Liam's English Blog

April 15-19         As the semester once again comes to a close, I'd like to take a brief look at the increased activity we have and reflect on the semester as a whole. As anyone could have expected, the week prior to finals week is crunch time for many students when it comes to papers. As such, the writing center, a place that, for me this last semester, has been fairly quiet and slow, has been a bustle of activity, creative solutions, and satisfied students. Indeed, the sudden flood of students in the last week would've caught me off guard if I hadn't already completed a semester here in the writing center, but I can say with the utmost certainty that I've enjoyed every minute I've spent with my appointments and walk-ins alike. There is a kind of hidden satisfaction to working as a writing consultant - seeing students come in, having them tell you they're lost on how to continue or approach their paper, but then watching them leave with a renewed sense of d...

April 8-12           Despite not having many sessions this week, it feels like I did more than I have in quite some time. I had two sessions, one being more of an advising session than anything else. The more intensive session was on Monday, and this is what I'll be focusing this particular blog entry on.           The student that came in to see me on Monday was a walk-in and was trying to write their history paper on the Crusades. I say trying because the first thing they said to me was, "I'm freakin' out, so I really hope you can help." Of course, this always puts a bit of anxiety on me as the tutor because it hints to me that this particular student is not only having trouble with their paper, but also on the direction they want to take it. My fears seemed warranted when the student told me that they had only one primary source, which, as I understand it in relation to a history paper, is akin to only having one scholarly source...

April 1-5          Almost had a full week of sessions this week, as students are starting to get their final papers before finals week. Most of these sessions revolved around students being unsure of their own writing capability, but as I've found, most of their papers were quite sound, needing only minor tweaks to grammar and occasionally structure. For that reason, I wanted to focus on something else today instead of just the session and the students' papers: writer confidence. It's an indisputably important aspect of writing a paper. If you don't think you can do something, or just don't want to do it, that can harm your long term ability to put forth any effort on your assignments.          That said, the primary problems in both sessions that I will be citing was this lack of confidence in the students as writers. In one session, the student was writing a paper on Tolkien's Faerie , the idea of fantasy and magic, but feedback f...