Writing Fellows Journal #5

David Colon

Writing Fellows

Professor Miller

9/28/18

As we move into week six, I want to discuss what it’s like to tutor/read a paper that doesn’t need revision. At UNE, I’m currently a writing tutor at SASC and over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two writing appointments. In both of those sessions, students have come to me to discuss questions and concerns regarding their finished papers. As I read through them and had the student’s read them aloud, the students were able to fix grammar and punctuation mistakes on their own. But, when it came to bigger picture ideas, such as the flow of ideas, they seemed to fit and seemed to match what the rubric required of the paper. During both of these sessions, I didn’t want to say “Your paper looks good, it doesn’t need big picture revisions,” but it felt like I was really stretching to find areas to help revise. I didn’t want to over-scrutinize the paper and mark up minute, small details that are more preferential based on my own writing style. So I guess, my question is, what do you do in these situations? What do you do if you are reading a really well-written paper?

Another area I want to discuss for this upcoming class is balancing time management within my tutoring session. Every week, I attend Professor Courtney’s Intro to International Relations class and I know that within the upcoming couple of weeks, a couple of rough drafts and proposals are due. On Monday and Wednesday, my office hours are from 5:00pm to 6:00pm (and a little bit after 6:00pm if people need to meet/more people show up to my hours), and I also have hours by appointment in case people cannot meet at those times. I haven’t had anyone come to my office hours yet, so I assume that they will come closer to their paper’s due date, rather than earlier on. My first question is if everyone wants to meet last minute, how long should I be available for? Would it be appropriate to hold 20 minute sessions if everyone is coming last minute? I know that in creative writing, that’s what we usually did, but I don’t know since I really haven’t tutored with a larger class-size before.