Thoughts on tutoring writing
Well, I just finished giving feedback on the first drafts of my three high-school writing students’ first essays of the year. It took a total of almost 3 hours or so, but I didn’t do them all at the same time. They will need further revision, so their next drafts are due Monday.
I think it was a good decision to take on writing tutoring this year. These three students are familiar students, I have graded their writings before, and they are good writers who need more practice and more fine-tuning than teaching. They know how to write a paper and now they need to hone their skills. I’m not sure I’ll teach a Writing 1 class again until Hans is that age (around 10 or so). Although it’s a good work and it’s always encouraging to see the difference at the end of the year, having to teach the process of writing — especially to 10 and 11 year old boys — often feels like banging your head against a wall. And that even with a great program and a clear outline of how to go about doing it. “How do I communicate what is wrong with this?” is the question a writing tutor has to ask no matter who the student is or what the problem is. Once you’ve figured out what’s wrong with it (which is often the biggest hurdle), it’s easier to communicate to a high school student who knows what she’s doing than to an adolescent boy who doesn’t care what he’s doing. :)
Still, staring at a sentence — even of a talented high school girl — and figuring out why exactly it’s not quite right is a challenge. I haven’t done writing for 2 years now and I’m rusty. I’m glad I took on this project so that I can keep up the skill of recognizing what needs to be corrected and I can remember the phrases and examples I’ve developed over my 3 years of teaching writing to get my point across.
“Don’t say in 4 words what you can say with 1 word; it’s more effective and forceful to use one meaning-packed word than to have a long sentence made up short, everyday words.”
“It’s unclear whether this pronoun refers to Odysseus or Homer.”
“Every sentence in your paper needs your own words in it; you are the author. Don’t let quotes just sit there in the middle of your paragraph; say something about it.”
“Three sentences do not a well-developed paragraph make.”
But the hardest part of all is dealing with organizational issues. It’s a waste of time to go through and give feedback on the word and sentence level, then get to the end and realize that the paragraph you just gave feedback on has no bearing on the stated thesis. What I forgot until halfway through the second paper was that I need to go through and read the whole paper all the way through and ensure each paragraph is relevant and ordered properly and has decent topic and conclusion sentences and quotes to back up its point. Sigh.
One thing I am pleased with so far is this concept of doing the tutoring online. My students email me their drafts in .doc format, I give feedback (this time I used footnotes to give comments and colored, highlighted text to show additions and colored, highlighted, strike-through text to show what they should delete), I convert it to pdf and send it back to them. Typing is so much easier and more pleasant than writing out comments! I’m sure I commented more and more fully explained myself by typing than I was wont to do with a pen before — won’t that please the students? :) Also, I was able several times to cut and paste an explanation from one student to another. This does only work because these students already know how to write. This isn’t a writing class, this is writing tutoring and there is a big difference. After my last Writing 1 class with 10-13 year-old boys where I tried to do most things by email, I realized I wouldn’t ever run a class online again. Beginning writers need face-to-face time; you need to be able to see that they understand what you are saying and you need to have times to watch them put their ideas on paper. But tutoring older students by email will work well, I think.
Did you notice that I have only said “feedback” and never “correction”? :) It’s not that I don’t correct punctuation or grammar errors I encounter, but that is not the primary point. A paper can have perfect grammar and perfect punctuation and still be perfectly dull or perfectly obtuse. I am being paid to develop their style and prepare them for college writing, not to nit-pick their punctuation and grammar. A professor cares more for the thought behind the paper; now, that thought will be clearest when properly punctuated, but only if the thought itself was clear before it was written down and only if the word choice was such that it communicated that thought. So if you saw my feedback versions of their drafts, you would see that the footnotes include almost as many words as their drafts. I don’t just want to correct the draft in front of me, I want to teach them principles so they will become better with each essay. Just as I tell them not to let the quote speak for itself, but explicitly state the point and connection you intended to make, I cannot let any corrections speak for themselves, but must do my best to communicate why its best to do this rather than that. Mostly I explain what is wrong, explain what is best, and leave the correction — the revision — of the sentence or paragraph to them. Then they have to apply the instruction, they have to think about it, and I am able to see if they understood or not.
When I woke up this morning and had three drafts waiting in my inbox, I wondered how I would feel about it by the end of the day. After finishing the task, I am glad that I took it on. If I had waited to do any further writing instruction until Hans needed it I would have had to relearn all I spent 3 years agonizing over. I will still have to do that for the beginning writing process and method, but the actual feedback part is what I spent so much brain power on. I wanted to be able to differentiate between style differences (not “correct” something just because he didn’t say it the way I would have) and to practice looking over several of one student’s assignments and being able to notice and see what the root trouble was — then how to advise them. I always wanted to refrain from rewriting their sentences myself but instead to explain things to them so that they would be able to rewrite them themselves. It takes a lot of thought and those thoughts escape when they go unused.
So, I’m glad I’m now able to use them again.
