I think I have admitted before that I am often bothered by bad grammar. I’m also really bothered by sloppy word choice and awkward sentence structures. Sometimes, in fact, I am so bothered by these smaller issues that I get distracted from looking at the larger picture. A mistake like that can really mar a well thought-out paper.
My biggest fear as a consultant, though, is probably letting a smaller error that I shouldn’t waste my time on distract me from a larger issue. I kind of felt like this happened a lot with one of the essays I was working with in a tutoring session last week. The writer used the passive voice. A lot. To the point that her use of the passive voice was distracting me from the points she was trying to make because I was actually getting lost in her sentences. While that may be a grammatical issue that needs to be addressed, because it subverts meaning and clarity, there were other smaller issues that were irritating me as well. Lazy word choice that didn’t adequately make the point. Contractions in formal writing. Simple things that the writer should be able to fix on her own anyway. But in getting so fixated on them, I almost missed the fact that her thesis wasn’t really making a point.
The best way to prepare myself for this is, honestly, probably to try and desensitize myself to the immediate urge to take a red pen to a grammatically messy paper. I have also found that reading through a draft more than once helps me get around this issue slightly. While the smaller issues tend to taint my first view of the draft and also tend to distract me from the larger picture, a lot of times the second read through allows me to look at the larger arguments being made. Though the grammar and conventions may have initially detracted from my understanding and my ability to look at a paper for its central arguments, a second read through tends to make things clearer and helps me really focus on the more serious issues.
27 March 2011
20 March 2011
The Writing Center Is Not Ikea
Minimalism.
I don't like it in my art or my furniture, and I'm not sure I like it in my tutoring style.
Jeff Brooks commented that "when you 'improve' a student's paper, you haven't been a tutor at all; you've been an editor" (168). Brooks then goes on to explain a method of tutoring that puts all of the work into the student's hands. I guess the problem I have with this method is that if your approach to tutoring is that minimalistic...why bother to have a writing consultant in the first place?
I understand the idea to which Brooks speaks, the adage around which the Writing Center is structured: North’s “We don’t make better papers, we make better writers.” When going over a paper with a fine-toothed comb and highlighting grammatical mistakes here, digressions there, it’s very easy to lose teaching to simply editing.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t a role for tutor-directed work. Just last week, I had a writing conference for my first year seminar, and I met with my class’s fellow to discuss a comparison paper I had written. After watching far too many comparison pieces fall into the infamous “Two Essay Trap,” I was actually quite worried about spending too much of my time summarizing the works that I was comparing and not enough time actually relating the two (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/organize.html). The fact of the matter is, though, that I made another mistake, which my tutor pointed out to me. In trying so hard to focus on comparing the two works, I’d missed something really important – an actual thesis that made some coherent point.
I needed my writing consultant to not be minimal with me, to sit me down and point out that I wasn’t really saying anything, or at least not saying anything clearly. And that did teach me something which applied to more than just one essay: to make sure that I never get so caught up in an individual aspect of an assignment that I forget to consider the assignment as a whole.
Sure, in certain cases, it makes sense to use a minimalist approach. For a truly engaged student, a lot of the issues with a given essay can be fixed with introspection and self-correction. But if a student isn’t engaged or doesn’t understand the material or, like in my case, is so wrapped up in some smaller aspect of their work, minimalist tutoring will not do them any good. At that point, not only are you not being an editor…you’re also not being helpful.
I don't like it in my art or my furniture, and I'm not sure I like it in my tutoring style.
Jeff Brooks commented that "when you 'improve' a student's paper, you haven't been a tutor at all; you've been an editor" (168). Brooks then goes on to explain a method of tutoring that puts all of the work into the student's hands. I guess the problem I have with this method is that if your approach to tutoring is that minimalistic...why bother to have a writing consultant in the first place?
I understand the idea to which Brooks speaks, the adage around which the Writing Center is structured: North’s “We don’t make better papers, we make better writers.” When going over a paper with a fine-toothed comb and highlighting grammatical mistakes here, digressions there, it’s very easy to lose teaching to simply editing.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t a role for tutor-directed work. Just last week, I had a writing conference for my first year seminar, and I met with my class’s fellow to discuss a comparison paper I had written. After watching far too many comparison pieces fall into the infamous “Two Essay Trap,” I was actually quite worried about spending too much of my time summarizing the works that I was comparing and not enough time actually relating the two (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/organize.html). The fact of the matter is, though, that I made another mistake, which my tutor pointed out to me. In trying so hard to focus on comparing the two works, I’d missed something really important – an actual thesis that made some coherent point.
I needed my writing consultant to not be minimal with me, to sit me down and point out that I wasn’t really saying anything, or at least not saying anything clearly. And that did teach me something which applied to more than just one essay: to make sure that I never get so caught up in an individual aspect of an assignment that I forget to consider the assignment as a whole.
Sure, in certain cases, it makes sense to use a minimalist approach. For a truly engaged student, a lot of the issues with a given essay can be fixed with introspection and self-correction. But if a student isn’t engaged or doesn’t understand the material or, like in my case, is so wrapped up in some smaller aspect of their work, minimalist tutoring will not do them any good. At that point, not only are you not being an editor…you’re also not being helpful.
15 March 2011
Theoretically Ready-- But Is That Enough?
For several months now, the students in English 383 have looked at articles on theory and hypothetical problem consultations formulated by previous writing consultants. Some of the problems of these hypothetical papers were incredibly formulaic; certain issues always seemed to come up: organization and the ability to correctly cite and command evidence, among others. When our practical midterm came up, none of the issues I expected to encounter surfaced and I found myself needing to extend beyond the basic theories we had discussed in class. Half a semester of theory still had not really prepared me for a more practical tutorial. Practicing written commentary and discussing hypothetical tutorials did nothing to assuage the stresses of working with an actual writer for one of the first times.
Writing commentary was a drawn-out process. More often than with most of my writing, I stopped and went back to change a single word in a sentence to help to hone the meaning and change the tone slightly. After reading over the assignment sheet, like Anna Kendall recommends all writers and tutors do, and realizing that the paper was a comparison piece, I expected to work with the same kind of two-essay trap that many of the sample papers we have read before fell into (3). My marginal notes were almost nonexistent, except to point out which end note corresponded to a set of underlining or a section of the text. In an attempt to avoid commentary that was too directive and more “authoritarian” than writing center commentary should be, I focused my comments on explanations from a reader’s perspective and questions that hopefully were not too demanding of the writer (Straub 225). Authoritarian commentary that dictated specific changes that could be made may have come across as offensive, and the paper was actually strong enough on its own that a few leading questions would have been enough direction to clarify some of the issues.
Sitting down to conference with another consultant about his paper was slightly intimidating. Even with pre-written commentary in hand, I felt slightly unprepared. I repeatedly had to reference my notes, and I worried that I would not be able to clearly articulate the things I wanted to say. I forced myself to take more time choosing my words before I spoke than I normally would because I did not want to say something that might accidentally derail the friendly tone I tried painstakingly to achieve in my written commentary. I knew that, while I would have time with my written commentary to go back and rethink a sentence or a specific word I chose, in conference I could not have the luxury of editing myself, so I had to be more careful about what I said before I said it. Even so, as we sat in conference, I found myself occasionally slipping up and using words like “good” that we, as consultants, are not supposed to use.
Being on the other side of the consultation further demonstrated the point that the words chosen for written commentary and in conference must be careful and deliberate. Even though the other student acknowledged that my paper was strong, and the details he suggested for revision were smaller things that I could change and conquer easily, I felt slightly threatened, even though his commentary was friendly. This was my paper, a paper I had worked hard on, and any suggestion seemed slightly upsetting. If he had said something in a harsh way, I probably would have become really distressed about the fate of my paper.
Working with the other student, one of the largest issues I identified in his paper was my confusion over the focus of his introductory paragraph. As I read through the paragraph, I noticed that several of the statements within it could have acted as the central focus for both the paragraph and the paper, and I worked with Miles to try to clarify his point. When addressing the issue of unclear focus with in “Focus on Focus,” Bithyah Shaparenko asked her students to explain the focus of each of their paragraphs (11). This is what I attempted to do with the student with whom I worked. He looked over his introduction briefly and then explained the focus of his essay in his own words. I suggested that if he decided to revise his paper, he should write that down and further emphasize that point as his focus, because it had not been clear to me when I had read his draft.
Another important issue that we sat down to address focused on the clarity of certain points to an uninformed reader. This portion of the session stood out for me because both the writer and I identified the same issue as something that needed to be discussed. The class this student was writing for was a film studies class, and the content of the paper was very much focused on specific cinematic and thematic details of the films being studied. There were certain quotes in the paper, then, which did not make sense to me when reading the paper because they referenced points of the films which I did not understand. This led to a discussion about audience and also about expanding on the quotations used. First of all, we discussed the fact that the audience that he was writing for would probably already understand certain references and that, for specific references to scenes in the films or to specific details of the films, it was acceptable to make less general references. There were also some quotations which were presented without any real context, and I suggested that, upon revision, more explanation of the quotations used would be helpful.
In an earlier post to my blog, I explained that my first individual tutorial left me feeling terrified. After this practical midterm, I have begun to wonder if that anxiety over a consultation will ever go away. I think the fear comes from a combination of knowing that a consultant’s input can have serious impact on the final grade that a work earns and the fact that theoretical study can only do so much to prepare a consultant for an actual consultation. I hope that with more practice, this anxiety might go away, but for now, I felt like practical application was only minimally helped by the theory we have studied.
Writing commentary was a drawn-out process. More often than with most of my writing, I stopped and went back to change a single word in a sentence to help to hone the meaning and change the tone slightly. After reading over the assignment sheet, like Anna Kendall recommends all writers and tutors do, and realizing that the paper was a comparison piece, I expected to work with the same kind of two-essay trap that many of the sample papers we have read before fell into (3). My marginal notes were almost nonexistent, except to point out which end note corresponded to a set of underlining or a section of the text. In an attempt to avoid commentary that was too directive and more “authoritarian” than writing center commentary should be, I focused my comments on explanations from a reader’s perspective and questions that hopefully were not too demanding of the writer (Straub 225). Authoritarian commentary that dictated specific changes that could be made may have come across as offensive, and the paper was actually strong enough on its own that a few leading questions would have been enough direction to clarify some of the issues.
Sitting down to conference with another consultant about his paper was slightly intimidating. Even with pre-written commentary in hand, I felt slightly unprepared. I repeatedly had to reference my notes, and I worried that I would not be able to clearly articulate the things I wanted to say. I forced myself to take more time choosing my words before I spoke than I normally would because I did not want to say something that might accidentally derail the friendly tone I tried painstakingly to achieve in my written commentary. I knew that, while I would have time with my written commentary to go back and rethink a sentence or a specific word I chose, in conference I could not have the luxury of editing myself, so I had to be more careful about what I said before I said it. Even so, as we sat in conference, I found myself occasionally slipping up and using words like “good” that we, as consultants, are not supposed to use.
Being on the other side of the consultation further demonstrated the point that the words chosen for written commentary and in conference must be careful and deliberate. Even though the other student acknowledged that my paper was strong, and the details he suggested for revision were smaller things that I could change and conquer easily, I felt slightly threatened, even though his commentary was friendly. This was my paper, a paper I had worked hard on, and any suggestion seemed slightly upsetting. If he had said something in a harsh way, I probably would have become really distressed about the fate of my paper.
Working with the other student, one of the largest issues I identified in his paper was my confusion over the focus of his introductory paragraph. As I read through the paragraph, I noticed that several of the statements within it could have acted as the central focus for both the paragraph and the paper, and I worked with Miles to try to clarify his point. When addressing the issue of unclear focus with in “Focus on Focus,” Bithyah Shaparenko asked her students to explain the focus of each of their paragraphs (11). This is what I attempted to do with the student with whom I worked. He looked over his introduction briefly and then explained the focus of his essay in his own words. I suggested that if he decided to revise his paper, he should write that down and further emphasize that point as his focus, because it had not been clear to me when I had read his draft.
Another important issue that we sat down to address focused on the clarity of certain points to an uninformed reader. This portion of the session stood out for me because both the writer and I identified the same issue as something that needed to be discussed. The class this student was writing for was a film studies class, and the content of the paper was very much focused on specific cinematic and thematic details of the films being studied. There were certain quotes in the paper, then, which did not make sense to me when reading the paper because they referenced points of the films which I did not understand. This led to a discussion about audience and also about expanding on the quotations used. First of all, we discussed the fact that the audience that he was writing for would probably already understand certain references and that, for specific references to scenes in the films or to specific details of the films, it was acceptable to make less general references. There were also some quotations which were presented without any real context, and I suggested that, upon revision, more explanation of the quotations used would be helpful.
In an earlier post to my blog, I explained that my first individual tutorial left me feeling terrified. After this practical midterm, I have begun to wonder if that anxiety over a consultation will ever go away. I think the fear comes from a combination of knowing that a consultant’s input can have serious impact on the final grade that a work earns and the fact that theoretical study can only do so much to prepare a consultant for an actual consultation. I hope that with more practice, this anxiety might go away, but for now, I felt like practical application was only minimally helped by the theory we have studied.
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