10/15 Reflection

Tutoring on my own was stressful but really fun. The first person who came in was working on his research paper for ENC 1101. He was on his final draft. He said he thought his transitions from paragraph to paragraph were weak, so I suggested we read the paper out loud together. It worked really well. Every now and then, he would recognize a little grammar error or a confusing sentence. Sometimes I had to think about how to make suggestions—like how to sound constructive instead of just saying, “make that two sentences.” That was probably the hardest part for me—not correcting him all the time. I used a trick from the girl I co-tutored with—she would say, “as a reader…” before pointing out a mistake. It’s sneaky. “As a reader, this sentence stood out to me.” The paper was about how music artists pair their sound with cover art. He had a lot of sources, but some of them were album reviews. He said his teacher disliked these sources because they weren’t from an academic source. I showed him the library website and how to find a database/article/journal. I hope that helped him.

               The second person I saw was a girl working on a paper for Hispanic marketing. She was a native Spanish speaker and said she made an appointment with me because my last name is Spanish. I was happy about that. She was concerned with her English writing. She had trouble with prepositions and prepositional phrases, pronouns, and articles. Her syntax was also a little confusing. Again, it was difficult not to just tell her what to do. One thing I found myself doing was re-writing some of her more jumbled sentences in a blank Word doc so that we could re-word it in a way that made the most sense. I think I did a good job of identifying patterns in her errors—most of them were easy to fix, but there were so many that it took a good forty-five minutes to make it through half the paper. Overall, I had a good time during these two appointments.