Blog 10 Tatiana

 One of my writing center students is in a psychology and a Greek mythology class. I don't know much about either subjects, so like the Bedford guide suggests I mostly look for clarity, cohesiveness, and to make sure she's answering all questions the paper asks. One of the psychology papers asked for a bit of a creative angle--the assignment said to imagine she was a witness to a crime and needed to convert the details to long-term memory for a trial, and to write a paper about how one could could do that. I was a little unsure how academic or creative the paper should lean, and so was the student, and we straddled a sort of middle ground. I recommended that she ask her professor what if she's produced so far is the sort of tone she's looking for. 

I have a student in my Gen Ed Lit class who's asked me for help with her med school personal statement and I've worked on that with her in office hours. I believe she's also submitting it to document review through the writing center. That one's a little trickier because I wasn't sure how much of what she was referencing was common knowledge (she's applying to a specific branch of medical practice and had intern experience doing this work and so there are terms and references to procedures.) But like the Bedford Guide suggests, I was able to help her smooth out her prose to be more clear and concise and we worked on making the opening engaging. 

Comments

  1. Jose Di PaolaNovember 11, 2020 at 9:20 AM

    I've often had to resort to recommending the student talk to the professor too. On one hand, I imagine it's very unsatisfying to not get a good answer from the writing center, but on the other sometimes clients need people to push them to talking with their professor.

    With the medial school personal statement, did it help to ask the student to clarify the terms you weren't familiar with? Or did that take too much time? I feel like it's an important skill to be able to summarize your work in a layperson's terms (the elevator pitch as it's often called).

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    1. Andrew CardenasNovember 11, 2020 at 1:29 PM

      Going off of Jose's comment, a really helpful study tip that one of my undergrad professors gave me for papers and free response questions on exams is that you should be able to explain the basic concept your talking about in terms that a high school freshman could understand. What he was getting at, I think, is that striving to effectively "dumb-down" an idea helps develop one's confidence handling the material.

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