I had three half hour appointments during my shift on 10/16.

My first appointment was with a freshman who was working on an essay about benefits for veterans. I decided not to have her read the essay aloud but to skim through it myself. I found that the toughest thing was to read thoroughly enough in the short amount of time that we had to be able to offer advice. So at first I offered a complement, which was that her writing was strong and backed up with plenty of data. Then I began with a topical critique, which was that she scattered rhetorical questions throughout. I wanted to tell her to scrap them altogether but I settled with telling her that they took away from the credibility of the paper. She also had a lot of opinionated sentences thrown in without and support to back them up, so I suggested that she add more support or move them to the conclusion paragraph. We combined a couple weak paragraphs to create a stronger essay. I was pleased that she listened attentively and heeded my advice.

My second pupil was also a freshman, working on an essay for ENC1101. He had prepared an intro paragraph and the first body paragraph. This appointment felt more casual because we were able to brainstorm ideas for the rest of the essay. I think he expected me to write some sentences myself but instead I just gave him some ideas.

The third appointment was an ESL student who wanted me to work with her on grammar. As we read through the essay I pointed out the most problematic grammar mistakes that took away from the content. I thought that even more so than grammar, what  needed to be looked at was the content because she contradicted herself a lot of the time, which took away from her overall purpose, so I helped her to form one paragraph with a counterargument. She asked me if there were any grammatical errors that I skipped over because she was "only there for grammar" so I was a little offended. But I think we were able to improve her essay as a whole.