As the second term as a writing tutor comes to a close this week, I want to bask a moment in the delightful variety of requests I’ve seen over the fall and winter semesters that services have been offered.
Sometimes it begins with the assignment. I suspect professors have a whole variety of reasons for giving assignments, but some of the time, assignments are meant to forge new neural pathways or develop new skills, like the challenge of close reading and analysis, or developing an argument based on source readings. In all these cases, I become re-acquainted with past experiences in which I had to get comfortable with stating an opinion, with learning to avoid summary when it wasn’t necessary, with familiarizing myself with events and people that were completely foreign to my experience. It is now an exciting thing to be dropped into a historical scene and to feel the drive to scramble to find reference points.
Sometimes it’s the writing. I realize it has taken me years to get a grip on academic writing and it doesn’t come naturally. For one thing, writing can feel extremely personal, and a tutor can help remind a student that an essay is just a product of your thoughts on a subject. For another, essay-writing is a skill that can be perfected over time. I feel bad for students who write with a kind of desperation about their marks… “I need an A” is terrible pressure to put on yourself - just as if an aspiring athlete were to declare to their coach on the first day of practice: “I need a gold medal”. Assignments are best viewed as exercises, in my opinion. With time their complexity becomes manageable and the lagging bits catch up to the stronger bits to compose a reliably good whole.
Sometimes it’s the detail. Academic writing requires citation and there are three kinds and each kind has a strict set of rules that lay out a finicky amount of detail. I’ve discovered that finding the right format and then applying it throughout the essay takes a surprising amount of time. It is also somewhat mindless work during which I can have Netflix playing while formatting the details.
What I most enjoyed this year is noticing how tutoring has changed for me… instead of thinking of myself as a person with all the answers who will tell a student how to write a perfect essay, I now think of myself as more of a guidepost. A student is somewhere along the path to writing good essays and they come visit for the next nudge in the right direction. I have left my lofty place to melt myself into that particular student’s challenge and try to hand them the most practical tool for meeting it. It’s just as much an exercise for me in anticipating what could be most constructive and useful at a single point in time, versus the tendency to overwhelm or the temptation to generalize too broadly.