When a student comes to us for help with skills, of
course we want him/her to get good grades on assignments, but our
primary goal is to help the student to become more capable of finding
problems in the writing and progress through effective revisions.
That is, we want to help our students to reach the point where
tutoring is not needed anymore.
We'll point out that an essay needs more research and
information, or help to understand the important
distinctions between research and plagiarism, but we can't do the
research itself. We'll point out that an essay has organizational
problems and we might even suggest ways to reorganize it, but we
won't do the reorganizing. We'll point out wording that seems awkward or confusing, and try to explain why it seems that way, but we won't rewrite the awkward sentences.
Above all, we won't fix every spelling, punctuation,
grammar, or usage error in the paper — the student must retain
authorship. If the student takes our advice about reorganizing, he/she
still must make the specific decisions about how to reorganize. If the
paper contains a punctuation error, there's really no decision to
make. It should be fixed. But if we fix it, all we've taught the
student is, “I don't need to learn the rules of punctuation,
because my tutor will take care of all that sort of thing.”
On the other hand, we're not simply going to ignore
problems in punctuation, grammar, etc., as such errors will lower
grades and, with respect to the SAT’s and college application
essays, may limit college options. Rather, we'll look for patterns in
the errors: the most frequent, the most serious and situations which
produce those errors (for instance, work done hastily and/or late at
night). We'll then point out those patterns, so the student learns what
to look for. We'll probably show him/her some examples of the most
frequent or most serious errors, explain them, correct them, and
perhaps give the student an Internet resource explaining the rules
governing them. Then, we will encourage the student to find and
correct any remaining occurrences of those errors. In the long run,
this should help the student to become a better writer far more than
if we simply corrected every comma omission, subject-verb agreement
inconsistency, and so forth. For this reason, we ask the parents of our
students not to correct their errors for them, especially those
resulting from hasty, last-minute work.
We begin with the large-scale problems. If the large-scale problems are severe enough, it may not be productive to worry about the small-scale ones. It does no good to point out a
comma problem if the entire paragraph containing that comma problem
needs to be rewritten because of lack of adequate research or lack of
organization. If we advise, “You need to rewrite this entire
paragraph because it lacks supporting details and contains two run-on
sentences,” it would be silly to also suggest fixing the comma
error in the third sentence of that paragraph.
We help a great deal with papers, but we don't simply fix everything for our students or function as a last-minute, late-night, paper-tweaking service. Our services are
designed not only to help produce better papers but to produce better
writers.
What special materials, texts or software should we purchase for optimum results?
We recommend that you install an up-to-date version of Microsoft Office (the version for students and teachers is excellent and not too pricey) if you do not already have this software package (Excel, Word and PowerPoint).
