Shadowing

Yesterday I shadowed with one of my friends who is a writing consultant at the Writing Center. We met with a freshman who needed help with one of her essays for her FYS. Before she came I read through the student's paper to see the marks that the consultant wrote. I noticed that there were a few grammatical errors that she underlined but for the most part there were just questions written in the margins. I asked her if she did this for all of the papers that she edited and she replied that when she notices that there are a lot of structural errors then she simply writes questions down to ask the writer.

Eventually the student showed up and she seemed very flustered. The consultant asked her to explain what her thesis was and she struggled to do so. The consultant did a very good job calming her down and helping her voice her points. She established a friendly relationship from the beginning which set a nice mood for the session. It seemed like the student really didn't have a sense of what her thesis was so the consultant listed out the 3 main points that were in the paper. Once the student saw her points listed out clearly and concisely it was much easier for her to come to conclusions about her paper.

I drew a lot of good things from this session. First of all, I always knew that it was important to establish a comfortable setting for the student but to see it in practice was very beneficial. The consultant noticed how flustered the student was about her essay so before they even began talking about the paper she reassured the student that they would work through the problematic bits and come up with a proper thesis. Overall it was a very beneficial experience and I was glad that I was able to draw so many good things from it.