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.