This week my writing consultant did not come to our shadowing appointment...I don't know whether he forgot or didn't have anyone to tutor, but it was a little sad because I had some experience last week with editing my friend's and sister's papers and I wanted to see how I could apply that in an actual tutoring session. Thankfully, another of my friends had asked me to help him with his paper, and so I at least had some sort of tutoring experience this week.
This assignment was a challenge both for him and for me. He had been writing summaries of articles all semester, about two pages each, and this assignment was to synthesize and play the articles off of each other into some kind of thesis and write a 4-5 page paper. Such broad instructions can either be liberating or just baffling, and in this case it baffled him. I just had him talk through the articles, explaining to me the main points of each, or the argument of each, and then helping him see them not just as individual, unrelated blips on a screen but as interconnected and interrelated, either how they supported each other or brought out each other's nuances. Simply mentally mapping them this way helped him find an argument to get behind.
Even more interesting than this was learning about his writing style. In our digital stories we have been hearing about all different kinds of writing styles, from literally filing information into a book to pouring it all out onto the paper and then sorting it from there. Most likely because they have been professors, none of the writing styles have been bad, just different. But when I asked my friend how he typically writes a paper he answered "Oh, I usually just start writing and then figure it out as I go". And my first reaction was to scream "THAT'S A HORRIBLE IDEA!" and run out of the room. Just kidding. But I did NOT think that this was a good way to approach an essay, especially coming from the highly structured way I typically write.
Then again, that raised an interesting question for me: Is there such a thing as a "bad" writing process?
Rachel,
ReplyDeleteI like how you ask the person you are tutoring to summarize the points of whatever article they are writing on. I think it's very important for the consultant to reach back to the literature being examined, instead of focusing exclusively on what is in the paper already. What is not in the paper may be even more important, and I think your blog post speak to this idea.