Andrew post 8

Something that reading these case studies prompted me to think about was how intimate of a relationship each writer has to language, even if the language in which they are expressing themself is not their first. Each writer, shaped by exposure to culture and their personal reading history, naturally favors certain diction and syntactic forms; the task of a writing tutor, as I see it, is not to dissuade students from writing in their preferred styles/modes, but rather to encourage them to be more mindful of how to adapt language to best suit their rhetorical purpose. 

The Goedde study succeeds toward this end in encouraging the student to experiment writing outside of the academic register she traditionally favors; effective storytelling undoubtedly requires a different skillset than effective scholarly argumentation, where engaging the reader's interest takes precedence over thorough and robust evidence. However, I do think tutors, when working with students like Lorraine, should be aware that there is no reason why a piece of writing can't be compelling on both emotional and intellectual terms. I feel as though Goedde's suggestions to Lorraine implicitly promoted such a dichotomy.

The strength of the Fan study is its empiricism, allowing the authors to identify the frequencies of specific classes of errors and to tailor feedback accordingly to meet the student's particular needs. Before addressing higher-order questions of style, like those addressed in the Goedde study, I believe it's necessary for students to master the fundamentals of grammar and usage, as it is for jazz musicians to master scales and chord changes before moving on to improvisation. However, as with the Goedde study, I think it's important to not discourage a student's ambitions; if a student like Fan enjoys reading and writing texts that are more literary or cerebral, a tutor should not convey that they shouldn't or can't write using that kind of language. Rather, they should acknowledge the style of writing the student aspires to write with, and work with them to develop the skills necessary to effectively do so. 

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