Dumb as Rocks

I had a paper recently where the author was far above my knowledge and expertise, so I can certainly relate and I am secretly hoping that someone will give some good incite that I can learn from. I certainly understood what Cynthia meant when she said, “I felt like a blubbering idiot by the time we made it through the paper.” because that is exactly how I felt. I explained to the student that I did not know a lot about his subject but that I would do the best I could to help his organization and writing. (Here is where I ask the question,” Did I do the right thing in admitting my lack of knowledge or does my confession cause the student to immediately lose confidence in my ability to tutor him or her and make the task even harder?”) To some degree my lack of knowledge helped us because I could help him make his paper a little easier for the layman to understand, but I had to concentrate really hard to try to follow all of his lines of logic because I really didn’t even have a lot of the vocabulary necessary to help make complete sense of things, so I am not sure if I missed anything major or not.

Considering the situation I think I did not do too badly, but I cannot say that someone with more knowledge in the subject could not have helped this student much much more then I did. When I left my head hurt and I felt about as smart as a rock. I at least I can say the only real damage that was done was the damage done to my ego. I tried to play it safe and did not attempt to change anything that I was not absolutely sure about as a tutor. In other words, like Cynthia I concentrated mainly on thesis, conclusion, and grammar stuff.

I suppose that in theory we can tutor these exceptional people just as well as we can tutor someone in English 960 because the basic writing rules are the same, the only exception being it is a bit harder to find some logic problems. In practice tutoring these people feels like hell.

Besides the questions typed above, my question for everyone is (as aspired by Ammon) do you find that because you are reading bad papers all day long you find that your personal writing is better, worse, or does it remain the same? They say to become a good writer you need to read good writing. Is the opposite true? Does the fact that we are correcting bad writing rather than just plain reading it carry any weight?