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 from their professor had made them question their writing ability. This isn't helped by the fact that they told me that they believed themselves to be a worse writer because they came from a largely African-American dominated school (they were African-American). Of course, I assured them this wasn't the fact, and only needed to point out several of the things that were in their paper before they showed it to me as an explanation of my reasoning. I certainly believe that, as consultants whose writing ability is respected (perhaps more than it should be) by students, we have the ability to influence them for the better - as a means of reinforcing their own self perception.
My other session was with a science major (I'm unsure of their field) who was writing a paper on a person's life while tying it into the works said person studied and what influenced them. As I've said, the paper was largely fine - just needing some minor fixes as we read through it - but what caught my ear was the student's repeated use of the phrase, "Fix what you need to, I'm a terrible writer." My inevitable response to this would always be to scroll along the paper and point out things that they had done or written that we hadn't changed, and without sacrificing too much time, explain why they should feel confident in the paper they had written, even if it had minor flaws here and there. What writers that come into the center need to understand is that we're not "fixing" their papers, nor are we changing them overmuch. Everything that goes into a student's paper was put there by them, and so it is my belief that they should feel proud of every A they get, even if they went to the writing center.
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