Writing Center: Week Seven

This session was a follow up on the session with the same ESL student that I observed last week. The writing consultant is very patient with the writer from the start after dealing with a long and tedious session last week. They start out by establishing where the writer is in her writing process. There is no conclusion to the paper but there are quite a few pages already written. She says one of her goals is to shorten the paper. They start by looking at a section in the paper that the writer had underlined that she knows she wants to work on. There are a lot of errors that are found from the consultant reading the paper out loud. This helps the writer a lot with her paper because the consultant can show the writer where in the paper her translation to english does not make sense. They underlined sentences that did not make sense and then identified what was not working within that sentence. The writer has not properly cited her quotes yet. They went over the basics for citation. They discussed how she needs to add analysis after each quote. This the writer seemed to understand very well. They also talked about the danger of using too many quotes. The writer didn't really seem to grasp this concept well at first. This may have been because it required a larger revision to the paper as a whole. The consultant then described how you can still use some ideas from the quotes but make a comparison of the two books in the paper. The writer then requests that they talk about the conclusion. This is a case where they are simply having a conversation and trying to create a conclusion idea. The consultant finds a sentence near the end that the writer considers one of her transition and explains how that would be good to put into the conclusion. The writer is then confused about what to do about the transition because she didn't realize she just needed to make a different conclusion. After discussing the conclusion, they go over the proper mla format for the heading of the paper. It seems like the paper should be due soon since she has been working on it for a week, so I think it was good to go this since the writer doesn't know the way to format the paper. The consultant then attempts to wrap up the session and asks if there is anything else the writer wants to work on. The writer takes this opportunity to ask the consultant to read over a section of the paper to check the grammar. They pointed out a lot of the same things they talked about earlier and it made it seem like the writer was trying to turn this into a "fix-it-shop" type session. The consultant tried to avoid this by pointing out a grammar point of where to use the word "and". The hour was up after this and it seemed like the session was overall very productive. The consultant was very polite and encouraging as the writer was leaving the WC. In this session it was clear that the writer was more comfortable with the consultant. She was interjecting(not in a rude way) and asking questions about things she did not understand. It was good to see the writing seeming to be more engaged in the session! This engagement didn't last the entire time. It is certainly hard I can see for the writer to stay focussed for an entire hour.