The Mega Blog

As we discussed in class, I'd like to see you all think through what
you think about when you think about writing on this blog. Who do you imagine reading it? In what conditions? How does that affect what you write and how you write it? Certainly, you're all responding to my prompts, but even within that structure you have to imagine someone reading it.

To be honest, I am still a little afraid something I say might trigger some huge offense like that one kid, and in turn I will receive death threats. I really don’t want any death threats. I know that I am taking the fact that my professor and boss can read this blog and I know this is censoring that way I would speak to say, any of my friends. There is a different level of comfort and appropriateness on this blog and I have to take this into consideration while I’m writing. The conditions…? This blog, for me, is a grade. That’s how I think it is read. I feel bad because I know I do not put the level of work into this as everyone else in the class. I’m aware of that. My main concern is just getting these out of the ay and written. It was like that before I had stopped writing the blogs and it’s even truer right now. Just get it done and over with. Those are the conditions in which I write this blog and because of this I don’t think the way in which others read this is as relevant. If there was a condition other than those I have mentioned, it would be the conditions of my peers, so boredom I guess. I tend not to really read the blogs post, but I might if I were just kind of piddling around online. And for those who are really bored and wandering around online enough to find a blog discussing tutoring tactics, their condition in reading anything I said would be one of half interest. I just don’t consider these people to really care or absorb whatever I was talking about. My writing is affected in not being too bold or offensive in what I say. I do try to watch that. I know this blog isn’t a free for all where anything goes that I want to say. There are restrictions on language and ideas. As far as language goes, that is obvious: no foul language. I also don’t want to sound like a fourth grader so some level of effort should be applied as far as language is concerned. With ideas, again I can’t have any outrageous, inappropriate, or offensive discussion because that could really come back to haunt me. Even though most likely only a very, very small group of people will ever see this, I still don’t want to be branded by some stupid comment put out on the internet from however long ago. If I am actually imagining someone to read it I can’t imagine that person being far off from myself. I’m just writing this as it comes into my head so what kind of voice does that create? My imagined audience is really just a peer maybe, I’m not trying to impress, but I also am keeping I mind that this blog is a grade. So while I write to a peer, I avoid damnable language.

In his introduction to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault remembers reading a passage from Borges:

as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.’ In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

This week, I'd like to see you all write about order. How do you know it when you see it? How do you detect it in student writing? How do you think about "ordering" when you write?

Order is a tricky thing to establish in any case, and in papers can even seem daunting. It’s funny because this idea doesn’t seem all that difficult. Order and organization in writing doesn’t seem like some complex issue in writing papers, but it is. I don’t know if that is due to the fact that writing is this evolving process and while it is happening it is also changing or whether people just aren’t putting enough effort into an outline of ideas to involve in the paper. In my sessions, I admit focusing on the organization in the student’s paper is a weakness in my sessions. I don’t know if it is just because my sessions tend to be longer and I just don’t get around to discussing this issue, but I am very content focused. Honestly, a well written APA paper is probably the best example of organization that comes into the writing center. The longer I have been working in the writing center, the more I have come to notice the thought process at the beginning stages of writing a paper, the execution, is an important determining factor on how a paper will turn out. Recognizing organization, for me, is also something I have to remind myself to look for because I tend to be more detail oriented instead of focusing on the overall themes within the paper. I have to actually think, is this paragraph working in the paper to determine a sense of order. Its not something that I just recognize when I see it. I feel guilty about this because maybe I’m not helping the student in a significant way when it comes to writing papers. I did come up with one strategy to make sure that the order or selected text was all relevant. I constantly pull the student’s thought process back to the thesis statement and ask, how does this relate? In doing this, hopefully the student will think about order and how each paragraph is working with the other and the overall point of the paper. This is the best method that I use in detecting not only the relevancy, but also the order and structure of the paper. As I have been working, there are certain ordering themes or methods to transitions between ideas while fully incorporating the discussion. For example, starting off a topic by introducing the history behind it or why it is significant before moving onto actual discussion. In doing this, the order is very evident in the way it is presented because they are beginning with a history, or purpose to the paper. This beginning for a paper creates a purpose to the paper. This is just one idea in beginning a paper to make the order more evident and reveal a thought process in writing the paper.

I'm sure that none of you have let this slip through the cracks, so I'm certain that you'll all have an answer straight away to this question. Here it is:

What are you thinking about writing about in your bibliographic essay?

Seeing as how I have already written this essay, I will just say my topic kind of just came to me very early on in the semester. I actually remember it was the same day we watched that ESL movie in class. What I did end up writing about was gender and its effects in tutoring and the writing process and its successes. It was a heavy topic and was extremely difficult to find sources for. I hate to admit this, but a few of my sources seemed…off topic, but they were all I could find. This topic just seemed very interesting. I wanted to know, is there a difference between men and women in the tutoring session and the overall way in which mean and women write? It just felt like a valid point to study and find if there are any academic source proving a marked difference in the sexes and how writing is conducted. I did think that there was a marked difference in both how men and women tutor and also how the writing process occurs for women versus men. Tutoring for man and women seemed to have certain strategies based on gender roles and basically the stereotype methods of communication for man and women. The writing process was particularly interesting to research because the confidence level of gender seemed to affect the overall willingness to participate as a writer. Women were more confident in the humanities such as writing, where as men were more likely to enjoy math and science. Also, gender stereotypes were also found in the actual language of genders. For instance, men tended to have more assertive language. The worst part in writing this paper was the fact that there was no analysis allowed and there were so many opportunities to discuss what the authors I chose were talking about. But I really liked my topic, even with the difficulty in finding sources. I probably feel this way because I am a girl and am curious on how this could affect the dynamics in interactions within the center. Reading everything during research process sucked, but the information was interesting and gave me a new perspective when dealing with men versus women in the center. This doesn’t mean that I am treating them differently, but that I feel I understand what communication may work better and where they are coming from. I do know that nothing I found in my research creates anything concrete and that there are always exceptions. This does matter because this is very important to take in to consideration for any session, but I liked the information gained through my topic.

This is perhaps the most meta topic this semester, and, more than likely, the most difficult to talk about. You are all here for a variety of reasons, and while you might all think it was because you're good writers, I'd wager that there were other things that marked you as a potentially good tutor—and one of them had to do with the way you think about things.

So here's this week's freakishly-meta prompt: when you think about a problem you're writing about, how do you think about it? What kinds of questions do you ask? What kinds of questions do you try to avoid? How do you push your thinking on subjects?

Okay, so this subject is hard to get your head around. I’m sitting here trying to identify “my process,” but all it seems like I am doing is writing what first comes to mind. Then, I think “Well, what do I think normally.” I don’t know! I’m not thinking about it when it’s happening. I don’t consider myself some outstanding kind of writer or anything. God, what am I thinking when I write a paper…you know, that’s not a class blog.

Ah, I think one step at a time, maybe. Let’s see if I can back this up. Okay, I can’t really get a paper started without the first sentence; without that I am lost n matter how much I know what I want to say. Until the first sentence is right I don’t move on. Its weird, but it is just how I operate. And it’s funny because the first sentence may not contain any real substance for the paper. When I’m starting to explore how I am going to write something, I do think I have started to consider tone and voice much more. Who is my audience? Why am I writing this? That’s a big one. Unlike math, I feel like there can be an actual purpose to anything I write. I like a point. Without one, the assignment, of whatever I am working on becomes trivial. I say not like math because I never (and I reiterate never) actually use algebra. With writing, there is a goal. A few other things I ask myself before I even put one word down is the order of the points I am going to make and how to best set up the information happening in the paper. What I fail to ask myself is how to best get across my point. I can write in a very unclear manner. Sometimes I go back over what I literally just wrote and have a stupid look on my face like “What?” I will overcomplicate my language to match my community discourse only to realize I have completely missed the mark. I hate this about my papers. I ramble too. Once I got a paper back from Dr. Rogers with an entire page scratched out. That has never happened to me before, completely horrible. It is so frustrating because now, when I go back over what I have read, I can tell when I have rambled. Problem is, I guess I’m not observant enough in the actual writing process because its only when I read back through that I tend to catch it. How do I push my thinking? Really good question. I don’t know if I do…horrible I know because I am in college. I try to look at other viewpoints and see how that may hinder my argument. I also am noticing that I incorporate more and more sources into my work. That does jog the actual writing process because those sources can’t just be hap hazardously thrown into the paper. They have to be analyzed to work in a paper. And chances are someone else will probably understand whatever your subject is better than you, so analyzing others is a good way to develop your own ideas a little further.

What kinds of questions do you have about the bibliographic essay?

For those of you having difficulty finding sources, look to the MLA database. Here are some instructions on how to use it.

My questions…don’t really matter anymore, but the biggest question I had was where can I find sources? And honestly this whole MLA thing has changed the way I research. I do not know how I lived without it. It was so frustrating surfing the net and getting squat from it, but the MLA link gave me a place to start, finally. When I was getting sources after long last, it felt like a godsend. My other big question was “How do I write this thing?” No analysis…okay. Tricky stuff. It seemed odd to write a paper with no analysis. I have never had a paper where that was the case. While I was writing it wasn’t that difficult, but still the concept of this paper was off-putting. There aren’t a ton of questions that I really had about this essay. The biggest problem I had was really just getting the sources and I really don’t know how great all the articles I did find were. A few felt…very off topic to me. Maybe they weren’t and I’m just underestimating my sources, but come topics were feeling forced to make them fit in to my overall discussion. I really had to broaden my discussion, which wasn’t something I was expecting to do.

Once, when I first began teaching, I was conferencing with a student who was making an argument that, I came to realize, was racist. I don't remember the specifics of it, but I pointed it out to the student who was appalled. We fixed the problem and moved on.

But then it occurred to me: was that my job? This was a regular Composition class in which I was teaching argument. Was it my job, as an instructor, to stop the student from making a racist argument? Or was it my job, as an instructor, to help the student make the best racist argument she could?

What about your job as a tutor? How do you respond to an essay that offends you?

Totally honest response: I kind of mock the student without them knowing, and then I play devil’s advocate. That would be the worst part of me in any session coming through. I try to suppress it when possible, so to answer this prompt the way it was meant to…I continue. Okay, I think this situation isn’t so black and white, one way or the other. There is no on the one hand or the other. Some situations will find themselves in the gray and it is the tutor’s job to decide how to act. Instead, each situation is arguably one way or the other. If the racism is overly present than I argue to help them argue that point to the best of your ability. Clearly, it is the point they are trying to make. It seems wrong to suggest these almost snap judgments, but in the end that’s all we have to go by to help the student. If the argument that is being made is so clearly in a certain stance than just help them and get it over with. If the idea is somewhat underdeveloped, perhaps the point should be brought to their attention, of course in a way that is least offensive as possible. This means not blurting out, “Are you a racist?” Instead, play up devil’s advocate…more like, “So do you think all Italians are part of the mafia?” This way they have to think about the point they are actually making and ask themselves, “Is this what I really mean?” You also avoid outing a Nazi or something. Bonus. Now I think everyone can agree there are certain papers that are inappropriate and personally offensive and this means not going into this session if it is too difficult for the tutor. I personally would not tutor a session that believed all women were evil temptations that should be covered head to foot and kept in a small room at home to avoid getting into trouble. I would do one of two things: give the session to a male tutor, or if Clare is there, give the session to her. I figure she would be mush better into the session than I would. The problem with offensive papers is that often times the argument is emotionally bases and this is the most important thing to note to any student about these types of paper. Simply point out the fact that there is no academic argument happening in their paper and that if they really believe whatever they are saying, they need to find source that will help support their argument. Occasionally in life, we will run into ideas we won’t agree with and this is true inside and outside of the center. The best any tutor can do is try to be accommodating and at least nice enough not to piss some one off. I understand that an academic setting is usually one that is more liberal, but if the argument the student wants to make isn’t fitting within the academic window, than I do think it is the tutors job to at least explain how the subject is touchy and may need a good deal of sourcing and argument happening.