Week Three, A Core Paper

"The tutor's goal is not to fix the individual paper, but to help the student become a better writer." ~Muriel Harris

This quote seems almost word for word to be the motto of the UR Writing Center. On Thursday, I believe I experienced the most common (or at least the easiest) session for tutors: a student with a decent paper on a familiar subject. Therefore, I chose this quote because I think the tutor did an excellent job pointing out patterns of error, and helping the student fix his own problems.

As we sat down with the student for the session, he explained to the tutor and I that he was working on a core paper for a "grammar freak" of a professor. He told us that his professor did not require students to go to the Writing Center, but highly suggested it because it "helps with the readability" of what tends to be writer based prose. When I asked him why he continued to come to the writing center, he said that he likes to meet with a fellow after every revision to make sure he did not make any grammar mistakes (primarily) and to see if there is some obvious room for improvement of the content (secondarily). A red flag went up in my mind as it seemed the student's priorities were out of order.

Reading the paper through for the first time, the tutor made some corrections with grammar and typos. She began to write some comments in the margins with questions raised in reading the paper, but scribbled them out as they were answered later. When she finished her first read through the paper she explained to the student that the paper was well-organized, well-written, and had good support. I too was impressed by the strong evidence and body of the paper; however, I thought the conclusion could use some work as it seemed to restate the thesis and then contrast it with another idea that seemed out of place relative to the rest of the paper.

Because grammar was the student's first concern, and we all concluded that the paper was a strong one, the tutor chose to focus first on the main pattern of grammatical error in the paper: pronoun antecedant confusion. She took one example from the paper and asked the student what the pronoun referred back to. Then she showed him how the reference was unclear and needed to be revised. The student changed the sentence, and the tutor told him to go through the paper and look for others that may be unclear. To make sure the point was clear to him, the tutor found another example and asked the student to correct it on his own.

There were also some instances of tense confusion in the paper, which I pointed out to the tutor who told the student. Without saying more than "tense confusion", the student knew exactly what the problem was and changed it himself.

Finally, the tutor asked the student if he had any other questions, and the student asked about his conclusion which seemed a little brief to him. The tutor reread the conclusion and suggested the student rewrite it because it seemed to contradict the thesis. She was quite directive in her commentary during this brief part of the session.

I may have reversed the order of the session, as I immediately thought the conclusion needed work after reading through the paper. However, the way the tutor conducted the session was also effective because there were no grammatical errors in the conclusion and the student's first priority was grammar. I think I would have been a little less directive with my commentary on the conclusion as well, asking the student questions like: "How does this sentence relate back to your thesis? What else could you say to expand on the thesis and raise more questions for the reader?"

The session had a happy ending though, and it certainly helped the writer more than the paper. Because it was a strong paper with good support, perhaps focusing on grammatical error was not a terrible thing. Besides, it could truly help the writer in the long run as he will look out for pronoun and tense confusion when revising his papers. The goal of the writing center was truly achieved in this hour.