities of the paper, I was able to “respond first to the content and organization of their paper, as you would with any writer,” like Ryan and Zimmerelli suggest. This way, together we were able to manipulate his old paper into a new structure while preserving all his own ideas, just putting them in an order that made them into an argument, not just a bunch of statements.

Although that hurdle had been jumped, I soon discovered that we had another issue to deal with: he had some issues with fundamental aspects of an analytical paper. It turned out that the approach the student had been taught was very different from the western style we are used to. When he was making a claim about one of the books, he had summarized the events that had occurred in a few pages to use as support for the point he wished to make. Not only was there very little introduction or analysis of the events he paraphrased, but it also became apparent to me that he had not used a single quotation. When I asked him why he had chosen that method, I uncovered that he did not know how to use quotations for evidence in a paper or to sum up an even when he was writing about a piece of fiction. Ryan and Zimmerelli mention this type of situation when they say, “many problems that second language writers encounter occur because their first language follows different rules.” Slowly I was able to work with him to explain the different way he could use quotations and the importance of them.

Through this session, it became clear to me that we, as writing consultants, must not only prepare ourselves for tutoring ESL students differently than other students, but that we also must treat every situation and student in a case by case fashion.

She helps me, She helps me not

As a student, the question, “whom do we write for?” becomes a very difficult one to answer. Although in theory, I would like to think I write for myself, to push myself to really explore new ideas and present my ideas in an interesting way, the reality is that most of the times I, like most students, adapt my writing to suit the needs, preferences and requirements of my teachers. Although part of me wonders if this is how it should really be, I have come to accept it as part of our learning system. With that said, however, the question of whom are we serving as Writing Consultants, also seems to come into question a times as the article, “In Defense of Conference Summaries: Widening the Reach of Writing Center Work” by Jane Cogie suggests.

In my mind, the purpose of the writing center is to best serve the student by providing a safe space where they can receive judgment free assistance with their writing. Although teachers may argue otherwise, most students feel that in order to go talk to their professors about a particular draft, their paper must be in a state where it could potentially be turned in if need be. This means that students must be able to write their papers many days in advance and already be confident in their ideas and arguments. Overall, students tend to respect their professors enough that they are afraid of embarrassing themselves by presenting a draft that has any known weakness. Therefore, the student who is unsure of what they are doing, embarrassed about struggling or who has just written the paper a few days before it is due, feels that they cannot go to their teachers for help with their writing ahead of time. The honest truth is that the majority of us are that type of student. As a result, I think it is important that the writing center be an outlet for students who which to improve their writing without any harsh criticism, judgment or even pressure, where they can actually improve their papers before they present them to their teachers. With that said however, the concept of “Teacher Response” sheets makes me question whether or not we are in fact always serving the student. In her article, Cogie explains, “Comments by two of the study's respondents indeed reflect the stereotype of writing center tutor as subservient to the teacher. One of these instructors stated that the most useful aspect of the summaries was that they allowed her ‘to evaluate if I felt the best use of the tutor's time was being made.’” The professor that Cogie highlights seems to not only feel that the tutor is serving her needs specifically, but that she personally has the full right to evaluate the effectiveness and the purpose of the tutor. Cogie then takes this one step further, highlighting how another professor states, “"it was very helpful to know that my specific suggestions for improvement were being addressed."” This other professor pushes the relationship between him or herself and the tutor so far as to almost state that the role of the tutor is to reinforce the teacher’s own particular views of writing and that the position of the tutor is such that they should just be reminding the student to actually do what the teacher has told them. Although theoretically, these teachers want the same thing that the tutors’ want, to help the student improve their writing, it seems that the presence of this type of relationship between tutor and teacher could potentially change the student’s reaction to the writing center. As a student, if I felt that by going to my writing center, I would only gain a better understanding of the changes my teacher wished me to make, not improve overall as a writer, than writing to me would become merely a game. As a result, a writing center would no longer represent a place where I could participate in a process through which I could constantly work to express my ideas and myself.

The Fear of A Writing Consultant

Roosevelt may have said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but as I sat down with one of my ESL students who was on the edge of failing the one last class she needed to graduate, my own inability to help her successfully became what I feared the most. This particular student had specifically come to work with me from the School of Continuing studies. A mother of two with a law degree from her home country, she was clearly smart, educated and persistent, returning to get her undergraduate degree in America even though she had not been to school in twenty years. With that said however, her English analytical writing was very much at a middle school level. When she came to meet with me two nights before her paper was due, panic flooded through me as I realized that her paper was all over the place and would by no means get her the type of grade she needed to pass the English course that she had taken and failed the previous semester.

It was at this moment that I realized that what I feared most as a consultant was not encountering an abrasive student or being unprepared for a session, but letting down a student who clearly needed my help. This particular student, however, almost seemed to be unable to be helped because of her desire to “just be done with the paper.” Although I knew what she wanted was for me just to make some line edits, give her a few suggestions about her conclusion and send her on her way, I couldn’t do that. As a result, I was not only left with the task of somehow figuring out how to salvage this paper without making her re-write the entire thing and balance her growing anxiety and frustration as the list of my suggestions grew too.

Although I recognize that as consultants, we have to remove ourselves personally from the situation and not feel completely responsible for the success or progress of the student or use it to measure our effectiveness as a tutor, it is much easier that say than to do it. As the student with whom I had worked with many times before sat before me, I felt responsible for helping her get back on track because I had the knowledge and the realization that she didn’t have, that if she did not, she would fail. As a result, I was more afraid for her than she was for herself. Steve Sherwood speaks to this idea in his article “Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can’t Help” when he states, “We feel anguish when we fail to help students because we invest ourselves in and care deeply about our work. If the opposite were true, if we did not care and did not strive for excellence, we would find neither safety nor satisfaction.” It is therefore, the result of this very situation that I felt afraid to fail because I felt afraid of the very same “anguish” Sherwood describes.

In the end, I followed the age old principal, “Do your best and that’s all you can do.” Often as a writing consultant, I feel that if I don’t correct an obvious grammatical error or tell them to fix a particular topic sentence, it is my fault if they get marked off for that in the end. However, eventually, as I did with that particular student, I took a step back and remembered that it was not my paper and in the end it was she that needed to take responsibility for the content and quality of the paper overall. Although this didn’t get rid of my fears or even some of my guilt at knowing I may have not been able to help her enough, it helped me to relax enough so that I didn’t get discouraged in future sessions to come.

Don't Stop Believing: The Impact of Works Regarding Working as as Writing Tutor on a Consultation

As a result of my peer consultation with Carter Staub, not only did I became more aware of not only my own practices as a writing fellow, but also was able to better understand the role a tutor can have by placing myself in the writer’s seat. It was through this experience that I was, for the first time, able to practice the ideologies of the different texts we have studied. As a result, I have found that their particular practices were both applicable and influential to both how I conducted my writing appointment and my experience as a writer.

When talked about theoretically, much of the advice given by the readings we have discussed seem obvious, but when put into place, I found that their particular and specific guidance allowed me to both understand what the student I was helping was attempting to do. As well, having their suggestions as a reservoir of knowledge from which to draw from, possessing the insight given by these texts gave me a certain level of confidence as a tutor because I was mentally prepared and educated enough to provide practical and functional solutions. 

When I actually sat down and met with Carter, I felt prepared for my tutoring consultation because of the work I did ahead of time on the hard copy of her draft provided for me. Before this class, my natural instinct when correcting a draft was to cover its margins with little notes throughout the work. This is what most students are taught to do when reading any primary source text for class, or when checking over their own papers and therefore, it is natural to have a tendency towards this style of editing. However, as our readings discuss, the overwhelming nature of this style eventually detracts from the consultant’s meaning, leaving a student so defeated that they could become reluctant to making any changes at all. In Richard Straub’s, The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of "Directive" and "Facilitative" Commentary, he expands upon this point further. His advice culminates in his asking of the questions, “How do different kinds of response create different images of the responder and establish various relationships with the student? What kinds of comments distinguish a directive responder from a facilitative one” (Straub 225)? For me, by keeping these questions in mind, I am reminded of how to move away from the paper-bleeding-with-ink style of editing. I now attempt to produce commentary that addresses the student I am helping as my equal, while at the same time organizing my suggestions for improvement into easily understandable categories and solutions.

To do this with Carter’s commentary, I utilized two very different concepts that have become almost sacrosanct in our writing pedagogy classroom: the removal of “you” and the usage of the narrative to a list style of editing. Although more challenging than I had originally anticipated, removing the word “you” from my edits completely altered the tone of my corrections. The almost judgmental type of instructions I had used before were transformed into kind suggestions that established a relationship of constructive editing between two intellectual equals. I then incorporated this change into my new style of providing commentary. By opening with a narrative instead of just jumping to the “here is what is wrong with your paper” section. This way, I was able to convey to Carter that this was one step in an on going conversation about possible changes she could make to her paper, not a list of the commands. Furthermore, I put as little as I could into the margins and instead, listed my comments at the end of the paper organized by subject matter. The effect of which was two fold: I was better able to see what were the most crucial overall areas for us to discuss when we met in conference, and it allowed her to see where and when she was repeating the same mistakes. Furthermore, in these final end comments, I also attempted to make suggestions to her that could nudge her in the right direction without trying to grab control of the session and her paper. 

As a result of this preparation, when I went to meet with Carter in person, I felt that we were able to use our time extremely effectively because I already knew what I thought we needed to cover and therefore, we had more time to address what she felt were the weak areas of her own paper. The first area we worked through was Carter’s thesis. For her paper, Carter chose to deeply analyze a poem by poet Adrienne Rich. Although it was clear from her thesis that she was conducting a very close reading on a particular poem, her thesis failed to provide her reader with enough of a road map to help them understand where this paper whished to go and what the point of its argument was. I got the sense that Carter’s thesis had developed while she wrote the paper and as a result, her original thesis was unclear because she did not know exactly where she was going and what she was arguing until she finished writing the paper. So instead of spending a lot of time manipulating the word choice of her weaker thesis statement, at the very beginning of our session I directly asked Carter what exactly it was that she hoped the paper would argue. This strategy, introduced to me in the article “Helping students write literary analyses: Some challenges and opportunities for writing center consultants specializing in literature” was incredibly affective. Yothers argues that “the process of articulating what they find to be significant about a particular story is often the first step toward developing a coherent thesis” (Brian Yothers 6). This was exactly the case with Carter, as the thesis she formulated in her own words verbally (which I quickly wrote down as she spoke), was a clear and succinct depiction of what the final paper was actually arguing and how it attempted to unfold that argument. Not only did this mean we had effectively restructured Carter’s thesis, therefore providing a more solid foundation for the whole paper, but also that the new product was still entirely made of Carter’s own words. Therefore, I was able to avoid anything close to the situation where “usurp control over student writing, making sweeping editorial changes and dictating what should be said or how it should be presented from top to bottom”(Straub 247) that Struab cautions against.

Once the framework of the paper was more concrete, we narrowed in on Carter’s topic sentences. This was an area that both Carter and I had highlighted as a place where some improvements could be made. As a result of Carter spending so much time exploring the poem, there were portions of her work where she was so close to the material that she forgot who her audience was and that they needed to be guided through her breakdown of the poem. As the Writer’s Web page on Transitional Words and Phrases expresses, it was important for Carter to “Use transitions with enough context in a sentence or paragraph to make the relationships clear.” To most effectively help Carter with this, I followed the advice stated in The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors by Leigh Ryan. Although Ryan suggested this strategy for tutors helping students in the beginning stages, I found it equally successful for Carter who, while having already written her paper, needed to realign the spine of it. Ryan suggests, “Ask the writer to start drafting the thesis and topic sentences. It might be helpful to see the main ideas worked out in full sentences. These sentences can be a jumping-off point when the writer goes to compose on his or her own” (Ryan 46). Therefore, Carter and I looked at the structure of her topic sentences and talked about how they often just jumped right in to a new idea without making sure the reader understood the transition from the previous thought to the new one. We thought out possible suggestions for how to change the wording and I kept asking Carter questions to further her thought process. Once she began thinking of several good possibilities, I left it up to Carter to decide how she wished to rewrite them so that the work could once again be entirely her own.

The last issue Carter and I discussed in-depth during her tutoring session was her conclusion. Although it did a nice job of piecing it all together for the reader, summarizing the paper’s main points, it did nothing to push the paper further. Like many students, she fell into the trap of “ending with a rephrased thesis statement that contains no substantive changes,” which Writer’s Web specifically advises against. Although careful about my tone, I employed another suggestion from Ryan by asking her questions similar to “why do you feel this is important” and “so what do you think is the point?” (Ryan 42). In the past, whether it has been helping a friend with her paper or working as a tutor for international students, getting a student to move beyond restating the claims of the paper in the final paragraph is surprisingly hard to do because when students attempt to make their conclusions more thought provoking or bring up a new idea their conclusions often become too global with unsupported claims about the nature of society or history or something of the sort. Personally, I have had a hard time in the past doing this successfully and I found that teaching how to write a good conclusion is almost as difficult as actually writing one. However, using the “so what” question for the first time with Carter, I saw how such a simple question can force a writer to really consider their paper on another level.  From hearing the new ideas Carter came up with just during the consultation time alone, I found that this strategy is the most successful. Carter was able to turn her conclusion into something that “suggest[s] results or consequences” instead of just summarizing (Writer’s Web). I have found for getting writer to think deep at the end of their papers because by constantly asking yourself “why does the reader care about what I am saying,” it helps you to produce a conclusion that answers this question, but still remains specific to your topic area.

What was also really interesting about this exercise was when we switched roles and I became the student. One of the things I struggle with as a writer is revision, as I often have lots of trouble catching my own mistakes, especially on a first draft. Having Carter’s commentary focus on the content of my work and not the small punctuation and grammar errors was a very different experience from what I am used to with other tutors. There have been times when teachers have embarrassed me because my first drafts contained errors so much so that when they finally got around to talking about my ideas, I was too disheartened to listen carefully. It was clear that Carter was employing Ryan’s theories on revisions by the way she handled my work. As Ryan suggests, she focused more on “global revisions…the paper’s overall development and organization” (Ryan 48) and instead of making be feel stupid for my sentence level errors, discussed them with me and was “carful not just to correct mistakes but also to explain how [I] can identify and correct future sentence-level errors” (Ryan 51). 

Therefore, the experience for me felt much more respectful and conducive to my future improvement.

Although I was unsure when I first entered this class how the works we were reading could possibly be as helpful as the lifetime of personal knowledge I had acquired, I now firmly see the impact of their teachings. Although often subconscious, the ideas and suggestions they provide have become the foundation of how I approach working as a writing consultant and have firmly changed both my definition and opinion of the writing consultant process.

To Be Or Not To Be Politically Correct, That is the Question

After reading Serkan Gorkemli’s article “‘This is a redneck argument!’: The Politics of tutoring paragraphing,” I began to think a lot about what our role is as tutor and what the boundaries we encounter really are. Especially at a school like the University of Richmond, where our title as writing fellows has been changed so many times to evoke the very concept of equality, the level of informality between fellow and the student being helped is something that has to be considered. Seeing as we all go to the same school and are assumed to be relatively the same age with similar levels of academic caliber, the question of tone when working with a student becomes incredibly important.

For example, although at first I questioned the reasoning behind us as tutors being told not to use “you” in paper commentary, or being told to use it as sparingly as possible, I now really understand the reasoning behind it. I think it is important that students and tutors develop a certain level of comfort and trust because as a result, the student will become more open and vocal and the session might unearth more creative thoughts and willingness to take positive risks than it would in a similar situation with the student and the teacher. However, with that said, this article does pose an interesting question regarding what a tutor is supposed to do if the students argument is somewhat offensive. Although I think that the positive relationship should allow us as tutors to vocalize our concerns with our student freely in order to help them in the long run, I think it is very important that we remain objective at the same time. Without a doubt, I think it is a difficult gray area, but I think it is important for a tutor to remember that according to the Writing Center’s do’s and don’ts, we must “Avoid turning the writer's paper into YOUR paper” even if their subject matter is offensive to you. However, although in theory this is true, I will acknowledge that I myself would be in a very difficult place if I was to encounter this situation in real time.

 When I was in high school, I was told that when taking a stance in a paper, I should chose the side I felt I could most easily support. The interesting aspect of such a concept is that this means you could potentially support or argue for something in a paper that you personal do not believe is right, because it is the most convincing argument. Although I am not saying that the student “john” chose the easier side to argue and that’s why his paper was so offensive, I still think it is important that when conducting a session, the student being tutored is still given the same about of respect even if their topic matter is controversial. I think that the author was therefore completely correct in arguing that his “task as a tutor was to get [john] 1) to talk to [him] as a tutor rather than someone with a professed authority over him, and 2) to appreciate the complexity of the issue he is dealing with rather than to have him temporarily put on a politically correct academic hat.” The way this tutor chose to deal with the situation is to engage in methods that allows for the same partnership relationship between the student and tutor, prevents the tutor from saying anything negative about the teacher, and get him to think about the deeper meaning of his argument rather than just tell him he is wrong because his opinion disagreed with that of the tutor. I think what is particularly clever about the second tactic of this tutor is it still allows the student to continue with the side he chose, as long as he does so more accurately and convincingly. Although completely unprofessional, by saying that his argument was “Red Neck” the teacher was commenting on his argument on two levels: the first being that he was being too casual with his argument and the second being that he was being naive and wrong. With the approach the tutor was taking, it allowed for correcting the tutor’s problem with the argument being too weak, without having to change it (thus making the student lose confidence in his work and his own individual voice). Even if the student’s paper did have a controversial or naïve approach, if argued appropriately and was very compelling and convincing, a good teacher would recognize that the teacher herself must also remain unbiased. I think that by aiming to attack the paper that way, the tutor made the best out of a difficult situation.

Taking the Bull By the Horns: The topic of control in teacher commentary

In one episode of the office, Dwight claims that, “In the Schrute family we believe in a five-fingered intervention. Awareness. Education. Control. Acceptance. And punching.” If you were to remove the “punching,” (at least in the current decade where corporal punishment is illegal) I think Dwight’s approach to life is how many teachers often approach correcting a student’s paper.

However, I agree with the Richard Straub’s article, “The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of ‘Directive’ and ‘Facilitative’ Commentary,” which advocates for the removal of teachers imposing “control” when editing a student’s paper. The article focuses on how teachers respond to student writing and the amount of power they assert over a students work through their commentary. Straub argues that teachers are often too eager to insert themselves into their student’s work, altering the student’s overall experience and inevitable product and feelings of accomplishment.

When posing the question, “How do different kinds of response create different images of the responder and establish various relationships with the student?” Straub forces his reader to consider how the teacher’s tone and commentary can not only influence a student’s writing, but their perspective of the process and the teacher. I have found this to be a questioned answered by my own experiences with editing:

When I was in middle school, I had a teacher hand back my paper early bleeding in circles and comments. Although inadvertently, she embarrassed me by singling me out, only turning back my paper and making me hyper aware of my flaws as compared to those of my classmates. Furthermore, she did exactly what we were taught not to do from the very first day of class, soaking my paper in comments and a using a tone that was discouraging and disappointed. From my point of view, what had happened was that I had experimented with dialogue for the first time and as a result, butchered many of the grammatical and formatting policies that come along with a specific style of writing. With that said however, instead of looking through the entire paper and realizing I was just making the same 3 mistakes over and over again, she circled every single flaw so that the ink from her pen was basically jumping off the page. Although she was a nice teacher with good intentions, I was discouraged by her behavior and began to see her as a negative figure, someone who was bringing me down instead of guiding me. Despite the fact that I could have used help, I became embarrassed and frightened, no longer wishing to seek her help. Straub comments on the theory behind a similar sort of situation saying, “Generally speaking, the more comments a teacher makes on a piece of writing, the more controlling he or she will likely be.” Despite this being so long ago, I remember this moment and paper vividly because my teacher was so controlling that she instilled within me a negative fear that was more counter productive than anything else. Like Struab argues and this anecdote illustrates, not only can asserting control through overbearing comments be overwhelming for a student, but can destroy the relationship of trust between a student and a teacher which allows students to grow and take risks. It was these kinds of negative experiences that caused me to feel completely insecure about my writing abilities up until my sophomore year of high school.

However, when I got to high school, I was met with teachers who did not let the focus of their criticism lie with “sentence structure and correctness,” but instead focused on the content of my work and like Struab suggests, attempting to get us to “consider the rhetorical situation or to try some technique of revision.” From watching my writing fellow conduct his sessions, I can see that this is an effective method because it gets the writer to think about the solutions themselves, allowing the writing consultant to work as a sounding board and to get the writer to acknowledge or see what they might not have seen before. The approach that my writing fellow uses reflects what Struab praises in commentary, where the” comments refrain from directly telling [the student] what to do.”

Similarly, I saw the effect changing tone in commentary can have on a student from the exercises we have done with editing in class. The first time I corrected a paper, I used “You” in almost every comment, coverings the margins in an attempt to be specific, but abandoning my reader by forcing them to figure out for themselves what I was meaning when I made comments like “I am a little lost here.” However, after more practice and guidance from class, my goal is to execute what Struab suggests when he claims it I more effective when you are “keeping [your] tone positive, keeping [your] emphasis on what is working and what could be made to work better.”

Although I agree with almost everything Struab argues for in his article, there is one claim that has me a little puzzled. He says, “Of course, the optimum style of response for any teacher is going to be a function of her personality and teaching style.” Although I agree that this may be true, I wonder if it is something to advocate for. I have a friend who has helped me correct one of my papers before and while he is very intelligent and makes good suggestions, his personality is honest, sometimes brutally so, concise and sarcastic. Although as a friend, I am used to it and find it refreshing, in a tutoring situation, I have a feeling it could come across as uncomfortable for a student, making them feel discouraged. I think that maybe what would be a better argument for Struab to make is that every “optimum style of response” should be a function of their most presentable and understanding selves while maintaining their natural teaching style.

Conciseness will you by my Valentine?

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Sugar is sweet;

And so are you.

On Valentines day, I cannot think of a better example of writing that gets to the point. I, myself, am one of he biggest culprits when it comes to using long verbose sentences that are often flowery and excessive (like that one). Despite this being true through, I am actually a huge advocate of concise language and writing. However, the truth is that while I may not always be able to achieve such a writing style, it is one that I admire and personally believe it is the most affective. A few weeks ago, I wrote a creative writing piece for one of my classes and was determined to use this type of language. I sat down and cut out everything that was unnecessary or that restated anything that had already been made clear the actions of my characters. What was I left with? The best piece of creative writing that I have ever written (in my opinion). What I believe worked so well about this piece was that by just putting on the page what was the essence of what needed to be said, it not only displayed a certain amount of honesty, but it also showed that I had complete confidence in my work and my ability to prove something and therefore didn’t need to repeat myself. I think that same strategy can completely be applied to writing analytical papers.

            Today I was shadowing and a first-year student brought his paper in to be looked at. First of all, I will say that I believe that this situation was an anomaly because otherwise us writing tutors would be out of a job. But, with that said, this student’s paper was incredibly successful and one of the best papers I have ever read. Thinking back on it now, I realize that the reason it was so effective and successful was because it was very focused and efficient in the sense that each paragraph had a clear point it wanted to achieve and did so. In The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, one of the suggestions they have for helping a writer when they are starting off is to continually ask them “What do you mean by this” and “How,” therefore getting at the age old concept of So What? I completely agree that this is a useful tool because the results of which can be seen in a paper like this student’s. As I was reading, every quote he used, paragraph he had and into/conclusion sentence he put in continually answered the “What/How/Why” questions. As a result, I never felt like he was just saying something to take up space or because he was repeating himself, but because each sentence propelled the reader to the next working through his argument.

            However, I think that it is not only important that a paper is concise overall, but also, that it is more effective when the sentence structure is not overdone.  The Writer’s Web guide for doing so really pulls out some of what I see as something I constantly do in my work that actually takes away from my paper rather than adding to it like I mean to. It’s interesting how something as simple as changing a sentence from passive to active, immediately strengthens an argument. I think that if it is possible to strengthen individual sentences, using only what is necessary by cutting out extra prepositions, adverbs and adjectives, then a piece of writing becomes not only more enjoyable for a reader. Therefore, the audience is able to soak up the main points, but makes the word choice seem very thought out.

Forget the Rumba, Lets Ramble Instead

Adverbs, run-on-sentences, comma after comma, fancy vocabulary and the use of the phrase “As well” = my old writing style. After reading David Bartholomae’s article, “The Study of Error,” I began to think about the presumption that basic writing is bad. I have found in my own experience and also in correcting the papers of some of my friends that as a student gets more advanced in a subject or attempts to write to impress their audience more, overwriting becomes inevitable. The best examples of this I can find are in my writing from High school, when I started believing that in order to prove to my teachers that I was a good writer, by sentences needed to be beyond “Basic Writing” and mirror the sentiment and language of more serious academic pros. Although my intent was good and the product of my doing so was a paper that showed a closer attention to detail and language, what I ended losing as a result was clarity.

            As a student, when I am supposed to read a primary source document for a class, there is one thing that always makes a difference between my being able to fully extract ideas from the text and not being able to do so: clarity. I am not saying that I wish the documents I am reading to be geared to the audience of a middle scholar, but that when an author removes all the unnecessary detail, vocabulary and subject matter that is not essential to their piece, they end up with a more finished and polished product. As a result of this, they are not taking away from their work, but adding too it, increasing their chances that their work will be understood and thus, appreciated. Talking in a straightforward and accessible way in academic writing should not be considered elementary or unscholarly, but praised because of its ability to grasp a larger audience. The same reason Wikipedia is preferred by most students and even many adults alike is because of its desire to be straightforward and to do so in the most concise and well tailored language possible. An encyclopedia however, uses jargon and highfalutin language that often further confuses the reader, defeating the purpose of the text in the first place.

            It is with this thought in mind that I turn to look at how “basic” writing of students is viewed. As a result, I come to the same conclusion, that when a stigma is attached to a students writing that is basic, it does the academic community a disservice. If a point can be made eloquently, but as tightly as possible, that is in my opinion the most successful type of paper. With that said, I think that a good teacher values the analysis and synthesis of ideas more than they value anything else. Bartholomae says in his article, “if we learn to treat the language of basic writing as language and assume, as we do when writers violate our expectations in more conventional ways, that the unconventional features in the writing are evidence of intention and that they are, therefore, meaningful, then we can chart systematic choices, individual strategies, and characteristic processes of thought.” I agree with Bartholomae in the sense that we as writing consultants and teachers as educators, should not be judging a paper immediately by what is wrong or different (whether that be they have made a mistake or their writing might not sound as elevated as one might hope). Instead, by looking for the strengths within the paper and seeing where the author might have a desire to really go, we can truly assess the author’s individual thought and abilities.

Write What You Love, Write What You Know

Today I read a story called “Intro to Creative Writing” by Dani Johannesen for my creative writing class that caused me to wonder, what is the point of writing if you don’t like what you are writing about? If you have not yet read this piece of creative nonfiction, you really should, in one page, the clear and concise story depicts a moment that so many of us can relate to as writers, constantly seeing our classmates write to “get it done” or to write what they think sounds smart or overly intelligent. Although this story is creative non-fiction and thus, a different style of writing than we will most likely see as writing consultants or many of us are used to writing, the story’s narrator emphasizes how important it is to “write what you know,” which I believe directly correlates with what I see as a growing problem with College writing: students are still writing about topics that are of no interest to them.

In high school, I was given precise and specific topics that were supposed to guide us as writers to certain subject matters or schools of thought. Like a film editor controls how an audience views the world, so did my teachers in regards to how I was supposed to view what my thesis or topic or overall paper should concern. In so many ways, we were writing what they wanted us to write because their essay topics dictated it to be that way. With Johannesen in mind, I look back on my high school work and have come to the conclusion that there is no point of writing something yourself, if you aren’t going to put you in it. Although you can insert your personality depending on your style and tone and the way you acknowledge your reader, really, the best way of all is to do so by liking what you write about.

When I got to college, I remember being both liberated and frightened by the idea of having the freedom to not only chose my topic, but also, chose the texts I wished to work with. I have had moments where figuring out my topic is 100 times more work because there is so much to chose from. My own personal problem is that I often spend more time swaying back and forth between ideas and texts and outlines than I do writing and I am always looking over my shoulder thinking maybe I should have written about something else. Even though it can be harder at first, I believe there is no point about writing what you don’t care about, especially when you encouraged to do so.

I remember one of the first times I really experienced the joy and rewards of deciding for myself what I was going to write about was during my second semester of Core when I decided to write my essay using the texts, House of Mirth and The Love Suicides of Chikamatsu. For some reason, when I read House of Mirth, I have this weird moment that I have had only a few times in my life, when I feel that I completely and utterly understand a characters and seem so much of me in them. Although comparing myself to Lily Bart could in many ways be doing myself a disservice, I acknowledge this in order to make the greater point that I felt a true connection to the work because I identified it and felt passionate about it. I felt like I understood Lily, and therefore, that I understood Wharton’s meaning and words more deeply than many of my other classmates. When we read The Love Suicides of Chikamatsu, I felt connected to the work for another reason: I am a huge romantic. Although one could argue that the work was incredibly depressing, I would still argue that put into context, the text was littered with rich examples of human love and emotion that was very different from any of the other texts we were reading. Therefore, when it came time to write a paper, and I was allowed to write about whatever I wanted, I jumped on the chance to not only write about the two texts I loved, but to write about what I knew. As a result, my paper had greater depth and insight and won me my first A in Core.

However, Core was not the only time I have been given the opportunity to write about what I know or love, seeing as in almost all of my other classes during which I have written analytical papers, I was given at least one assignment where I was forced to chose my own text and topic. Knowing that this is often the case, I am left to wonder why so many students still chose topics that are incredibly dull to them because that’s what they think the teachers want and just want to get their paper finished. The wonder of being in college is that, for the first time, we get to take the classes we want, chose the professors we want, and even think the way we want. Therefore, it amazes me that so few students take this opportunity to actually do so.

In one of my upper level English classes last semester, I had to peer edit two of my classmates work as a part of our revision process. Although the text I chose to use was one I found challenging and I would be no means ever pick up on my own to read casually, I still selected a topic that focused on the diverse female characters in the work, which were far and few in between. However, I was amazed to see that the students whose work I was editing had not only chosen the texts that, despite being one of my teachers favorites, were universally thought to be the most confusing and unexciting. One writer overly simplified a complex subject and the other’s paper was so verbose and puzzling that poking my eyes out seemed a better alternative to finishing the paper. I think the reason the drafts resulted the way they did was the direct result of the students choosing a topic they didn’t really like and therefore, did not really work to fully understand. Instead, they were writing to write. What amazed me though was that our teacher had explicitly encouraged students to choose a topic that excited them and that made them passionate. Therefore, it seems to me that not only are the writing patterns established in high school hurting the freshman writers of Core of FYS, but, to some extent, still plague the minds of even more advanced writers.

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev34/johannesen_cw.html

Link to the story, “Intro to Creative Writing” by Dani Johannesen

Sorry To Be the Bearer of Bad News

The only thing worse than being wrong, is being wrong and thinking you are right. The article “Helping students write literary analyses: Some challenges and opportunities for writing center consultants specializing in literature,” by Brian Yothers, got me thinking about this idea. Ignoring the fact that this article has an obnoxious and unnecessarily long title, this text articulates one of the types of encounters we might experience as writing tutors and that I myself confess I have been both a culprit off and witness too. The article focuses in on the situation of “Kevin” who is described as entering into a writing lab wanting nothing more than “another set of eyes” to look over his work. The author describes that ,although, Kevin believes that his work is fairly complete, the writing tutor soon discovers “that [Kevin] has not understood the material he is discussing at all.”

Personally I believe that the article did a good job of suggesting a solution to such a situation. I have found that when helping a friend or one of the students I have tutored in their work, getting them to summarize their paper like the article suggests is not only helpful, but exposes many of the elementary flaws in their interpretations and arguments. I remember I was helping one student who had come to me wanting help with her grammar, word choice and style in her paper, seeing as English was her second language.

She sat down and informed me that she had literally been working on this paper the entire weekend and her tone suggested that she was not only tired of writing it, but seemed to hint that she was also pretty “over” working on it. However, as I began to read the first few pages, I soon realized that she had absolutely no argument at all. She had obtained credited sources and had great ideas, but her paper made no viewpoint or source of tension. When I asked her to tell me what her paper was about, it took her 5 minutes to get out what, in theory, she should have been able to articulate in 30 seconds. Like Kevin, her paper lacked a focus because she was not fully understanding the material and thus not only using it incorrectly, often contradicting herself, but not using it effectively to prove a specific claim.

However, when we went back to her sources themselves like this tutor did with Kevin, she was able to look more closely at specific key phrases and by braking the articles and books down piece by piece, was able to get an accurate and more clear picture of what her sources were really saying and eventually, what she wished to argue and how to support that argument with a deeper analysis.

Although my own experience matches that of the Kevin, and I too found Yothers’ approach worked, what the article does not address is the reluctance and frustration of a student who thinks that they are merely having their paper proofread who soon discovers that there are fundamental problems with their ideas and therefore, often have to rewrite sections of their papers.

I remember being a freshman in high school and asking my mother to check over what I thought was a truly brilliant paper for my paper on the Tempest. My mother, being an editor, has a great eye and although she did not pass down her talent for being great with grammar and spelling to me, she served as both my sounding board and mentor for most of high school when it came to writing. I distinctly remember her calling to me from her bedroom where she was reading my paper. She had been reading it for no more than 20 minutes, which for her was incredibly fast, and I sauntered in thinking that her speediness must be a testament to how good my paper was. I remember her looking at me and saying, “Honey, I am sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense.” To say the least, I was crushed. As a result, she, being my mother, was forced to calm me down as I ranted on about how she didn’t know what she was talking about. Angry, I set off to my computer to rewrite the entire thing. As it turns out, she was completely correct. My paper had been confusing and inarticulate and I had not reached deep enough into Shakespeare’s work. I rewrote my paper, thus rewording my already throughout ideas and searching for new quotes, and ended up with a piece of writing that got me my first A in an English class ever.

With that said, however, I think that frustration of the student must be something that the consultant must be aware of. Although obviously, I acted in that way because it was my mother, and I therefore had freedom from social constraints, my emotions were normal. Although it is ok for a student to be frustrated, I think it must be noted that sometimes that frustration can turn in to reluctance to hear what the consultant is suggesting and to walk out of the session feeling pissed off and it ending up to be a waste of time for both. 

Using Personal Examples to Respond to "My Teacher Hates Me"

 Blog Entry 1

When we read the article “My Teacher Hates Me” for our last class I found it to be very applicable to my own experience teaching and as a high school student. When Perry says that “students often engage in “pseudo-academese,” an artificially inflated prose style that they believe is a key to success,” I felt as if I was back in my Senior Year struggling to figure out why my teacher in my creative writing class had given me a B when I had worked so much harder than anyone else in the class who had received an A and I concluded that she just disliked me. However, several months afterwards when I was cleaning my file cabinet, I found a copy of my paper again and finally understood. I had written it in an attempt to sound more creative and intelligent and therefore, more mature. In actuality however, all I had really done was leave my paper bleeding with too many adjectives and had lost my reader by using words I didn’t really know how to use effectively, but that I thought sounded “good” in my paper.

Although I have yet to have any experience working as a Writing Consultant, I have for several months worked as a writing tutor for international students whose first language is something other than English. I have found several common trends amongst my students that this article also addresses, but the most applicable is the statement that students often “express frustration over the “devaluing” of personal observations and experience in the sciences, and the need to couch everything in order to achieve credibility.” The sentiments that the article expressed by making this claim were often, in my experiences, translated into two types of writing: unsupported arguments and summary of one particular authors ideas, as well as, repetition of previously stated thoughts. I remember the first student I tutored came to me with his essay that was supposed to be a research paper on a topic of his choosing. I read through the paper and it not only became clear to me that he was doing everything he could to be “done” with the paper, but also, I was amazed to find that, although he summarized the ideas of a few authors, repeating himself, he had failed to use a single quotation in his entire paper. Although shocked at first, when I asked him about what he was arguing, I realized he himself had very little idea. I have seen this patter repeat with several of my students. I find that its not necessarily just a frustration in having to reiterate someone’s words the way Perry states, but more over this problem stems from having an unclear argument or lack of thesis, but wanting to just “get it done” and therefore, the student just writes a brain dump of information that often only shares the common trend of being about the same topic. When I finally figured out that the statement explaining what my student seemed to want to talk about and argue was actually on page 3, it became clear to me that his inability to find quotes to support his argument came from his not really having any focus when he started writing, but had just kept writing to finish it. When we moved those few sentences he had written from page 3 to the beginning of the paper, he seemed to feel more focused and understood how he was going to alter the rest of his paper and began thinking of evidence he could use to support his idea.