How I Feel About Becoming a Writing Tutor

As someone who truly enjoys writing, I am looking forward to becoming a writing tutor this session. While I have tutored in the past, my tutoring has never been at the college level and has never had such importance attached to it. I feel confident that I can serve as a great resource to my fellow students and help them to realize their potential and become improved writers. My career goal is to become a creative writing professor at the undergraduate level so I am definitely psyched about learning about tutoring writing, even though we won't be doing much, if any work in the creative writing realm. My personal experience of having had difficulty with the ACT exam and having taken ENC101 which included ACT preparation allows me to relate to the struggles of the tutees and will further serve in my future tutoring sessions.

After having observed an actual tutoring session last night, I feel even more excited about becoming a tutor. I feel like it is something that is well within my abilities and will be a rewarding part of my growth as both a student and future professor. I can only hope that I can live up to the expectations of the tutees and truly help them not only pass the ACT but also to have them feel confident about their writing, not only when it comes to English but all courses.

What I Have Learned About Being a Writing Tutor

What I have learned thus far about being a writing tutor is that a tutor is not an editor. It's simply not a matter of "correcting" or "fixing" the errors of grammar, syntax, etc. You are more of a guide, someone whose job is to guide the student through the revision process. There are three main approaches for tutoring writing: student-centered, teacher-centered and collaborative. As a tutor you have to decide which approach best suits the the situation at hand, but as a general rule of thumb, the teacher-centered approach should rarely if ever be used in peer tutoring. the student-centered and collaborative approaches tend to work best since the tuttee is treated as an equal instead of the power dynamic favoring the tutor such as in the authorative teacher-centered approach.

There are also some basic theories on tutoring such as the social constructionist theory, reader response, talk and writing, collaborative learning and feminism. These theories when applied in tutoring writing help to foster improvement and instill confidence in the student while at the same time providing a framework for how the tutor should should approach their sessions.

Additionally, I've also learned that to be a successful tutor one needs to concentrate on what are known as higher order concerns (HOCs) such as thesis, structure, organization, and tone. If the emphasis is placed on HOCs instead of lower order concerns (LOCs) such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation, the tutor can help the student focus in on the greater problems in their writing instead of losing time on minor errors. Since most tutoring sessions are time based, you want to make the most out of each session by addressing the HOCs in an effort to help the student improve their writing in a more efficient manner.

While I still have much to learn about the tutoring process, I believe that what I have learned so far will serve me well and provide a solid foundation for my future tutoring experiences.

Why I said what I said to Melissa

After reading both Melissa's Essay and the poem she read, I felt that she missed the overall purpose of the essay. According to the guidelines set forth by Prof.Smith the students had to not only define symbolism and cite examples of it in their chosen poem, but also had to explain how the use of symbolism helped to further clarify the meaning of the piece. Also, I felt that maybe Melissa got lost in abstractions about the 7 deadly sins and lost her train of thought, which caused her to lose focus on the criteria in question.

Why I said what I said to Stephanie

The reason I asked Stephanie to give a personal reaction to the tone of the poem she had read is that since tone has to deal with how the writing affects the reader, I felt it need to have Stephanie's own reaction to the piece and not just an objective view of the author's use of tone. I saw this as a higher order concern because from reading the whole piece over twice, I felt it was a bit dry and academic. It lacked a personal element that defined Stephanie's point of view. I felt she had a good command of the language and the format, so I tried to find a place where I could have her develop her own ideas further and probed her with questions in an effort to get her to reexamine her work.