In training tutors to respond to student writing, we first point out that they are in a unique position to encounter drafts in-progress, rather than finished pieces of writing. The kind of reading that’s called for can be very different from the evaluative reading that a finished paper may be given by a teacher who must assign a grade. The pieces of writing they will encounter will be at some stage of a process, one step in an evolution that will eventually be a finished paper. The evaluative sensibility they might bring to a finished piece of writing is not always helpful or appropriate to bring to a generative draft. To be useful to the student in their roles as tutors they will often need to set aside their initial judgements of the writing so that they can instead learn to perceive the possibilities inherent in the student’s work.
We tell tutors this will take some discipline and some practice. I compare encountering a draft of student writing to coming across a creek or stream. What first catches your eye is likely to be the surface: it may be something beautiful—the light playing on one spot, the ripples and splashes—or it may be leaves and twigs floating and moving along that catch your eye. The tutor, though, must learn to look below the surface to see what moves the water: the shape of the riverbed, the currents that pull the stream along. These currents may clash and jumble, may be divided. Similarly, when handed a student’s draft, we may find it is the sentence level that first catches our eye, forms our initial impressions; but our job is to learn to look deeper, to discover the shape of the writer’s ideas, the currents of thought that run throughout the piece of writing, to come to understand where ideas emerge from and where they may eventually go. This kind of reading of a draft is an essential part of responding to student writing.
The tutor then has a basis for asking certain questions of the writer, and for describing her own impressions of what the writer has conveyed. While tutors do know a lot of activities that can help students with specific aspects of writing, a lot of what is accomplished in the tutoring session is the result of two general approaches: tutors ask a lot of questions, and they provide a trial audience for the writer. Tutors are trained to ask many different kinds of questions designed to draw out the development of the student’s own ideas, but also to help the writer think through all the demands of an assignment and the choices they are making as a writer: questions of audience and discipline expectations, organizational principles, levels of analysis, research strategies, rhetorical and stylistic choices. The dialogue about these aspects of an assignment helps the writer to develop not only the specific piece of writing he may be working on, but also a more sophisticated sense of what it means to write within an academic setting, for a particular discipline, etc. And by taking an approach that emphasizes the potential and possibilities in a piece of writing, tutors are often able to encourage a student writer to explore those possibilities and take the kind of risks that will lead to real progress in their writing.
Elizabeth Keithley (Student Learning Center)
Originally Published: Volume 2 – Number 1 (Spring 2001)