My book, Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences, is proving to be very useful for writing teachers at all levels. There is specific advice for working with writers in early grades, high school, and college. There is also advice for working with ESL students and English speakers from other cultures.
I’m surprised to learn that most tutorials involve more talking than writing. It seems that the best way to tutor writing is to ask the writer what he means to say in the piece and how he intends to continue. The idea is to help the writer help himself so that he will eventually no longer need the outside tutoring help. Most of my experience with writing has involved reading the papers, red pen in hand, to find mistakes and point out ways to correct errors. One expert states that the tutor should not use red ink but any other color that will stand out from the draft. I remember in one early teacher education course that someone suggested that red ink was intimidating and should not be used. She suggested purple!
I’m looking forward to seeing all of you on Monday.
Great post! I have been told in so many various classes at different levels (undergraduate, graduate, workshop settings, etc.) to never use a red pen when reading student work. I got into the habit of using a pencil – and one unknown (but very beneficial) side-effect was that after returning their work, the students actually read their papers very carefully searching for my markings. Oftentimes, they would catch and agree with my corrections/questions as they reading to find my pencil marks. Before, they would view the bleeding paper as a big failure, and never get past it in order to examine the work and move forward for growth.
Talking – so important to express our ideas. It is our first learned mode of communication, yet we become accustomed to forbidding it during the writing process. In an earlier post, I wrote that “thinking = writing”. But…sometimes talking about what your’re thinking about might lead to writing about it as well. Hey – I developed that entire thought process while I was typing it – same thing?