Common Ground

Tutoring ESL students can often feel

like taking on a lot more parts of a paper than you're used to!

As a tutor for the English as a Second Language program here on campus I see biweekly the struggles and accomplishments of people trying to learn the nuances of our fickle and often illusive English language. The article Creating a Common Ground with ESL Writers by Mosher, Granroth, and Hicks discusses the differences that may appear in an ESL consultation in contrast to a normal consultation. What we, as consultants, are trying to impart to the writer (an adept understanding and wielding of the American rhetorical style) is oftentimes a goal while noble and lofty, is far from being reached in a single consultation. The tendency to get frustrated, ignore the issue, or not try quite so hard to really help the writer are all temptations and downfalls of a successful ESL consultation. 

To avoid a futile-feeling situation the authors of Creating a Common Ground with ESL Writers site the author Judith Powers and endorsing her assertion that to approach the consultation exactly like a non-ESL consult expecting the same results as before can be a spirit-killer to both the consultant and the writer.

While I agree that ESL consultations should be approached differently this article places much emphasis on requiring the writer to do most of the talking, an approach that I feel may not be effective. Many ESL students are shy in a new country and school filled with bubbly, loud, type A people. Perhaps also afraid of misusing the tricky and colloquial English language that we often spout a mile a minute around here on campus I think oftentimes a consultant will have difficulty even coaxing out a lengthy response from the student. Prompting the student with very specific questions might be a better route.

This article offers up some good information on ESL consultations, and consultations in general. Though it does stress the rhetorical textual differences between American and other cultures it doesn’t recognize so much that rhetorical styles in spoken communication are also very different too, and this is probably the cause of different written styles too- afterall oral compostition came far before humans ever wrote anything down. It is only natural that the written composition should mimic the spoken style.

A very helpful acronym (however creepy) that Mosher, Granroth, and Hicks supply in their article is WATCH. I find following the format of this process to be helpful in any consultation, especially if one is nervous about getting disorganized and talking circles around a paper.

W-Talk about the WRITER.

Use “small talk” to find out where the student is from, how long s/he has been in the U.S., how s/he likes it, the extent of his/her first language writing experience, and opportunities to use English outside of the classroom (Fox 111).

A-Talk about the AUDIENCE/ASSIGNMENT. Ask for a description of the assignment. Help interpret the professor’s comments and discuss his/her probable expectations. Check for understand- ing of the subject and reading comprehension in English.

T-Talk about the writer’s TEXT. Ask the student to explain his/her purpose or the focus of the paper. Ask where s/he has informed the reader of his/her purpose. Confirm whether your interpretation of the text matches his/her intent in terms of voice as well as content.

C-A few COMMUNICATION CAVEATS. Be more direct than when working with native speakers, but don’t silence the non-native speaker by dominating talk time and not genuinely listening. Do not always expect explicit verbal disagreement. Pay careful attention to non- verbal cues as well. Also, be aware that a student’s pause time may be longer than yours. If are not aware of this, you may have a tendency to silence and/

or interrupt a student without realizing it.

H-Remember, HELPING the writer is your primary purpose. Being WATCHful will help to establish the trust, respect, and empathy necessary for any “helping relationship” (Taylor 27). Creating a common ground by being WATCHful fosters better interpersonal relationships which, in turn, lower anxiety and increase productivity for both the ESL writer and the consultant.

Distracted-

Keep that Focus!

Wait, what were you saying? Distractions- the world is full 'em, and sometimes they make us feel like we're fighting tooth and nail to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Writing is no exception when it comes to distractions and it is easy to find oneself interrupted in the process of writing a paper. There's a reason that "How to Write a College Paper" jokingly lists 36 distractions that might befall a college student before they actually start writing. (and this list isn't far from the truth I've found!) Distractions are no doubt the reason students bring long, long papers into consultations rather than sending them via email in advance, and the reason some consultations go awry.

We've seen how distractions have undermined the effectiveness of the consultation in many of the readings. Steve Sherwood for example in his "Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can't Help" noted that distractions might have been what doomed his consultations with the learning disabled Byron. He said, "But as I commented about particular aspects of his paper, Byron frequently stopped the tape, rewound it, and replayed my earlier remarks. These unpredictable interruptions were unnerving and derailed my train of thought. I would leave out points I'd intended to mention and lose touch with insights I'd had about his essays"(Sherwood, 1). Similarly he later quotes an excellent tutor who'd felt she had failed during a consultation recalling, "We got interrupted a few times by people needing help with their computers, so by the time we finally got to the end, I didn't even remember the beginning of the paper. Then he asked me if I had learned something from his paper. I just went blank. I couldn't even think of the last sentence I had read. It made me feel really bad, and like I hadn't been paying attention or didn't care. I just felt like I handled the whole tutorial wrong, and I could tell he was really disappointed"(Sherwood, 54). In fact I've seen this effect first-hand in a consultation that shadowed just this week. We were stuck in the waiting room because another consultation was taking place in the writing center room. As the consultant read the paper at least a handful of people stopped through the hallway and many tried to stop and chat with the consultant. Clearly distractions are something we need to pay better attention to (no irony intended!) since both of the former distracted consultations crop up in an article that so plainly deals with writing consultations that have been claimed as failures. 

The areas of the brain (prefrontal) that are necessary to resist distractions are exactly the same areas that are needed keeping information in mind. It looks like a direct competition. 

Amani, the consultant I shadow, dealt with these distractions in the only and best way possible: she acknowledged the people that came through but let them go like obstructive thoughts, focusing on what mattered at the moment- the student's paper. Not suprisingly her consultation was a success, and both she and the student left the consultation confident that good and helpful things had been accomplished. 


In yoga during Savasana (final relaxation) one is told to acknowledge thoughts, and let them pass on by like clouds. I believe this is the best way to treat distractions. Like yoga, focus takes practice but hopefully fall of next year my mind will be ready to power through consultations of any difficulty or length confidently, calmly and focused. 

"How to Write a College Paper"  http://asil.logicalinsanity.ca/300college%20paper.html 

-The New Copy Editor Girl -

Not all of us can pull off journalist Clark Kent's hipster glasses like he does!

http://thecollegianur.com/

Follow this link to The Collegian's website!

http://www.copyediting.com/

Or, check out some helpful tips on this site for copy editors

I’ve added a new chapter to my repertoire of literary adventures - copy editing for The Collegian our campus newspaper.  Unfortunately this kind of editing goes against many of the principles we’ve learned during the Writing Consultant class. Though I’m trying hard and putting a lot of hours in to be honest right now I don’t think I’m very good at it! To begin with we are asked never to edit for content, it is an entirely grammatical endeavor.  Though I am interested in eventually writing articles, to be candid I’ve never been a grammar Nazi or even very concerned with grammar. This new position, hopefully will be a stepping-stone to a more interesting position, but in the meantime I’ll have to learn to be a rockstar at editing. To do so might mean I’ll have to crack open the Diane Hacker books that have been sitting on my shelf and gathering dust since freshman year of high school .

One article we’ve read entitled Grammar in the Writing Center: Opportunities for Discovery and Change makes the statement that, “The teaching of formal grammar has negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing”( Glover & Stay). This assertion is a little frightening to me as a copy editor. I think perhaps that the context of the Writing Center is important to consider alongside this quotation. My role at the newspaper is to produce the most polished and professional paper in my power. Unlike in the writing center I am working not towards the individual growth of each writer, but towards a finished product.  But we’re all college students, learning from one another aren’t we? Glover and Stay suggest in their article that appropriate editing on all levels of a piece can make all the difference in helping the author become a better thinker and writer. One article that I’ve encountered which was particularly hard for me edit was also difficult to digest as a reader. I understand that opinion pieces can and should be causal, but this one while entertaining was hard to follow. Why shouldn’t editors help at least with more superficial aspects of  content such as organization? I think that The Collegian should hold its editors to the high professional convention used in the real world, but should also be flexible and allow them to engage in the pieces more wholeheartedly, creating a dialogue between editors and writers to produce the best possible paper.

Adventures in E.S.L.

My experience with ESL, or English as a second language tutoring to date has been fabulous-it’s really something I’ve fallen in love with. The staff member Bruno (not actual name) I have been set up with is from West Africa and speaks a dialect of French. This is a great match for me because I do have some background in that language in particular. From the first moment Bruno entered the neat, new, room and organized his papers I could tell that he was ready and eager to learn. His broad smile and sense of humor bridged the gap of our differences easily.

The first and foremost thing I initiated before we dove into the workbook he was equipped with was basic conversation. Here my understanding of learning a language came into play. While his sentences were basic at best, I remember the frustration of understanding conversation and not being able to respond. Listening generally comes first, and then comes speech. He told me a little about himself, and talked about his family, all the while eager to begin the workbook- perhaps I thought conversing put him outside of his comfort zone.

The workbook exercises that we began were basic. We practiced together with prepositions: under, over, behind, below, next to, …etc. He seemed comfortable with this and I had him draw pictures to illustrate the ideas he was learning from the book. “Draw a turtle under a tree,” I would read, and he would sit and ponder for a moment or two but presently draw a turtle under a tree. Before I knew it, it was time to go and I wrapped up the session by asking him about animals he knew of. Shyness forgotten Bruno carried on for quite some time about African animals he couldn’t find an English equivalent for, that sounded both thrilling and terrifying like a creature that might leap out of the game board in Jumanji.

These sessions are much more based on learning the language of English, rather than utilizing it, and Bruno offered different concerns to me  than an ESL college student might present. Mosher, Granroth, and Hicks suggest in their article Creating a Common Ground with ESL writers, “to avoid becoming the teacher in our writing conferences; we would rather be the listening ear. Greater directness, we fear, could com- promise our goal of creating a better writer through talk”. I think this statement sounds good in theory when applied to any ESL student but might be much more difficult to implement if the ESL student is shy or reluctant to speak. I will try to continue to engage Bruno in conversation he finds interesting, (I’d love to hear more about those crazy animals) and I think that he and the other staff members engaged in the program, are incredibly trusting and dedicated people to devote as much time as some of them do to an entirely student operated organization.

First Consultation: Katie Oberkircher’s Psychology Paper

I’ve never written, read, or encountered an academic Psychology essay before my midterm consultation with Katie Oberkircher, and yet here I was, required to comment upon and suggest improvements on an essay written about just that. Since her paper is a piece from her class which is entitled First Year Seminar: Friendship, one might expect her writing to be expository literary analysis like many seminars, at least that’s what I expected. But no, she informed me, “All we’ve read so far are handouts and packets, scientific studies on friendship. We haven’t read one book [novel] all semester”. As I set out to give a helpful consultation I kept this in mind, along with the important fact that a professor from the Psychology department would be working from a very different criteria than the English or Art History professors who taught me in my First Year Seminars. The consultation was to be a lesson in a new academic discourse, for both Katie and me, and I knew such a new experience would mean the academic context of the essay which is addressed in Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions by Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs would be important to take into account in the consultation. The assignment sheet in particular was also to be an invaluable tool in bridging the requirements of Katie’s professor, Anna Kendall’s Assignment Sheet Mystery was to help me help her balance and blend these demands with her raw writing skills to produce a polished essay. Finally, Summer Smith’s essay The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing was especially vital in aiding me to concretely communicate with Katie the nature of my suggestions and commentary in writing.

Context is paramount to any written academic work; an assertion that Downs and Wardle bring up and discuss in their article. Academic context too becomes essential in Katie’s conflicting ideas for how her paper should be formed. Downs and Wardle refer specifically to the mode in which this context is understood as “universal educated discourse” a phrase, which indicates the different voice, needed and employed in writing on any topic from biology to banking. To write in this discourse one’s argument must be in accord with the discourse prescribed to a particular academic field. However, I noticed Katie’s thesis lacked a decisive argument and instead was rather broad in its statement that is as follows, “ Both Sullivan and Harris show the consequences of the preadolescent environment affect social development, but Harris concentrates on how different aspects of the preadolescent environment affect social development, while Sullivan centers around individual social growth”. I mentioned my thought to Katie in the consultation, suggesting that she strengthen the thesis with her own assertion on the contrast between the two authors she was analyzing. However, she informed me that she had already met with her professor, and that this professor had said she didn’t really need a thesis to speak of. Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions makes the assertion that, “If writing cannot be separated from content, then scholarly writing cannot be separated from reading”(Wardle & Downs, 555). If all academic writing requires discussion of equally academic reading to be successful, analysis is inherently required of the writer. Having read the Wardle and Downs article I recognized that not all fields require to be structured in the same manner, but that an argument would be beneficial to any analytical essay. It was difficult for me to see how we should proceed without this so, I hearkened back to the assignment sheet, the concrete written outline of what the teacher wants from her students, and it seemed the only logical and valid place to begin.

The assignment sheet can be useful to ascertain whether or not the written work at the end of drafting is written in appropriate academic form and discourse specific to the field.  Anna Kendall’s Assignment Sheet Mystery suggests that really the assignment sheet is an important genre of academic writing in universities, and worthy of notice. The St. Martin’s handbook asserts, “a discussion of strategy words will guide students to a more complex understanding of how their essays will be evaluated” (St. Martin’s 96). Together Katie and I followed this suggestion, looking for action words in the assignment sheet text, and we noticed the presence of the words compare, analyze, and contrast. The essential word analyze clued Katie in that a more concrete thesis might be useful in order to fully analyze the texts she discusses, and to fully compare and contrast the authors in an interesting and intellectual way.

The next facet of the paper I addressed was the organization. I know from firsthand experience that structuring a comparison paper can be one of the trickier tasks in any kind of writing. While Katie’s topic sentences were for the most part very clear and well written, her paragraphs often strayed from their original purpose. I suggested that Katie make herself a reverse outline, a tip I learned from one of my own appointments in the Writing Center. I also referred her to Glossing Your Ideas: Focusing/Connecting Ideas a page on Writer’s Web that suggests the writer ask themselves essential questions, which determine the focus of a paragraph and greater argument of the paper.

End comments are something I’ve had a lot of experience with in my short background in Creative Writing, but have always struggled with. However I never really found myself a very strong writer of end comments – they made me feel uncomfortable, and like I was passing a final judgment on the work of the writer. Daunted by writing another, I was delighted when I read an article dealing with this concern deeming the end comment its own genre. Summer Smith’s The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing. Smith asserts that this is the most important text a teacher or consultant can write to help or hinder a writer. To avoid judging the content of a paper I shied from what Smith qualified as a “primary genre” or a response that is only a few brief statements, which in her studies she found were the most judgmental of all. Instead I strove to write a comment she qualified as “secondary genre”. Smith says this genre “usually begins with positive evaluation, moves to negative evaluation and coaching, and ends either with coaching or positive evaluation”(Smith, 250). This example still however seemed to me a little brief and lacking in specifics. I attempted to merge my own ideas with those of Smith to produce an end comment that cited in detail the parts of Katie’s paper such as the thesis and organization which I wanted to comment upon.

Katie was grateful for my commentary, and in summary I feel the consultation went well. The readings, especially the three discussed above were completely helpful to me in Katie’s consultation. I recognize that every case is different though, and that the variety of reading we have engaged in will serve as a veritable mine of information as I approach new consultations. Often our readings and activities for class address extreme situations, as in the case of our Training for Tough Tutorials videos. However, I think in this way we are a lot like paramedics in training. Just like any paramedic all we can do as consultants is prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and do all in our power to help the writer, pledging ourselves to aid their pursuit of writing. 

Keeping Professional, Staying Objective

Finally, my first opportunity to shadow! A blonde girl dressed head to toe in pink was our first client to date. As the appointment proceeded I noticed from their talk of Edna Ponteiller that the writer was creating an essay on The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which happens to have changed my life and is one of my favorite books. I am a very talkative person, and while we discuss often in class the difficulties of being a consultant, I think that the apprentice side of the arrangement can be equally challenging in remembering to be quiet and observant. I was positively bursting during the session to share my insight on the novel, but I held my own and watched instead.

Ernest Hemingway said, “Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking about what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe”. I am glad I did somehow find the patience to watch and listen. Our writer was concerned primarily with the demands of her teacher using repeatedly the words “weird” and “crazy” to describe his methods. She admitted that she didn’t understand the teacher’s style, and that she was frustrated that there are, “So many ways to write”.

The writing consultant immediately asked to see the assignment sheet, a helpful move, which I noticed, was strongly recommended by Anna Kendall in her article The Assignment Sheet Mystery when a student flounders with writing for a different mode than accustomed to, or grappling with the demands of a teacher. The assignment to me did seem overbearing and a little ridiculous for a college professor to assign, for example he required a quotation in the second sentence of the paragraphs, the consultant was respectful of the teacher’s opinion and didn’t join in to criticize the professor, as a consultant fell into the trap of doing in Training for Tough Tutorials: The Friend about a reluctant client. Instead the consultant kept her cool and professional attitude giving her input within the boundaries of the assignment.

Towards the end of the consultations the writer said, “I think I might try to shoot him” I froze in my seat “(dramatic pause)…. an email” I swear to you, that I really for a moment thought that one writer’s angst might have resulted in a horror. But no, the consultants professional demeanor must have been a positive influence for instead the writer endeavored to better understand her professor and polish her writing. 

Poe!

Check out Richmond's Poe museum here!
http://www.poemuseum.org/index.php

 A week ago I paid a visit to the little cottage, once Poe's childhood home, to interview and look around. I received a call today with the good news- a job offer! As I'm sure you can see from the video below there's a lot of Poe most of us don't know. I will now be able to share the notoriety of the most notorious Richmond writer with the world in a position that's half academic half theatrics. The museum curators that interviewed me were regretful that I couldn't meet the other student that works there. "He's really funny" they assured me, "and right now he's halfway to a speech he's giving - dressed as Poe!". Apparently he routinely gets ovations at the finish of his tours, which sparked my naturally competitive nature. I'm eager to meet my new, possibly quirky, coworker and for the other events the museum throws. Apparently people have had weddings there in the past. I lit up when they told me this, I love weddings! But, on second thought a wedding at the Poe museum might be a little more morbid than romantic. There are other events at the museum too; concerts, dinners, even murder mystery parties serving as a venue of spooky fun.

The museum itself contains many of his personal items; a gorgeous silk vest, the bed he slept in as a child, even a lock of his hair. Hopefully my new workplace will be a great source of inspiration in my own writing, but not too creepy!