Week of 11/6

            This week my tutee, Andres Elovic, came in with a very strong paper that he wrote for his nutrition class about food choices, nutritional value, how frequent people eat and the quantities they consume, and how societal, cultural, and historical factors all play into the decisions we make regarding what we eat. We fixed a few grammatical errors and typos throughout, but the writing content and structure of his paper was phenomenal.

            Andres began his paper with a very strong thesis, and followed the excellent introduction with paragraphs making clear and specific points, each point contributing to the overall answer to the main idea of why we eat the foods we eat. Andres used personal examples, such as his childhood in Miami, and how the foods he ate were different in comparison to his friend’s diet, who also lived in Miami. He used this example to solidify his point that even if you come from the same region as someone else, your dietary patterns could rely completely on your upbringing and your family-resulting in many different cultural ways of eating-all condensed in one small region.

            Andres had a few questions about formatting, and was mainly worried about grammatical errors. The fact that the writing content of his paper was already so finalized and polished gave us much more time to focus on sentence structures and grammatical errors, making the tutoring session run much more smoothly. Andres was open to all of my suggestions, which was wonderful. He made me feel like he was happy with the overall product of his paper, which is always a huge relief after any tutoring session.

            Andres plans to read over his paper a few more times to catch any last minute, minor errors before submitting it for grading on Sunday. I felt confident after our tutoring session that his paper would receive a very high grade, as Andres gave himself plenty of time for the polishing and revision process, and is already such a strong writer to begin with. Tutoring Andres was truly a fantastic experience, and I look forward to more sessions as fantastic as this one.