Give me awful any day!

A good paper...

Humph.

I would definately agree that tutoring a good paper is harder than tutoring a bad paper (though not an awful one). The biggest issue is that as a tutor, my job is to improve the writter and improve the paper simultaneously. When a good paper is brought in, that effectively eliminates half of my job.

When I am given a well-written paper, I generally turn to the student and asks them why they came in. What was their purpose? Did they have concerns? Do they have any other classes that they needed help with? Do they have things that their professor said they need to work on?

Usually, after asking all of these questions, the student will give me enough information to fill the tutoring session as much as I possibly can. I either help them with whatever problems their professor thinks they have, or clarify anything that they're confused about.

Reading a paper aloud can also help. If the student wants me to correct and improve the essay, I can always pull some random advice out of thin air, even if it’s just word choice and the way sentences are constructed. I’m a big fan of proofreading aloud. That makes the biggest difference in how people write. Written English, while being different than spoken English, isn’t too different. Reading aloud what you’ve written helps a student hear what they wrote, not just what they thought they wrote.

On another note, the classroom discussion about thesis statements really helped me. I had someone come to be tutored on Thursday with a paper that was fairly well written, but it was a little weird. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was for a minute, until I realized that she didn’t have a thesis statement!! That made me very happy, because I knew what I was supposed to do. We’d just talked about it!

The woman made things difficult. She didn’t want to focus. Her thought process went in circles, revisiting the same ideas over and over. Finally I made her write everything down by herself, which helped her focus a little more, but she kept trying to manipulate me into writing her a new thesis and reorganizing her paper for her. She’d ask me questions like, “I’m not sure what I should put here…What do you think?” or “Does this sound best here or here?” It was frustrating to try to guide the session so she wouldn’t try to take advantage of me, but I couldn’t let my irritation show. Some people…

Anyway, the point was, although she had a well-written paper (at least grammatically), her organization and other things left a lot to be desired. I was luckily able to talk to her about problems, but, had I not realized that her thesis could be better stated, I’m not sure what I would have said to her. I hate admitting weakness and failure more than anything else, so admitting I couldn’t help her would be humiliating for me. I guess I would have swallowed my pride and done it, but for now, I’m just glad the essay wasn’t as good as I thought it was.