From UVA Writing Center

Contents 1 The Tutorial 1.1 Beginning the Session 1.2 During the Session 1.3 Some Pedagogy Points 1.4 Ending the Session 2 The Essay 2.1 Diagnosing the Essay 2.2 Dealing with Organization and Style 3 Assignments 3.1 Analysis 3.2 Negotiating Bad Assignments 4 Some Administrative Points 4.1 Professionalism 4.2 Dealing With a Difficult Student 5 Appendix: Helpful Reference Works

The Tutorial

Beginning the Session

Introduce yourself to the student. Try to settle the student into the carrel comfortably. Ask the student his or her name and spend a little time getting to know each other--especially during the first meeting with a standing appointment.

Find out about the assignment. Ask:

• “When is the assignment due?” Knowing how much time the student has to work on an assignment can help you tailor your approach in the session. Some students come in literally hours before an essay is due, in which case it is senseless to spend the session suggesting major revisions.
• “What is the assignment, exactly?” Ask to see if the student has the assignment sheet--sometimes it's more clear about the essay's objectives than the student can be. Sometimes the student needs help interpreting the assignment. Show students how to read assignments by underlining key terms.
• “Did your professor/teaching assistant send you here?” This question is important; some instructors ask that the student work on particular problems during the session. The instructor may also have written a note to you, the tutor, explaining the reasons for his/ her sending the student to the Center in the first place.
• “What do you want to do during the session?” Make sure that you always ask this question so that the student knows that you recognize him or her as an individual and not simply as a feature in a process. Sometimes students respond to this question by asking, “Can you proofread my paper?” Explain that you will be working with the student, looking for ways to improve it and developing techniques he or she can use on other papers too.

During the Session

Read the essay. Keep in mind that you're reading a draft, so many of the local level errors you find are a product of the student focusing on and working out his/her ideas. Concentrate on the higher level structures (problem statement, introduction, argument / evidence, organization) rather than on style and grammar unless the instructor or the student has specifically asked to focus on these things or you have some time to devote to it at the end of your session. As you read the student’s paper, concentrate on whether the student followed the directions of the assignment and addressed the goals of the assignment. Is the student seeking answers to appropriate questions or making an argument that is relevant to the field of study and the level of the course?

Make the student an active participant in the session. Ask questions rather than simply tell the student what to do. Play devil's advocate in order to help a student refine the argument, but let the student know that you are doing so in order to help. Make sure that you do not do all of the talking.

Work within the student's range of abilities. Remember that you aren't there to perfect the paper, but to help the student learn about the writing process. Although you may be tempted to “fix” the entire essay, you must work at the student's pace and skill level. Results may be slow, but they should be permanent.

Don't side with the student against the teaching assistant or professor. DO NOT criticize the instructor. If a T.A. or professor's comments seem to be genuinely insulting or inflammatory, do not make an issue of it in the session. You should encourage the student to focus not on the insensitivities of the instructor (about which you can do nothing) but on the weaknesses of the essay (about which you can usually do something). However, mention any particularly unprofessional comments to the Writing Center Director.

Be positive. Often students come to the Center feeling browbeaten by comments on their essays that they at least perceive as being combative or destructive. Emphasize the virtues of the essay - if an original idea is expressed poorly or confusingly, give credit to the student for that originality and help him or her make the most of it.

Be honest about the extent to which the paper ought to be revised. While you ought to be positive, you must also be careful not to exaggerate the virtues of the essay.

Be flexible about methods and strategies. Some students benefit from pacing or dictating to you. Others benefit from using the Center's resources, including dictionaries and reference works. Some sessions are most profitable when they allow the student to rework unclear paragraphs or sketch an outline for a revision.

Do not try to guess what grade the paper will get. Students will often ask you to predict what grade they will receive or whether or not the changes that you have suggested will make it an "A" paper. Tell them that there is no way of knowing and that it all depends on the professor. This way you avoid having them return in a week blaming you for being wrong (or trying to use your prediction as leverage with a professor).

Some Pedagogy Points

The sessions are basically a Socratic way to get students to learn how to recognize problems with arguments for themselves before they bring in a draft. To that end, there are a few things you can do in a session that will model the kind of critical approach students should be learning.

Check Questions The more questions you can ask the student, the more the student will start to ask those questions while writing. Leading questions are a good way to get students to start to recognize parts of their own arguments. "Where do you think the claim is in this essay? How about the conclusion? Does the conclusion sum up your claim better than your introduction?"

Outlining Students should always be ready to mark up their drafts. One good technique is to have the student write the (possible) main idea of each paragraph in the margin. Then look at those ideas, map them out, and see if they're logically organized. This kind of backwards outlining (also called glossing) is a good way to find out if a draft is actually following a clear structure, or needs one.

Reading Aloud This is one of the simplest and most effective techniques to check for coherence and cohesion. What's in a student's head may not be what's on the paper, but students may not recognize that when reading it themselves. By reading aloud, the student can externalize the ideas they're trying to convey, and hear how they may sound to the audience. On a simple level, it helps with sentence structure and flow; the student may think they wrote "economic development," but they actually wrote "elephant deepak chopra." When read to him or herself, even though they see "elephant deepak chopra," they're thinking "economic development," and that's what registers in their brains. By reading aloud, students can catch mistakes, find where punctuation may be needed, listen for natural sentence and paragraph breaks, and discover other stylistic elements before they turn in a final draft. When doing this, it's a good idea to just make a quick mark next to the problem areas and keep moving through the draft, in order to hear how the entire paper flows.

Ending the Session

Each session should last between 30 and 50 minutes, though standing appointments for ENWR need to last at least 40 minutes. Try to avoid running over the allotted time because that will mean that you will not have enough time to write your session summary. Start wrapping up the session a few minutes early. Ask the student to write down either:

• 3 (or more) steps he or she will take in writing / rewriting the paper, or
• 3 (or more) skills you worked on during the session.

Every session should end with some form of “take away” exercise--a quick statement of what the student has planned, plotted, or learned during the session.

The Essay

Diagnosing the Essay

When reading a student’s essay, look for underlying problems rather than compiling a list of specific errors. Not setting out to answer a specific question, for example, causes many other problems, such as lack of focus, weak transitions, jumbled paragraphs, irrelevant information, excessive generalization, or vague diction. Remember that you are reading a draft; often a student will write his or her way to an argument, which can appear in the very last paragraph, or will not be able to choose between competing arguments. Starting with the last paragraph or with the writer’s dilemma will help you address the related problems by dealing with their cause.

Address the global issues of focus and organization before more local concerns of style.

• Does this essay have a point?
• Is the student asking a specific question?
• Is that question one that matters in the academic realm of the course?
• Does the student indicate how it matters?
  

What is the solution to that question?

• Is it arguable or is it really an observation masquerading as a solution to a question / problem?

Are the topic and question of appropriate scope for the assignment?

Does the essay provide sufficient support to develop the solution to the student’s question and to argue it convincingly?

Does each paragraph address a single, clear issue?

• Can paragraphs be moved around, or are they locked in place logically?
• Do transitions indicate the logical relationship between the ideas in each paragraph?
• Is the analysis thorough enough? Did this student leave out the steps of his or her logic? Is the reader forced to guess how he or she arrived at his or her conclusions?

Dealing with Organization and Style

Organization: You can begin with any paragraph that seems out of place or that has more than one issue (topic idea). You can also begin with transitions. You can use them to help you and the student assess organizational problems because often transitions signal how well the writer understands her essay’s points and how logically she orders them. For instance, a lack of transitions can indicate problems with focus. You can then demonstrate to the student how to use transitions and sub-claims to assess and revise her own work.

Assessing Transitions: Here are some common transitions. Underline or highlight these to draw the writer’s attention to them. Ask the student if any paragraphs can be moved around.

• “grocery list” transitions: first, second, etc.
• “narrative” or chronological transitions: “And then,” “and he continued,” “next,” etc.
• additive transitions: also, in addition
• transition words standing alone: however, moreover, furthermore, thus, etc.

Encourage any attempt at transition; point out that at times all of the above transitions are appropriate, but that we often rely too heavily on such transitions. Indeed, we frequently use such metadiscourse as an all-purpose, fill-in-the-blank response to our need for transition. Encourage students to move from using transitions mechanically to using them imaginatively. Remind them that transitions must grow out of their text and that, in analytical essays, they should spell out the logical relationships between paragraph topic ideas. Ask questions such as these: is this relationship one of cause and effect? similarity or contrast? generalization and example? Remind writers that their job is to explain to readers how ideas relate.

Making Logical Transitions: There are many techniques for making transitions--repeating key words and using pronouns or transition words. Whatever the tip, the transition is made by logically relating paragraph topic ideas. Joseph Williams and Greg Colomb use the phrase “old-information/new-information” to describe transitions. They mean that a transition begins with old information--“ideas that your readers will readily recognize, ideas that you have just mentioned”--and moves on to present new information. In other words, the transition shows how new information relates to the point just discussed. This principle holds for transition between sentences as well as between paragraphs. You’ll find that the phrase “old to new” is a useful mnemonic and that it involves you in another phase of Organization Revision: figuring out what those paragraph issues are.

“Mapping” Paragraph Issues (Topics): Use this technique to identify paragraph issues, to do any necessary reorganizing, and to make logical transitions. Use it also to teach writers to troubleshoot their own essays.

This method is a kind of retroactive outlining. If transitions are weak, if paragraphs have competing issues, if paragraphs offer no issues but only a series of details--now is the time to “map” the essay. Ask the writer to jot down in the margins the key idea(s) of each paragraph. The writer may target a detail or a side issue. Let her write these down anyway and wait until she's finished before going back. You might even want to excuse yourself and get a drink of water if you think your presence distracts the writer.

After the writer has mapped her essay, ask her what she's noticed about the essay's structure. Do the same points crop up again and again? Do some paragraphs have more than one key point? Does a paragraph seem to come later or earlier than it should?

At this time, you can discuss “issue” versus “discussion” (supporting detail or evidence) if the writer is having trouble with the concept. Make sure to let the writer do the investigating, though: if more than one paragraph is misidentified, go over one and ask the student to do the next one. Try not to over-coach.

You might also try having the student outline what he has written on a separate sheet of paper. He need not summarize the paragraphs in order; in fact, it might be better to identify each paragraph’s points in a random order so that the student is not tempted to superimpose what he thought he said upon what he actually wrote.

Style: The Center’s collection of reference works includes a number of style manuals; two that are particularly useful are Lanham’s Revising Prose and Williams’ Style. Students are often stymied by comments like “awkward,” “vague,” and “wordy.” Williams and Lanham provide specific techniques for revising and help students view style as strategy.

Remember to start at the top with the question the essay poses and the solution it offers, then with its evidence and its organization before you become concerned with style, unless the instructor or the student asks you to start with style. If they do, you might try some of the following techniques:

Style Checklists: Writers need to learn how to analyze their own stylistic choices. To help them recognize their stylistic tics, highlight patterns as you read. Draw boxes, for example, around “be” verbs, underline expletive subjects like “there is” and “it is,” and circle nominalizations. A nominalization turns a verb or an adjective into a noun. For example, ‘discover’ becomes ‘discovery’; ‘careless’ becomes ‘carelessness.’ Of course, some nominalizations can be useful, but when a student uses too many of them, she can obscure agency and produce turgid prose. (See Williams, Style: Ten Elements of Clarity and Grace.) Before going over these, make sure that the writer knows the parts of a sentence. (You may have to map a few together.)

You can also create a checklist, perhaps tailored to the writer's style, that the writer can use to read, highlight, and revise his own work. This method is especially handy when seeing a 105 student without a new essay--just set them to work and take the last 20 minutes of the session to go over it with him.

Assignments

Read assignments carefully to determine what they require. While it is impossible to prepare you for every type of assignment you will help students work on, we can offer the following tips:

Analysis

Sometimes students are given topics, sometimes not. Whatever the topic, this kind of essay succeeds or fails on the depth and persuasiveness of its textual analysis and, of course, the coherence of the argument. Typical pitfalls are mostly paraphrasing, over-quoting, and failing to adequately address quotations. Encourage students to read their passages closely, paying attention to details, words, images, ambiguities, and echoes of other passages. Encourage them to investigate their observations--getting at function and meaning. Remind them that analyzing something means explaining what something means, how they know it means it, and why it means it. In textual analysis, they should quote relevant passages and discuss what in the passage has prompted them to interpret it as they have. Some students feel a quotation speaks for itself or that their interpretations merely state the obvious and should be left out. These students need to realize that analyzing is explaining all the steps that led them to their conclusion about the passage.

A useful schema for explaining analysis is the “A, B, Cs of Analysis.” This written schema will help you explain what textual analysis is, and it helps students visualize the steps. Essentially it is a labeling system. Work locally--have the student label each component of an analysis passage with “a,” “b,” or “c” in order to determine if she has completed each step. (“A, B, C’s of Analysis” reprinted by permission from The English Instructor’s Sourcebook, c. 1992)

1. WHAT: Observation

• Tell your reader what you are looking at.
• Quote the relevant passage and describe important elements(words, images, etc.) to reader.

2. HOW: Explanation or Explication

• Tell the reader what you make of these elements.
• How do these work? How do they create meaning? What meaning do they have or contribute to within the work?

3. WHY: Conclusion

• Tell the reader the significance of the meaning you’ve just uncovered.
• So what? What function or purpose does it have? What larger meaning does it reveal (e.g., part to whole)?
  

Tips on focus and organization for the literary analysis

• If the student is having real trouble focusing the essay, encourage her to narrow its scope: choose an interesting passage (anything from a paragraph to a short chapter) or two to three passages linked by a common thread of some kind and center the essay around analyses of these passages.
• Make sure, too, that the essay is organized according to logical topics, not a chronology of the passage. Narrative or chronological transitions can signal this trap.

Negotiating Bad Assignments

Some of the assignments students bring to the Writing Center may be poor ones, ones that seem always to produce bad writing. Other assignments may be difficult for you to understand. You can’t change these assignments, and you certainly shouldn’t criticize them in front of the student, but you can help the student to negotiate them. Here are some approaches you may want to use when you are trying to figure out what an assignment requires:

• Ask the student to show you the assignment sheet. Help the student read it and look for key terms.
• Ask questions about it. The student may have picked up ideas about it from lecture.
• If doubt still remains, send the student to the professor or T.A., but first help her to come up with questions to ask about the assignment.

Some Administrative Points

Some of the following points might seem obvious, some less so--all are meant to emphasize our responsibilities to the students who use the Center.

Professionalism

Be prompt. This is extremely important. If you are late more than once, we will have to discuss whether or not you wish to continue working at the Writing Center. If you are unavoidably late, however, call the Writing Center and tell the tutor working the desk that you’re on the way and when you think you will arrive. If you are opening up the Center at 9:00 a.m., you should try to get to Bryan 314 a little early--preferably by 8:50.

Work your full shift.

Cover your hours if you can’t come in to work at your usual time. If you know well in advance that you’re going to be absent on certain dates, you should switch your hours with someone else or have them substitute for you. If you do this, indicate the substitution in the schedule book, though do notify one of the directors about the substitution. If someone is going to be absent and the directors mark the person as canceled in the schedule book, please do not schedule an appointment for that person’s hour. Finally, if you have trouble getting a substitute after numerous requests to the other tutors, please tell the directors well in advance so your hours can be canceled altogether.

Notify students if you must miss a scheduled appointment. If you can’t come in to work at your usual time, you were unable to find someone to cover for you, and there is already someone scheduled to meet with you, make sure that you or the person at the desk calls the student to reschedule the appointment.

Notify the instructor if you miss a ENWR 105 standing appointment. If you must miss work one day when you have a standing appointment with an ENWR 105 student, you should speak to the student’s instructor to let him or her know that you will have to reschedule the regular tutorial; then call the student and try to set something up that is amenable to you, the teacher, and the student. Try to reschedule as close to the original meeting time as possible. Note in the schedule book under the original meeting time, “Appt. resched. this wk.” If the student must have the appointment that day, find someone to take the tutorial.

Help maintain a communal but productive environment. If you don’t have an appointment and you’re not assigned to desk duty, you can talk quietly with others when tutors are not working. Feel free to compare notes about sessions, but make sure you don’t gossip about students or violate anyone’s confidentiality. Be very careful when you talk about sessions you have had--the student might be in the carrel next to you being tutored again! You can also deliver faculty tutorial notices to the English Department main office.

Dealing With a Difficult Student

You will inevitably get a student who does not want to hear that anything is wrong with the paper, that they have to fix grammar and sentence structure on their own, that their reasons require evidence, etc. Like people anywhere, students can sometimes be indignant and belligerent.

If you find yourself in a difficult situation, there's a few things you can try, but feel free to get the director or assistant director if need be.

Another technique to try is to just leave your student for a little bit, but in a constructive way. Go over some of the issues you're seeing, and then lay out a small assignment; write out a paragraph that describes X, or rewrite a claim that accomplishes Y. Then just get up and get a coffee or something, and give that student 10 minutes to look at the work alone, and hopefully simmer down some.

Appendix: Helpful Reference Works

On the bookshelf you’ll find various grammar books and style manuals. Students will assume that you can correct faulty constructions; however, it is also important that you be able to explain to the student the logic of that correction. There are lots of helpful reference, grammar, style, and composition books in the Center library behind the reception desk--many of them can help you explain a grammar or usage rule if you get stuck (or if you forget or are unsure of the rule). The following are some particularly useful titles. I encourage you to browse through them when the Center is quiet so you know where to go when you need a quick answer.

Gibaldi, Joseph and Walter S. Achert. MLA Handbook. 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1996.

Graham, Sheila Y., and Wynn J. Curtis. Harbrace ESL Workbook. New York: HBJ, 1986. A very useful series of exercises for working with ESL students.

Hacker, Diana. The Bedford Handbook for Writers. 5th ed. [Old title: Rules for Writers.] Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1997. This is the usual handbook for WR classes. It is very well indexed, reliable, and has a fairly substantial section on ESL. It is exhaustive and very clear--even if unexciting--and does have some useful exercises.

Hodges and Whitten. The Harbrace College Handbook. (HBJ--numerous editions) Lots of grammar exercises; a sample research paper outline, draft, and revision.

Lanham, Richard. Revising Prose. New York: MacMillan, 1992. Very concise yet brilliant discussion of how to revise passive into active voice. Relies heavily on “The Paramedic Method.”

Raimes, Ann. How English Works: A Grammar Handbook with Readings. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Raimes is a well-known ESL scholar who teaches at Hunter College of CUNY. This book has some quick explanations of English grammar that you could refer to when a student asks you why something works like thus-and-so and you have no readily available explanation. Check out the charts.

Williams, Joseph. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 5th edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Many composition classes require this book. This is a very useful style manual that provides usable techniques for revision. He teaches that style is strategy. Nominalizations and the passive; bureaucratese versus clarity and why.

Note the reference section in the Writing Center with dictionaries, thesauri, MLA and APA style manuals, and more.