Liam's English Blog

November 26-30          This week was the first back from break, but was also, understandably, lighter than the Monday, and week, prior to Thanksgiving Break. It would seem that the majority of people who found use in the services of the writing center, did so before the break so they could work on their assignments during that time of feasting and festivity. However, I still found a few appointments this week - at least one appointment with the ELL I have described in earlier blogs, as well as a friend who came in on Friday with questions on an English paper. Nothing particularly interesting occurred in either of these sessions as far as questions go, but I will cover them nonetheless.           The session I had with the ELL student was standard as to how we have been running our sessions the past three or so times they have come to see me. They give me a quick synopsis of their paper, usually communications, and I read through it...

November 19-20         This week was severely shortened due to the impending break on Wednesday, but I still managed to get several appointments on Monday. In fact, two of my appointments were with an ELL student, however their English was at a much higher level than the ELL student I had last Monday. Since they took the majority of my time, I will be focusing on this student and their work - as the last student I had just wanted me to look over a quick proposal assignment.         The ELL student came in for both a 1:00 and 3:15 appointment, which I was actually amused by since my 3:15 had been clear until after my session with them. According to them, after our first session, they had turned in their paper to their professor and gotten an A - so naturally they felt like the dialogue we had was helpful, and immediately came back for help on another paper.         With that said, I will discuss the type of help the stude...

November 12-16        This will be a somewhat shorter post than usual as I was too ill to come into work on Friday, a result of a nasty fainting spell I had the morning of, which left me horribly nauseated. However, Monday was full of appointments, and while most of them were just the same assignment four times, my first appointment that day was the most unique, and quite coincidental. We had just learned on Sunday how to go about a session with an English Language Learner (ELL), and so I was a bit panicked when my first appointment on Monday was just such a student who needed help with her English grammar and sentence structure.          As a natural English speaker myself, it took a moment of assessing both the paper and assignment for me to get a grasp on how to most effectively help the student with their work. Obviously I couldn't just tell them what was right and wrong, but in some cases the English was so mixed up, it was hard for...

November 5-9       This week was incredibly busy with every one of my appointments filled, and plenty of walk-ins to fill in if I managed to wrap up a session quickly. There are three major things I want to discuss this time: scheduling miscalculations, the student that knew too much, and consultant's fatigue.        Starting simply, as soon as I started my shift at 1:00 PM on Monday, I had two students who claimed to have an appointment with me - one was a new student with a technical business paper on AI, the other was a returning student that I had seen twice before. The matter created some confusion for me, which I resolved as best I could and things did end amiably, but I thought it worth mentioning. I had checked my appointments that morning, but only knew that I had an appointment at 1:00; I didn't know who it was with. Regardless, I ascertained who could wait and who couldn't and handled things in a timely fashion.       ...

October 29 - November 2           This week in the writing center was quite busy, much to my delighted surprise. Monday saw two students come to see me, one of which I will be discussing later, and Friday saw a full schedule of appointments - a repeat tutee among them, which in itself is refreshing to see. First off, let's talk about Monday's session. The predominant issue in the paper that the student who came to see me on Monday had was sheer word count. They had a paper that was more than three hundred words over the required maximum. Additionally, they needed help with Chicago style citations, but one short trip to Purdue fixed that quickly enough. No, the struggle that I found was trying to help this student cut out useless language from their paper, and consolidate extra lines of summary without sacrificing meaning or analysis.             I noticed while helping in this way that such an exercise is far more difficul...