You Did What?
I will be the first to admit that I typically get attached to my own writing and as a writer, this makes accepting feedback difficult (which I try not to take personally). Earlier this week, I sat down for my first tutoring session in The Writing Collaboratory. I believe that there is always something new to learn when it comes to writing, so being able to sit down in a collaborative space with tutors who are also students, provides an outside opinion on student’s writing and how to improve the quality of it.
Despite this session as a requirement for the class, I wanted to take an assignment that I genuinely needed help with or one that was recently assigned. With that being said, I was recently assigned to write a critical response in connection to The Hobbit with minimal guidelines of the requirements for the response. I decided to play it safe and write a pretty “standard” essay, standard as in length and format. When I made the appointment, I knew that I would have my body and closing paragraphs completed, but I typically struggle with writing clear thesis statements and occasionally introductions, so I put that down as my reason for scheduling the appointment.
Session Time! 
I booked my appointment with a tutor who I knew was an English major and has been in a couple of my classes in the past, so I felt they were the best fit to help me. When we sat down, I explained what I felt I needed help with and I pulled up the assignment for them read over. The assignment only included the prompt, but not anything further. The tutor suggested that we check the syllabus, however, there was no further explanation of my professor’s expectations on there either. The tutor agreed that writing an essay with the given prompt made sense and was a safe bet. They asked if I wanted to read my essay out loud, or if I felt better having them read it. We chose to take each paragraph at a time, so I read what I had started for my introduction. They explained to me that what I had down for the introduction already, worked well for the assignment and they also noted that it seemed like I already had a strong thesis statement within that paragraph. We continued to read through the other paragraphs, looking for any other issues or problem areas I may possibly have.
At this point, I felt it would be better for them to read it because I figured they would catch any mistakes better than I could and I would be able to hear the way it sounds from a different reader’s perspective. With my second paragraph, the tutor noticed some citing errors. I, of course, cited quotations pulled from the book, but they pointed out that even when paraphrasing the book or specific chapters, the information needs to be cited so I added in citations where necessary before we moved forward.
Throughout my response, there were a few laughable moments as I discussed certain “odd” scenes within the book. The tutor found themselves laughing at certain points but made sure to reassure me that they had never read the books before so certain names and events are funny and that they were not laughing at my writing. I knew this, of course, but from a tutor’s standpoint, it’s important to reassure the student throughout the session of both their strong points and that despite certain errors, their overall writing is fine. This is important to consider, because you never want to make a student feel bad about their writing, or that your laughter or comments are any way connected to the quality of their writing. There were some parts of my writing where certain wording didn’t quite make sense, so the tutor would pause and encourage me to read those parts out loud to myself and consider how I could make them more fluent, rather than them fixing it for me or suggesting that I need to fix it. That method helps writers in the future, to help them work out similar issues and to be able to recognize them in their writing on their own.
Once we reached the end of my response, they noticed I had some italicized writing at the top of the page that I hadn’t talked about when we were going through my writing. It was a quote pulled from the beginning of the book, a note from the publishers rather than the author, but it had given the definition of a Hobbit and it was something that I wanted readers of my response to keep in mind. To put this in context, my response was about the development of Bilbo Baggins, a Hobbit, throughout the story. I wasn’t sure how to properly cite the text because it wasn’t apart of the actual book itself and it didn’t have a page number associated with it. Although the tutor was unsure how to properly cite it themselves, they had a great solution that would work best for the situation.
Concluding the Session
Before we ended the session, the tutor asked if I had any further questions or if there was anything else I needed any help with. Once everything was resolved and I felt confident with my work, we ended the session and they asked me if I wanted them to email my professor about my visit to the collaboratory.
Overall the experience was great and despite having specific concerns going into the session, the tutor worked with me on any other problems that I had and they taught me the importance of citing paraphrases as well. My tutor concentrated on getting me to point out my own mistakes as they read through my work rather than them pointing them out for me, and when errors were encountered, they gave me different options to fix them if I felt they needed to be changed.
The methods the tutor used in the session connect with our class’ readings about language usage. Though my response had little flaws with language, the practice of getting the student to point out any grammatical or structure errors on their own is similar to the suggestions from Perryman-Clark when dealing with language. This method helps students apply revision skills utilized in the collaboratory on their future assignments.
