More than subjects I've not known anything about, I've had writers in forms I was unfamiliar with. The most recent was a business proposal. Students in the business program must put together hypothetical business proposals. This is an indepth, well-researched proposal for a fictional business the writer would be interested in starting. The form is highly technical, area specific, with a great deal of convention involved in every aspect of the proposal. Specific headings, sub-headings, graphs, charts, citations, etc. I don't know anything about business proposals or the genre of the business proposal as a piece of writing. I can't tell a good one from a bad one. My approach is first of all to concentrate on the writing. Aside from the format, is the writing good? Is it cohesive? Is there anything that seems muddled or is otherwise unclear? Is this lack of clarity the result of poor syntax, etc, is it the result of unclear writing, or is the idea behind the sentence what is confusing? As far as the format is concerned, I look for anomolies and refer to the writer. Here you use bullet-points. Are you supposed to use bullet points? Is this a convention of the business proposal. Here you use contractions. Is this acceptable, or should the business proposal meant to be more formal in tone. Here is your research. How did you go about collecting this data? Was the source reliable? This method of citation is unfamiliar to me. Did the instructor tell you to cite materials this way? More often than not, in my experience, the writer knows the answers to these questions. What the writer needs is a fresh set of eyes from a person who hasn't been staring at the business proposal for the last three weeks. I see my job as catching potential errors and bringing them to the writer's attention. Whether the writer decides to change or preserve the paper is the writer's perogative. I'm just trying to catch potential problem spots and bring them to the writer's attention. I'm helping the writer correct his/her own mistakes. This is the best I can do, since I have no idea if these are mistakes or not, but I know consistancy is important to good writing and without understanding the mode, I can still find instances within the project where the project is not consistant with itself. Whether this matters or not, I have no idea. But I can bring it to the writer's attention and let the writer be the judge.