Blog Post #10


Blog Post #10 Consuelo

Helping writers from disciplines outside mine has been less challenging than I expected.  Even, I would say that it is rewarding to work particularly with graduate students from unfamiliar disciplines to me. As I expected, they know their subjects well so the content becomes a given.  The focus of the tutoring then centers on the writing per se. Here it becomes relevant what Ryan and Zimmerelli (2016, 72) point out, “[r]egardless of a paper’s topic, you can determine whether the ideas are presented in a cohesive and persuasive manner.  You can look at larger issues—like organization, style, and tone—or at smaller issues—like grammar and mechanics—and determine whether the writing is effective.”   
This semester, I have been working with graduate students from different fields. Regardless of the field (e.g., marketing, statistics, language acquisition) the experiences have been gratifying. However, helping writers, in particular, undergraduate students, about works that I have never read has been less fulfilling. It seems that because the tutoring experience in part is solely based on the writer’s reading of the text and their comprehension of it, the help provided appears, to me, incomplete. I cannot provide any comments to the content of the writing. On the other hand, when the writers’ paper topics come from disciplines close to my own, or even topics, not particularly uplifting, but linked to my country of origin (e.g., Pablo Escobar and the “Narcos”) my help appears to be more effective, and the tutoring experience more fulfilling. 

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