Observing Tutors and Writing. March 27th, 2012.

Yesterday I went to the Writing Center again to witness students being tutored. The two students I worked with were on their second draft of the papers they were working on. Sarah, my tutor, was very informative with the way she tutored and spoke to me on what and why she was doing the things she was doing. The first student was Mohammad, and he was mainly focusing on the overall piece, trying to get what he wrote to a more "readable" and understanding paper. It was well written with strong ideas and personal information, but Sarah was focusing on how the grammar would be improving what he wrote. Overall, Mohammad was confident in what he was writing but to get to the bottom of handing in a well-written paper he'd have to focus on the grammar and punctuation.
For the second student Rezwana, Sarah didn't let her mark the paper she was working on before they both spoke about how to make the paper better. Rezwana was focusing on her problems with the thesis and maintaining her idea's through out the paper, but Sarah was making sure she'd talk to her before changing anything. While they were talking about ideas Rezwana wrote, she was able to catch her mistakes while reading aloud. Sarah was on top of the conversational aspect of tutoring, getting exactly what the student wanted to say into her work. After briefly talking about it, she was able to put an unclear sentence that she wrote into a more understanding and fulfilled sentence.
I felt that Sarah was a good tutor, and knew what she was trying to do by helping the writers with higher order and lower order concerns, evening out both to get an overall good paper. Also leaving the student with a lot of work to be done by themselves when they got home.