Carey Dunne - Writing Center Blog Post Week 3

 In my experience teaching Gen Ed Lit, I’ve had a couple of ESL students who were both very hard on themselves about their difficulty mastering English grammar and syntax. I found that while these students’ papers did contain significant grammatical errors, these errors didn’t prevent me from understanding the arguments and ideas they were trying to communicate, which I tried to emphasize in my meetings with these students. In one case, the student’s ideas were very sophisticated and his grasp of concepts like thesis writing was more advanced than that of many of my native English speaking students, despite some awkward phrasings in his papers. When I met with this student during office hours to discuss what he perceived as his shortcomings as a writer and his concerns about getting points docked for grammatical errors, I tried to emphasize that, while correct grammar is not unimportant, it’s less important in writing than having interesting things to say, which he clearly did; I encouraged him to write his first drafts without worrying too much about grammatical errors, and then to go back and revise with the help of the Writing Center after developing his ideas and the structure of the essay. I think tutoring young writers, either ESL or native speakers, is often as much about encouragement and coaching them on how to overcome their self-doubt and insecurities as writers and how to cope with these insecurities as they crop up during the writing process as it is about teaching them new language and writing skills. This experience and “The Writers You Tutor” chapter of the Bedford Guide did make me want to get a refresher on basic grammatical terms and principles, however, since my approach to revising for grammar and syntax is mostly intuitive; I would have a hard time explaining the rules of grammar to a student who asked for technical breakdown of why their grammatical errors were errors.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Andrew post 9

I think it's vitally important for writing center staff to keep abreast of writing center scholarship. Because students who visit writing centers vary widely in their proficiency, their motivations for seeking help, and economic/identity categories, and bring in work from disparate disciplines, staff need to be adaptable to multitudinous tutoring relationships and scenarios. Requiring staff to go through practicum courses (held on maybe a biennial basis) and holding regular department forums where tutors can present research or seek counsel would help keep everyone on the same page with regard to the latest findings and debates in writing center theory and practice. However, I don't think that it's reasonable expect that each member regularly conduct their own research, since many tutors are graduate students or full time instructors whose resources are often already stretched thin on account of pressures to produce writing/research in their own field of study. Asking too m...
Read more

Andrew blog post #10

 I'm usually fairly confident working with writers outside my discipline. I think part of that has to do with my own experience as an undergraduate, where I switched majors from political science to literature to philosophy then, finally, to psychology. To my mind, basic critical thinking skills--the kind that I teach my students in my rhetoric classes--apply just as much to qualitative analyses as they do to quantitative/empirical analyses. Questions of audience and purpose factor into effective writing and communication--approaching any paper, regardless of the class that it's for, I always push writers to ask themselves how much information is necessary for them to provide to contextualize an argument, and remind them that each item of evidence they introduce has to be accompanied by an explanation of its relevance to their overarching thesis. One of my writing center students' first assignment for his rhetoric class was to write a paper about his major (bio-medical engi...
Read more

Andrew blog post 4

Perhaps one way to promote appreciation of other "Englishes," as the CCCC statement (as much as they would disapprove of the use of the term) is to recalibrate considerations of style in writing pedagogy, one that demonstrates that what we call "standard English" is but one among many modes of expression that can be modulated according to varying purposes/audiences. Many people, I think, don't particularly enjoy reading academic English, which, besides imposing oppressive standards on marginalized people, is often a clumsy, bland, and inefficient means of expression; writing is most effective when it comes off as the work of a singular voice and intellect.  Students' general education in universities should also include critical studies of how languages are products of conquest. This, of course, has been a constant throughout history--consider how Spanish and Portuguese integrated Arabic vocabulary by virtue of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. However...
Read more