MU Learning Center Writing Lab Volume 12 Number 2 January 2007


From the

Director's Desk

 

Winter Semester 2007 greetings from the Writing Lab at the Student Success Center! We officially open on Jan. 29, but our WITS and MA tutors will begin doing outreach presentations starting Jan. 22. In this issue, eight of our English Dept. MA tutors describe their first semester as interns tutoring writing. In their own words they describe what they have learned as writing consultants and as writers themselves. As one MA writes, “MU students can think but writing is hard.” Our student evaluations offer high praise to these tutors for helping them with this “hard work.” We have so many fine MA essays that we are publishing only brief selections in this newsletter, but we offer the full texts at this web address:

Sally Foster will coordinate the Online Writery and the Nursing Online Writery (NOW) tutorials. Sharon Emmerichs, Norma Fisk, and Catherine Chmidling, three lab veterans, will consult with graduate students and assist with observations.

We are eager to inform your students about our services through outreach visits and bookmarks. Unfortunately, Irene Wolf, our scheduling secretary has retired, so we cannot offer visits to the SSC. However, inviting a tutor for a brief visit to your class encourages them to come to the lab for help. When tutors come to your class, they can talk about all the services available in the SSC. Our bookmarks feature information about all our writing help—the Writing Lab, Online Writery, WITS, and residence hall writing lab tutoring.

So send them on over to the SSC. Please call me at 882-4420 if you want a class presentation, special help, or just to comment on our services. As you can see from the essays in this newsletter, our tutors are eager to assist your students.

Elaine Hocks

HocksE@missouri.edu or 882-2496

 

 

Giving Students Credit
(click above for full essay)

By Andrew Parker

As a tutor at the Writing Lab, I give students support at any stage in the writing process. During a typical tutorial, either the student or I will read the paper aloud, looking for mechanical errors, which leads students to catch many of their own mistakes. A discussion of mechanical errors also leads to the paper’s thesis, organization, or other concerns. Ultimately, Stephen North, one of the founders of the writing center movement, best articulates my goal as a tutor—helping to change student writers so they can change their writing. For instance, I find that students think much about the content of their papers but think less about how to structure their argument. Many students do not know how to write a thesis statement. And I can sympathize; to repeat, writing is hard. But when I can help students think differently about their papers—and about the writing process, in general—then those students will write better papers, and I will have done my job. We tutors know we have done our jobs when students return for tutoring sessions three, five, even ten times a semester with each paper showing improvement.


Tutoring Tips
(click above for full essay)

By Claire Schmidt

When I started tutoring in the Writing Lab I was worried about being non-directive. It’s a hard skill to learn, and only experience makes it easier. However, with more tutoring, I have established patterns to focus on non-directive tactics. I think the most important thing I have learned is that it’s essential to make students feel safe and comfortable right away. I ask students how they’re doing and make it clear that their answer matters to me. When students are relaxed, they can think more clearly and make connections on their own. When we begin, I usually ask about the paper and assignment, helping them to see the big picture before they focus on mechanical errors. I ask them to read the first paragraph out loud, and to tell me when they come to the thesis, which moves us to higher order concerns.

 

Students Learning to Help Themselves

By Bri Kneisley

As a Writing Lab tutor, helping students write better is only one of my many tasks. Many students need to overcome other obstacles before they can understand dilemmas in writing. As a tutor, I work with individuals on their own levels to help them get to the root of their problems. When a freshman comes in and says she has always hated writing, I show her how writing is related to a field she does like, or I tell her how to pre-write in a way that might better suit her visual and spatial learning style. When a sophomore comes in and says he is having problems gathering information from source texts, I might guide him through reading a few paragraphs of an essay to extract the most pertinent information. I do not hesitate to spend an entire session fine-tuning a thesis statement for a student who has no clue where to start. As a Writing Lab tutor, I help students learn to help themselves so they can they can first progress as thinkers, then as writers.

 

Topic + Comment = Thesis
(click above for full essay)

By Daren Pine

At the beginning of the semester, most of the problems students face with their papers are thesis-statement related. Even if they say their main problem is outlining, it is really that the exact nature of a good thesis statement is elusive to them. Many over-think it, believing it to be something grandiose, when actually a good thesis statement is straight-forward and uncomplicated. I give them the definition of a thesis from the Prentice Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage, which simply says, “After you’ve selected a topic to write about, you have to decide on a comment that you’ll make about it.” So Thesis = Topic + Comment. Sounds too easy, but it’s not! Once students realize this pattern, it liberates them to make their “comment” and allows an outline to develop. Of course, once they’ve found that good comment, they should be on the lookout for ways to make it more focused and specific.

 

How to Question an Authority
(click above for full essay)

By Katie Zimolzak

The best tutoring session I had last semester was with a student too confused to set an agenda. The assignment prompt was clear, the essay was well organized, and the thesis was adequately supported, but the student was still unsure of something. We were only fifteen minutes into the session, and I was not certain how much more help I could be without knowing what the student wanted to address. I asked if she had any other questions. She asked if the thesis made sense. “It makes sense,” I said, “but you don’t seem convinced. Do you believe it?” The answer, of course, was no. I sat silently for the next few minutes while the student vented about why she did not want to argue a position she did not support, but felt that she had to because the readings said she should agree. She and I spent the rest of the session discussing why and how it is okay to disagree with existing scholarship.

 

The MA Internship Investment
(click above for full essay)

By Leta Ruppert

When we new MAs entered the Writing Lab for training in August, I must admit I was a bit skeptical about the whole idea of “non-directive” tutoring. My previous tutoring/teaching experience had been in math and science, where asking the students, “What do you think?” wasn’t always productive—when teaching them about the periodic table or factoring polynomials, for example. However, as I began my writing tutorials, I soon realized a non-directive style could not only help the students learn far more than if I were just to “check the paper,” as many of them request, but could also help me to understand their writing processes and difficulties better, which will help me to do a better job as a teacher of English 1000 next fall.

 

Tutoring Writing Is Rewarding Work
(click above for full essay)

By Rebecca Richardson

After teaching high school English for six years, the thought of tutoring in the Writing Lab sounded easy to manage with my demanding graduate schedule. However, what I found was fulfilling, rewarding work — immediate gratification I did not always receive when teaching. The opportunity to work one-on- one with students, watching their own personal growth, has been satisfying — so much so that I am ashamed of my initial thought that the work would be “easy.” Actually, it is far more demanding and exhausting because I invest so much emotion and energy in each individual student. However, I have found my most rewarding work to be with ESL students. This writing center “job” has been more than employment.

 

Learning Writing as a Dialogue
(click above for full essay)

By Tim Hayes

I have discovered, during my time as a writing lab tutor, that one can often be most useful and effective only after asking the simplest questions. Sometimes these questions are so fundamental that we are tempted to simply move forward into the heart of critique without first pausing to ask them. For instance, the first and most significant question to ask is "Where is your thesis statement?" It may seem too elementary or even embarrassing to ask something so obvious, but I have discovered that this question often reveals more about the essay as a whole than one might think. Though the thesis usually comes at the end of the first paragraph in undergraduate compositions, sometimes it is hiding in an obscure corner. Sometimes students realize there is no identifiable thesis at all. By simply asking this basic question, one learns (in most cases) how the student conceives of his or her argument, and even (in some cases) that the argument itself is still amorphous, undefined, and in need of fine tuning. And nearly any thesis statement (even at the highest levels of scholarship) can benefit from attentive revision.

 

[an error occurred while processing this directive]