week 13 chris
I can't find the prompt but it looks like from most of y'all's posts that we're sharing case studies of our own tutoring work, so here goes.
I have a student--let's call them X--who comes to me with very densely written, legal-jargon heavy writing. English is a second language to X but their vocabulary is quite good. Their sentence structure on the other hand is often convoluted and confusing. Sometimes, we talk about word choice and I recommend different ways to rephrase what X is trying to say, to make the relationships between X's concepts more clear.
The real challenge comes from when I want to avoid being just a proofreader--I want to avoid writing the thing for X--so I try to force myself to, as often as feasible, just explain a problem and teach the principle instead of offering any options for replacing the offending phrase/word. X has a hard time with this and usually bluntly asks "well, what would you recommend?" X is not trying to coerce me into doing their writing for them, but it is a challenge to sometimes steer X's expectations in the direction of "look I'll give you all the tools I know how to give you, but at the end of the day you'll have to rewrite this sentence with your own words/ideas." Now and then I cave and give X a handful of options of how they could rephrase the passage. But I try not to choose for them.
Overall sessions are going pretty well. The subject matter X is writing about is complex and high-concept stuff, so it's always a unique and fun challenge to try to 1) wrap my head around what they're trying to say; and 2) figure out how to teach them to say it more effectively without taking over their style or spending too long stuck in the weeds of each sentence.
I have a student--let's call them X--who comes to me with very densely written, legal-jargon heavy writing. English is a second language to X but their vocabulary is quite good. Their sentence structure on the other hand is often convoluted and confusing. Sometimes, we talk about word choice and I recommend different ways to rephrase what X is trying to say, to make the relationships between X's concepts more clear.
The real challenge comes from when I want to avoid being just a proofreader--I want to avoid writing the thing for X--so I try to force myself to, as often as feasible, just explain a problem and teach the principle instead of offering any options for replacing the offending phrase/word. X has a hard time with this and usually bluntly asks "well, what would you recommend?" X is not trying to coerce me into doing their writing for them, but it is a challenge to sometimes steer X's expectations in the direction of "look I'll give you all the tools I know how to give you, but at the end of the day you'll have to rewrite this sentence with your own words/ideas." Now and then I cave and give X a handful of options of how they could rephrase the passage. But I try not to choose for them.
Overall sessions are going pretty well. The subject matter X is writing about is complex and high-concept stuff, so it's always a unique and fun challenge to try to 1) wrap my head around what they're trying to say; and 2) figure out how to teach them to say it more effectively without taking over their style or spending too long stuck in the weeds of each sentence.
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