Well this is bad...

So what’s so bad? The fact that I completely spaced and didn’t get the week two blog entry finished before the week three prompt showed up? Or the imaginary essay in question? Probably both, but we’ll focus on the essay since five hundred words is nowhere near enough to contain the excuse as to why this post is a little late. Oh well, got to get into the habit somehow.

I was also a little caught up with not being able to go to the Sheepdog Championship trials.

Anwyay. All in all my focus during the spring semester of tutoring seemed to shift between bettering the paper and bettering the writer. It seemed to adjust according to each session and according to such variables like how many essays I had already read that day, if I had had a stressful situation earlier…the list could go on. But during this semester my mind will be more focused on bettering the writer—it’s easy to get caught up in the mechanics of a paper, but fixing the paper sometimes does little to help with future papers. True, some people learn through visuals and can pick up on certain recurring issues in their won writing, but for the most part students don’t often think like that. The student is almost always focused solely on making that paper better, so to balance that the tutor’s role should be focusing on bettering the writer.

But sometimes an essay is just…bad. Really bad. I have yet to come across an essay so bad that the student would need to start it over, but there have been a few very close. Usually I start off that particular part of the conversation with asking what sort of organization is going on in the paper. If the student can’t answer that question or fluffs around it, then comes the fun part of trying to nudge the student in the right direction, building up the conversation to the point where the student is restructuring the entire paper. Although again, it does depend on the session. Some tutees are perfectly fine with being told that they need to start all over again (granted those are usually smaller papers for serious students), and others would be deeply offended.

Speaking of deeply offended, there have been several papers that have come my way where I think I should have felt that way. Fortunately I’ve worked with enough offense to not get offended except in the most serious cases so such papers hardly faze me personally. But I have to keep in mind that I’m not the person grading it. If the professor eventually reading the offensive paper is fine with it, then I generally leave the offensive parts as is. I haven’t come across anything too radical, but so far it seems the offense is just bringing up the writer’s voice and thoughts, and criticizing those elements too far may stem the flow irreversibly. It’s the student’s paper, the student’s views. We do live in a free country that allows, for the most part, free speech, so who am I to tell someone that they are thinking wrong? Unless that has the very large potential of leading to danger then not me.

And when the writer warns me ahead of time then all the better.