A Prompt . . . With A Bit of History
We've been talking a great deal about ESL, and while that's great, it's not all there is, nor is it the only kind of tutoring session you're going to have. You will, soon, have sessions with regular old traditional college students, some of whom will simply have no idea why their respective instructors have required them to go to the WC. Some of them will be utterly heartbroken about it.
Why? If you ask them, they might say something like "I've always gotten 'As' in High School English," which is a pretty common response to a bad grade on a Composition essay.
I had the same experience. I always got As in HS English. I won local and regional writing competitions in HS—I once even placed in a national competition and received an invitation to the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC for the awards ceremony. But when I got to college, my grades on essays my freshman year were most decidedly not what I was accustomed to. I tried and tried to write better essays. I tried and tried to sort out what I was doing wrong—like many young students, I was taking it personally. And like many young students, I didn't bother to ask my professors what my problems with writing were (one of them was kind enough to draw an enormous X across an entire page of one of my essays and write "B.S." in huge letters in the margin). We didn't have a writing center.
So I asked my roommate for help. Writing seemed to come more naturally to him than it did to me. We printed out one of my essays on dot-matrix paper (the kind that's connected with a perforated edge) and spread it out across our kitchen floor so we could see the whole thing at once.
And he walked me through it. Thesis. Topic sentences. Connecting the dots. Making points. Organizing points. All of it. After that, writing essays was much, much less mystical. Writing essays grew easier and easier. My grades got better and better.
It would be inaccurate to say that no one had ever taught me to do this before. I'm certain that in my HS English classes, someone, somewhere taught me how to do all of this; I'd simply ignored or forgotten it, and so it took getting my butt kicked in a few classes and a good bit of help from my roommate to get it alll to sink in properly.
And so I ask you: how did you learn to write essays? Did it come naturally to you? Did you have some teacher, somewhere, who lifted a fog for you?
Why? If you ask them, they might say something like "I've always gotten 'As' in High School English," which is a pretty common response to a bad grade on a Composition essay.
I had the same experience. I always got As in HS English. I won local and regional writing competitions in HS—I once even placed in a national competition and received an invitation to the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC for the awards ceremony. But when I got to college, my grades on essays my freshman year were most decidedly not what I was accustomed to. I tried and tried to write better essays. I tried and tried to sort out what I was doing wrong—like many young students, I was taking it personally. And like many young students, I didn't bother to ask my professors what my problems with writing were (one of them was kind enough to draw an enormous X across an entire page of one of my essays and write "B.S." in huge letters in the margin). We didn't have a writing center.
So I asked my roommate for help. Writing seemed to come more naturally to him than it did to me. We printed out one of my essays on dot-matrix paper (the kind that's connected with a perforated edge) and spread it out across our kitchen floor so we could see the whole thing at once.
And he walked me through it. Thesis. Topic sentences. Connecting the dots. Making points. Organizing points. All of it. After that, writing essays was much, much less mystical. Writing essays grew easier and easier. My grades got better and better.
It would be inaccurate to say that no one had ever taught me to do this before. I'm certain that in my HS English classes, someone, somewhere taught me how to do all of this; I'd simply ignored or forgotten it, and so it took getting my butt kicked in a few classes and a good bit of help from my roommate to get it alll to sink in properly.
And so I ask you: how did you learn to write essays? Did it come naturally to you? Did you have some teacher, somewhere, who lifted a fog for you?
posted by Scott Rogers at 11:44 AM
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