Writing Tutoring--The Wrong Way

I give the acting an F. But anyway...

Let me break down this bad session.

Sitting across from the student creates a separation between student and tutor. It no longer feels like a collaborative experience is happening but rather that the right answer is found across from the student. The student must pass the paper to the tutor who then looks it over and passes it back to the student;this is a dynamic that you would find between teacher and student, and when the teacher tells you something is wrong you fix it. No questions. But why do you have to do it? The tutor sure is not explaining why. She just says you shouldn't, which puts the onus on the student to ask for further elaboration.

On another note.

The student does not seem sure about the assignment and yet the tutor does not ask to look at the assignment. The student could very well have completely misinterpreted what they are being asked to do.

Also, when the student tells the tutor the thesis, her response makes it seem that the student has a good thesis when in fact it is not. She should right here start explaining what is required of a thesis, maybe give some handouts about thesis writing, and then have him read the rest of the paper and maybe from there they can deduce a thesis.

Instead she moves on to sentence level revision when she has not even looked at the paper. Maybe the content needs rearranging and that comma wont matter since the sentence will be gone.


What she does is text book appropriation of the author's paper by putting in her own idiosyncracies into it, specifically in the replacement of “utilize," the revision of the authors words and inserting of her own idea of what the paper means.

This is a pretty bad session. I actually have never seen this at the Writing Center. But I've seen some other things that are comparably bad.

October 17, 2010 3:58 PM