Tatiana Schlote-Bonne

 1. Will I know ahead of time what major my students are and what kind of help they might be looking for before we meet? Or is that what I learn in the first session?

2. How will I provide helpful feedback to a student who's working on a topic I don't know anything about? 

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  1. Carol SeverinoSeptember 1, 2020 at 3:40 PM

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  2. Carol SeverinoSeptember 2, 2020 at 12:56 PM

    Good questions!
    1) You can go that student's first appointment on WC online, open it, and click on the student's name to get basic info about them--their major and year. You won't know though what their writing goals are until you meet them for the first time.

    2) If the student knows something about the topic, say from class, or it's part of their major, have them teach you about it. If neither one of you knows much about it, you can look it up together.

    More than half the time that we don't know their topics, so do ask questions. The paper should make sense to a general audience, especially an undergrad's paper. Most of the Rhetoric topics you'll be reading about will be current controversies, and as you know, the rhetoric and lit papers will be analyses of texts that sometimes are well-known, sometimes not. If you don't know the text, you can ask questions and still help them go deeper with their analysis.

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