Run-on question of fixing papers

I have been thinking a little bit about Melissa's response and Tyler's "challenging questions." It is difficult to tell the student what is wrong without fixing it for them. Not only that, how do I explain why something may be wrong or confusing or--- whatever?

Today I tutored a student that had a ton of run-on sentences in her paper. At first I didn't know what was going on with all of the super long sentences, but after I felt winded from reading them and realizing that some of them (if not all) were dragging on without an end, I knew what was the problem. She didn't know how to end her thoughts. Even though I diagnosed what the problem was, I still had the question of how to explain what is going on without just fixing them for her. I didn't know where else to begin except by saying, "I think that I am seeing run-ons. Do you know what a run-on is?" She kind of did, but asked me to remind her what they were. So I did. Then, by explain what they are and then teaching some ways to fix them, (put a conjunction, end the sentence and begin another, or use a semi-colon---- and I explained what a semi-colon is---) we were able to return to her paper with a little more understanding of what was going on and maybe how to fix it. After we had discussed run-ons, we returned to the paper. The next sentence we read was a run-on. I stopped reading and explained: "Here is a run-on, like I was telling you about." And then I gave options on how to fix it. She chose the one that she liked and we moved on. Soon, she was the one to point out the run-ons. And then she was giving me the options of how to fix it; I tried very hard, though, to not tell her which ways were better. It is her paper after all. I did not want to take-over and cross the line. It was hard sometimes because I could see her struggling, but when she chose the way that she thought fit best and asked my opinion, I gave it to her. “I ended this sentence here. Is that right?” she would ask me. I would answer, “it works, in fact, I really like it…”

I guess it is possible to explain how to fix something without doing it for them. It was hard, but it worked I guess. So--You look for the student’s reaction to see if you are crossing the line? Right? She was engaged the entire time, so I guess that was a good thing. I even cracked a joke during one of the tense moments of the session, just to get relaxed again, and she quickly dismissed it with a half smirk and then continued to work. I don’t know what that means… was it bad of me to comment on not having seen “The Others” the movie while working on a sentence that talked about “others”?