Talking about writing
Adapted from material compiled by Kary Pratt, August 1986
Tutoring is a social situation, a very distinct face-to-face interaction that changes with different participants, and so it is difficult to describe the sort of talk that characterizes it. The direction of this talk derives from the writer's feelings and ideas regarding the text and the work that has gone into it, not solely from the text itself. The best tutorials lead, encourage and prompt writers to reflect on their work and to engage in further composing and editing. Your talk is a guide to promote this inner dialogue. It requires a certain sort of self-control. The appropriate sense of control, an ability to identify and promote direction without taking over from the writer, is what is most difficult to master in tutoring. Appropriate is the key word, since control of a dictatorial kind is very easy to assert. One circumstance might exacerbate your difficulties - the immediacy of the situations: you have to say something right there and then with no advance preparation. The temptations are three: to comfort; to do the work for the writer; to deal with the problem abstractly (seeing individual problems as types and offering general rules as solutions). The kind of self-control that enables you to steer clear of these paths, and leave the writer to do the work, comes with time and awareness.
There are several ways to recognize and avoid potential problems that may arise from the responses listed above. The single most important thing to remember is that your tutoring must be centered on both students and their papers. While you are there to help correct problems of grammar, mechanics and usage in a particular text, your primary function is to help students move easily between the stages of writing and overcome the anxiety connected with is in general. Sometimes, it isn't easy to determine where a student is and what sort of discussion and what kinds of suggestions will promote improvement. Remember, you're essentially an observer whose comments on the composing process should lead the student to new, more productive and efficient ways of expression. To accomplish this, you will need to let the writer do the writing.
How exactly does one keep the discussion student-centered not take over from the writer? You don't want to simply ask the question "what does the writer want to do?" While it is important to have a sense of what a writer expects from you, you won't really improve a student's writing in general if you're asked to look for grammar and spelling errors and you ignore the absence of discernable structure in the paper; you'll have trouble helping writers make outlines when they haven't yet any ideas with which to fill them. After learning from the writer what their expectations are, you'll probably need to take a step back to see where the immediate issue fits into a larger process. Your job is to bring the student's intentions and location in the writing process closer together.
In order to help you thing about composing "locations", I offer the following list, with the warning that composing is not a neat linear process, and that "locations" can be pretty idiosyncratic and are always a metaphor for processes that often occur simultaneously. Included in each description are some specific suggestions for approaches that may help you, and some "tricks" to try for specific problems you may identify.
Invention and Discovery
This phrase describes the time when the student is fishing for ideas, audience or form. Invention and discovery can occur at any time during the writing process, though academic writers seem to work hardest on it at the beginning of a paper. Most students come to the writing center to find a topic for their paper within the rubric of the question assigned. They generally need help narrowing things down. Often students who come in for help with their first or second paper haven�t yet gotten a sense for what it means to find a thesis and argue critically. Talking through the topic will help these students a great deal. Asking what they think about a given statement is a good way to start. Help them to identify those things they say that are potential theses, and provide examples as to how they might go about arguing such a case. You might say something like: �What you�ve just said seems really interesting. Why do you think that�s true? Was it something in the text or a lecture or in conference that prompted you to think of that?� Encourage them to ask these sort of questions, given the information they provide. After a few minutes of questioning, if the writer seems hell-bent on repeating the same piece of information or explanation, without providing any commentary, you might try a more direct approach: I�ve stunned a few writers into considering a passage in light of what they think by asking �So what?� If the writer seems to have nothing to say about the topic assigned you might ask what bothered, puzzled, enticed or annoyed him about the work he is to write on and continue from there.
When a student seems to have an idea or many ideas arrived at either through your questioning or independently encourage freewriting for five minutes. Freewriting is a great way to find and/or flesh out ideas at any time during writing. Just ask the writer to spend five minutes writing down ideas continuously. Point out that freewriting doesn�t require full sentences or a logical pattern or even punctuation� the goal is just to commit ideas, no matter how implausible, to paper. Five minutes later, you can sort through these fragments and help decide which ideas merit more consideration or how these ideas might be ordered in a formal or informal outline; in any event, you will have started the student off writing and thinking about ideas that have been narrowed down, as well as suggested a form in which they might evolve into an essay. This technique has many variations (some can be found in Horton's essay) and is especially useful for students who have writer�s block. One variation that can be used for those who prefer to compose on the computer is to turn the screen to black and freewrite. Sometimes the visual absence of what one has written can relieve the anxiety connected with writing and cure a case of writer�s block.
What is most important at this �location� is to encourage students to write with and to move toward some organized idea of what they�d like to say. While ideas are born, refined and developed during writing, it is difficult and discouraging to begin an essay without a direction or a notion of a thesis. If you suspect a student will have organizational problems during writing you might suggest writing the thesis out as a question and/or a statement and copying it directly onto the draft at the beginning of every paragraph. You might talk a bit about how each paragraph in the essay has a different relation to the thesis statement if you do use this strategy; no need to have the same point iterated ad nauseam. This is a simple trick that is often quickly outgrown, but it�s easy, and really helps many beginning academic writers to maintain a sense of continuity in their work.
Outlining
After students have done some freewriting, or when people come in with a lot of ideas, they may need help organizing them coherently. Some students skip straight to writing without an outline of any sort; others need or like to plan every move before beginning to write. It often depends on the specific project, its difficulty and its length. If a student needs to outline for one reason or another, there are all sorts of ways to outline comfortably that differ from the traditional junior high format based on the idea of the five paragraph theme. Generally, I suggest a much more flexible structure depending on the needs of the writer. For example, some writers like to simply list their ideas and use them as a loose guide, organizing them as they draft. Others feel comfortable making a sort of computer flow chart; this is especially good for students who are not sure how their ideas work in relation to one another or are familiar with the format for scientific work. A student who is working on a paper comparing two ideas may need a grid in which to list the variable of the two subjects in columns and state the difference or similarity between each element in another column. That sort of format helps the student whose difficulty is distinguishing between the organization of information and the information itself. There are all sorts of variations that will help a student organize his ideas before writing. You need to listen to students and their concerns and tailor something for each particular project.
During Writing
The writer is actually drafting. A few people will come in doing well, just to check in� you�ll have little to contribute at this stage but encouragement and support. However, most writers don�t come to us at this point unless they are experiencing writer�s block or some organizational difficulty or logical inconsistency. To help with writer�s block, you can freewrite with students, and often just bouncing things off you will get them back on track. Sometimes writers come in very unhappy because they�re no longer arguing what they thought when they began their paper. This is a golden opportunity to emphasize how one learns through writing. Encourage such writers not to abandon their new ideas, but to incorporate them into a new draft. Whatever the problem, you need to read and talk through the student�s work, checking carefully for transitional problems. It�s easy at this stage to step over the boundaries of tutoring and overdirect the student� but remember: you cannot do the work of the writer. You are there to prompt new ideas but be sure that if a student comes in with writing in hand that you don�t stray too far from the text. It is difficult sometimes to keep your own ideas at a distance; this is not the time for you to advance the wonderful idea you had about Herodotus at the end of fall semester (too late for your own paper!) of your first year. You can make suggestions, but they will not help the writer unless the writer can absorb and reformulate them independently. This is a �location� of reformulation and articulation; your job is to provide the proper setting to promote it.
Revising
The writer and the tutor agree that the text is a changeable draft. It is your responsibility to provide and additional view of the text, often incorporation the writer�s specific concerns. Many students arrive at this stage with a fairly complete draft prepared to revise as well as edit. Here they are concerned with whether or not they have said what they intended. You must read through the draft carefully. I often do this aloud. If you are sure that they will edit later then you don�t need to correct a lot of little errors and spelling errors (they will often say that they are planning to do that later). Since their primary concern is at the level of ideas and organization, I like to give them a short summary of what I think their thesis is and what evidence they have provided to support it. When I first began tutoring, I made the mistake of stating outright that a student lacked the appropriate amount of evidence or that they gave far too much explanation and not enough argument, or whatever. With this structure the onus was on me to provide the missing information or rewrite. By contrast, summarizing the writer�s work to the writer puts the onus of judgement (�That�s not quite what I intended to say�) and invention (�That last idea needs more support. Maybe I could��) on the writer, where it belongs. Summarizing stresses the positive and doesn�t discourage writers. It also presents the weaknesses of the paper, providing a model of a process of critique and review that writers can recreate on their own in the future. Most will quickly identify the gaps between what they wanted to say and what they have written and will immediately start to correct the interpretation or add missing information, or simply recognize that something they have said is unsupportable or unnecessary. You will be amazed at how quickly some students will internalize this new sense of audience and gain a great deal of confidence about writing in general.
Simply identifying or listing problems directly often makes writers paranoid and doesn�t really give them a sense of audience, but rather a sense of writing as mechanical and requiring certain �things� that they simply lacked. One of the things you want to do in this stage is to provide an overview of the argument in general, without fragmenting it. When you are through reading a paper, you might say something like �Let me see if I can understand your argument� and describe what you have read as clearly as you can. A good visual complement to this verbal description is to run your pen down the column of the page in a straight line when the argument is proceeding well and a squiggly line where the text veers off course, is confusing, or becomes too obscure. If the paper doesn�t make any sense to you or if there isn�t really an argument, but rather a long series of descriptions and quotations try to summarize that (�You seem to be describing [topic]. I�m not sure what your are doing with this description. Can you clarify what you are trying to prove for me?�). You then have an opportunity to help them define an argument and show them how to incorporate the sort of description and quotation they have already written into an organized essay.
Editing
The writer sees his draft as complete except for proofreading. This can sometimes be a difficult spot, especially when a writer comes in thinking that her work is nearly ready for final typing and you find a structural, conceptual or organizational problem. You must be very tactful; I often direct the conversation toward one of the larger problems and offer some suggestions as to how it can be corrected. Overwhelming writers, especially when they believe that all they need is proofreading, can do more harm than good. However you must tailor your suggestion to the amount of time writers have before the paper is due, as well as how motivated they are to make further changes. Most students bring these drafts in the night before they are due and have very little time (and often little desire) to revise. Here it is appropriate to discuss setting aside time for revising. You can help students to set personal deadlines before the paper is due, and to plan realistically to allow for enough time to write and revise. Try not to sound as though you are scolding them; the last thing they want to hear when they are feeling overwhelmed is that they shouldn�t have gotten into this mess. Occasionally, when students have been working very hard in earnest to finish the paper by the deadline but are still far from finished or very confused, I suggest that they talk to their instructor about the problem, prepared to hand in what they have done to that point and ask for some additional time to re-work the draft by a certain date. (Professors are generally happier to grant an extension if they have at least a draft in hand.) I point out that this is not something that can be done on every paper (especially not Hum 110 papers!) and that they ought to respect their professor�s generosity and hand the completed version in on the agreed date.
The editing stage is a good time to teach students to correct their grammar. When you encounter a grammatical error be sure to make clear precisely what the error is and how it can be avoided or correct in the future. If possible, find a similar instance in the paper where the writer has gotten it right; seeing that one is oneself able to do it right is more convincing than seeing that someone else can get it right. You may want to use the resources in the center to provide other examples of corrected sentences or make up some of your own. If you encounter the error for a second time in the paper, point it out and ask the writer to correct it; if he or she can�t, then try to explain it again. Once a student demonstrates an understanding and ability to correct, you can just identify subsequent errors directly on the page and leave corrections to the writer.
It is much more difficult to help correct syntactical errors; often you must help writers rewrite several sentences before they can do it themselves. Don�t be surprised if the writer�s sentences are still a bit awkward after they have been corrected� one session will hardly make a great writer, but a readable, though slightly awkward sentence is better than an incomprehensible one. You may develop a trick or two to help writers with their syntax. One� which seems to work for a writer who composes exceptionally long sentences with improper verb constructions� is to recommend that there be more than two words separating the subject and the verb: it�s harder to make a passive construction with this rule and it forces the writer to identify the subject and the verb. At first, I hadn�t realized that other people didn�t necessarily identify subject and verb without thinking about it but after some practice at separating the two and understanding how they work several students seemed to have acquired the ability and have outgrown the rule. Sometimes simply drawing attention to the problem in the writer�s mind in a consistent way will correct the error. You might suggest that a student think twice about a sentence containing more than ten words or less than four depending on whether he or she has a tendency for run-ons or fragments. Unfortunately, few students come in for more than a few sessions, so it is useful to recommend ways of reading that draw attention to grammatical and syntactical problems that can be used when the writer has no immediate audience. Armed with the ability to identify these problems, a student will often try very hard to correct the error independently and will frequently be quite successful.
Evaluation
Here the writer is basically finished and has a competent, well written� or fairly well written� draft that is largely free of conceptual, syntactical, grammatical, structural and organizational errors. This writer simply wants to know what you think about the work. Working with this kind of student and paper can be fun, especially if you are familiar with its topic. You can help the writer to develop the ideas more fully or present a new way of seeing them; in short, you can challenge and encourage the other student as you do yourself in your own work.
Meta-conference
The student comes in with a paper returned from the professor exhibiting the scrawl: �Go to the Writing Center�. This is perhaps the most difficult situation to deal with since, as tutors, we do not have the right to second-guess the professor�s comments or lack of them. Here we must be clear what our role is with regard to the instructor. We never play student-advocates in teacher-student relationships. The guidelines are very clear; in all instances the student must understand that we respect the professor�s position completely. Or, to put it in less loaded terms� for we are not teacher-advocates either� the professor is simply part of the rhetorical context in which the writer is trying to operate. We cannot change that context: all we can do is help the writer operate in it and other contexts like it. In practice, this rule means that we never evaluate or second-guess any professor�s assignment or comments. If students are unclear about either of those, we send them back to the professor for clarification. Even when writers come in confused by what seem to be poorly designed assignments, or, more commonly, crushed by what appear to be unwarrantably hostile or unsympathetic comments, we pass no judgement. We simply try, in every way we can, to help the writer make constructive sense of the situation.