Suggested
Questions for (Last) Blog Post #10: Choose either question. In preparation for the Writing Fellows visit and looking toward Midnight Madness, please describe and comment on any experiences
you’ve had helping undergraduate writers outside your discipline, especially in unfamiliar
subject areas.
Which of
the 3 writing paradigms (writing to learn content, writing to learn language,
learning to write) are you most familiar with?
Most persuaded by? Why?
Agenda for Class on Wednesday: Writing Fellows visit from 3:45-4:15; Ivo's resource report on what types of students use writing centers; discussion of Ortega; discussion of case studies vs. personal essays about tutoring a student
(am I the only one who has a really hard time seeing responses on these posts? I suck at blogging).
ReplyDeleteMy experience with undergraduate appointments seems to mostly center around science reports, which is definitely not my field. I've seen quite a few students who are asked to write papers that show that they understand the material the authors are reporting in a scientific journal, etc. I would say this falls under the writing to lean content category...?
I've found that my own ignorance in science is the most helpful guide in working with unfamiliar subject material. Because I tend to like creative writing assignments more, when I see that a student needs help on a science report, I establish my unfamiliarity at the top of the appointment. As we work through the assignment and I find bits of language that is jargon-y or convoluted, I ask the student to explain it to me out loud. As they do, I write down exactly what they are saying and then show it them. "Why don't you write it down the way you just said it? Don't you think it's a little more clearly stated?"
It's usually a successful technique in demonstrating that they actually understand the material and invokes the paradigm of including audience as a significant part of the writing process.
Totally agreed. I really dig the ethos of asking questions in general. In my editing work I have in the past tended to find try to work out what the writer was going for and offer suggestions, it's a hard habit to break, but asking questions and allowing them to explain or try to rework it themselves is a lot less work for me, to be frank, and doing it in a discipline not my own where questions are all I have is an enriching experience since I learn something and hopefully they learn to articulate themselves better and better see the gaps in their knowledge and the laypeople.
DeleteTwo of my students have brought assignments for rhetoric which is outside of my discipline. The biggest challenge I face in helping students with these papers is my own confidence in directing their writing. I think they should include or rearrange certain things to form a clearer argument but end up second guessing myself worried that my suggestion may be a specific to science writing and lose them points with a rhetoric instructor. Twice I have made my suggestions in a very "soft" manner only to see their instructor give the same comment as something they should work on for their final draft. If I had been more confident thus assertive in my notion, they may have taken the advice more seriously and made the changes so their instructor could focus on another aspect of their paper.
ReplyDeleteI'm most familiar with writing to learn. When diving down a new avenue of my research, I immerse myself in handfuls of papers that give tiny details of certain pathways or proteins that may somehow be connected to the research question I'm investigating. I usually leave for the day with my mind swimming in the pool of facts I've just consumed and feeling like I know less than I did before I began. When I come in the next day, I will take those papers and make a list of the most helpful information from them and synthesize a page long explanation linking them together as if I'm writing an introduction to a research paper.
I'm most persuaded by all three. At different times in everyone's life we write for different reasons and gain what we need to from the exercise. It depends on the person and what skill they are trying to develop.
I, actually, find it more pertinent my work with a graduate student. I have a student working on her dissertation and it's very well written, she does most of the rewording and rearranging herself, but the topic is two strands of Buddhism in Japan and this one particular researcher from history. I feel a little nervous since we started in the middle of the chapter and I don't know what's already been stated and how, but her main goal is reworking on the sentence level to make sure she's saying what she means and means what she says. Her command of the English language is obviously strong, and she's teaching me new ways to use language, though we often end up shifting words for clarity that technically fit, but aren't usually used that way in English. I of course find these moments glorious and am humbled when I realize that her definition of the word is in fact correct, if slightly outside of English speaker use. She says that the work is her baby and that the questions I ask are helping her to fill that knowledge gap. It's a lot of intense work over 50 minutes and we often don't get very far along, but it feels good. I'm hoping as I become more familiar with the subject it becomes more smooth.
ReplyDeleteThe only non-rhetoric assignments I've seen in the writing center were for a healthy living class that one of my enrollment students is taking. With the rhetoric assignments that I've helped with, at least I have a sense of what the instructor is expecting, but it was harder to anticipate what this instructor wanted. My student walked away with a plan, but also with questions that needed clarification from the instructor.
ReplyDeleteSo far I've encountered more unfamiliar material in the speaking center, but often that is when working with graduate students. Most of the undergraduates who come by are rhetoric students. I did have two who were analyzing popular culture texts for rhetoric, but instead of using American music videos, they had chosen East Asian examples. I had so many questions to ask before I could help them and it was hard to know what we were missing. I suppose this is the other side the discussion that we had last week about expecting international students to respond to prompts that require familiarity with American culture. It's difficult to write about a culture that is unfamiliar, but it is also difficult to evaluate a writer's work when, as an instructor, you are unfamiliar with the cultural content.
One of my enrollment students is an econ/math major. His writing assignments are typically reports for his economics class. While it was easy for me to grasp the formal and formulaic structure of econ writing, I faced some difficulties dealing with the econ jargon. This student is also an international student, and I found myself having to Google many of the terms in his paper to confirm that the jargon term was the correct term, could be used as a verb, needed an n-dash etc.
ReplyDeleteThis has me thinking about the possibility of only pairing students with tutors from their discipline. Certainly, all writing tutors are equipped to address some writing concerns, but, when it comes to upper-level writing, I wonder if there are writing centers out there that break their students up more deliberately by discipline.