First Real Tutoring Session

This week I held my first real tutoring session on my own. Our class has paired up with Dr. Blake’s class to help look at the papers they are writing for a research project, which also helps us gain tutoring experience.
I had already read my writer’s paper the night before because I had picked it up from the Writing Center so I was lucky enough to already know what kind of paper I was working with. I was happy to find that the student seemed to be a competent writer but that her paper was only a draft so although it was pretty well done already there were things I could talk about with her. It was nice that my first tutorial would be with a student that would be able to talk about her paper and take suggestions but who I would not have to do sentence-level or grammatical work with. My only fear was that the student would be reluctant to take criticism or just be uninterested in working with me because I knew she was required to come in for her class.
However, I found that the student was quite easy to work with. She listened to the suggestions I gave her and discussed her own opinions with me. We talked about things like possibly reorganizing some of her paragraphs and adding a little bit to her conclusion. Throughout the session I felt that we did a good job of working on the paper as two peers and I think we did some worthwhile work as a result.
I found that the reading most applicable to this tutoring session was chapter eight of Ryan and Zimmerelli’s The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, which was about different types of writers and how to cope with various tutoring situations. The section on “The Unresponsive Writer” was useful because it is what I feared would happen (p. 100). It discussed how sometimes students who are required by their teachers to visit the Writing Center can be reluctant to accept help. Although it turned out that my writer was willing to work with me, I still found one piece of advice helpful. The section states that it can be good to “remind the writer that you are there to help and that the suggestions you offer are just that—suggestions that he or she may choose to accept or reject” (p. 100). I believe that this is relevant not only in a situation with an unresponsive writer but also with any relatively strong writer. The student writer I saw obviously knew how to write so I wanted to be careful not to give the impression that I thought I was better than her or could teach her but rather that I was a peer who was willing to edit her paper and offer my recommendations as an outsider to the paper, and she could choose to take my suggestions or not.
I also found the section on “The Writer with the ‘Perfect’ Paper” helpful (p. 105). While I do not think that either the writer or I thought the paper was perfect it was certainly strong. The most useful comment I took from this section was that even in a good paper “you can still encourage the writer to look for areas that might be improved” (p. 105). I liked this comment because it shows that even when a paper is already good it can always be improved and thus it reminded me that I would still have work to do with the writer.