First Tutoring Experience

        At first I felt very nervous, but I started to calm down when we both sat down and were ready to go.  As soon as we began I asked "what do you have that we are working on today?" My student Norma pulled out an article and an essay.  I made her read the article out loud to me so I can learn what her paper was about.  I read her essay out loud slowly so she would be able to catch any errors she made, for me to be able to become familiar with her writing and know exactly where her weakness is when she writes.  I told her to make sure to always summarize, mention the most important thing of the author's, choosing significant ideas of the author and to add a personal experience in your essay.  I thought overall she was a good writer and was a good listener, she had each one of these things I mentioned in her essay they just needed to be explained more in her conclusion.  We spent a lot of time on the conclusion because it did not sum up the entire essay.  But by adding explanations and feelings to it we made it stronger and more clear to the reader. 
         Other than the conclusion most of her problem was she jumped straight into paragraphs, into a new idea without any type of introduction.  My advice to her was to add a sentence or two at the start of the paragraph to give your writing better fluency.  She wrote opening sentences for each of her paragraphs and that problem was fixed.  I then asked her to read the essay aloud to me and she really started correcting so many errors to do with repetition and words that don't belong or make sense.  The last thing I did after all the corrections were made was read the essay out loud for the third time.  She said the essay sounded much better and more fluent then the beginning.  She was very happy and satisfied with the improvement, and as was I.

Response to Kalle Lasn's Advertisement article

      This essay mentions the most important thing the author mention's in her article and chooses one significant idea that the author made in her article to specifically write about. The writer quoted the author and refereed back to her many ideas from the article to include in this essay.  This writer hinted to a personal experience in their essay but the experience could have been easier to find.  Instead of referring to everyone in the world ages 10-50 the writer should of specified or made this example more personalized.  There is not enough "mention" of their personal experience.  There were also a couple of grammatical errors I noticed, I would advise to re-read your paper to make sure you catch any grammatical errors that can be avoided.
       Overall i do however think this person should pass because the summary, authors important message, and the significant idea of the authors were all broad topics in this essay.  The grammatical errors were minor and there were not many and there was a personal experience.  However there should have been more in depth and more clear to the reader at the end of paragraph one, that your example was your personal experience.

Sondra Perl's Processes

            The three aspects from Sondra Perl, Retrospective Structuring, Felt Sense, and Projective Structuring  are all examples of ways to make your writings improve.  Retrospective structuring is looking back on the beginning of your writing for example before you started organizing your essay you could of done exercises such as free writing to get your ideas together and what retrospective structuring does is taking those under developed thoughts to shape and reorganize them.  Felt sense is a very important part of the writing process that is feeling exactly what you want to say almost like an intuition.  For example "does what i say make sense?" or "Is this really what i want to say?" And finally projective structuring which is the ability to form what someone needs to say so it is better understood by others.  For example putting your self in the audiences shoes and thinking "how would they respond?"
            All three of these aspects are very important, but the most useful and my favorite is felt sense because it basically is the reason behind your writing.  'How will you write?' 'What will you write?' and 'why you are writing?' Is all felt sense. When writing an essay you need to say exactly what your thinking and you need to have some sort of opinion or intuition in order to place an 'argument' to get your essay started.  Without felt sense you would not be able to get your opinion or thoughts into your essay, none of it would make sense and there is no motive to your writing. 

Tutoring Do's and Dont's

Tutoring Dont's:
Do not be late under any circumstances.
Do not show poor body language. for example slouch in your seat or putting your feet up and looking to comfortable.
Do not cheer-lead or tell the student their paper was so good or guarantee them a good grade.
Do not be the students therapist and talk to them about their everyday problems.
Do not go off topic and talk about the past or upcoming weekend or vacation.
Do not eat or drink in the session with the student, it may distract them.
Do not do the students work for them.
Do not interrupt the student or cut them off while speaking or take ownership away.
Do not respond too late.

Tutoring Do's:
Always try to look comfortable and happy in front of the student.
Stay reasonably relaxed.
Always stay on topic with the student about there paper and what needs improvement the most.
Guide the student through their work so they can see where they need to improve.
Always have the student talk more than you and let them explain everything they need before you speak. let the student have the ownership.
Always let the student find their errors or mistakes do not simply find them and correct them.

Becoming a Writing Tutor

       Becoming a writing tutor is not as easy as i thought it might be.  I knew that it was not going to be simple but i had no idea about all the things I must remember while sitting next to that student.  Not praising them if their writing is very good, and to not be a therapist or a friend and talk off topic about the upcoming weekend or what happened last weekend.  Sometimes when you are sitting with a person for an hour if they come multiple times a week you can get sidetracked and it is going to be difficult to stay on topic and talk about only their writing. 
       Its is also a nervous feeling that is growing even more now that the time for tutoring is getting even closer.  The student's writing improvement skills are in my grasp, also maybe the determination if they pass or fail can be my fault.  There is a lot of pressure on me and I don't like being under pressure if its for someone else s outcome.  However i do fee very anxious and excited to help these writers improve their skill and pass the test they need to take.

Sondra Perl

Danielle Esposito

Teaching Writing ENG 220

9-18-11

            Sondra Perl is an English professor at Herbert Lehmann College and she is the founder of the New York City Writing Project.  Perl has been known to analyze writings, both unskilled and professional writing.  She also wrote a couple of books about writing and conducted a study.  Perl has contributed ideas, guidelines that have been considered one of the greatest tributes made to theorizing the writing process.

 Perl describes composing as a “Recursive process that entails rereading of small

units of text mid-way through writing with rewriting of short passages serving to move writers forward.”  She argued that composing involves backward and forward movements that allow writers to discover new things as they write and rewrite.  By using this process you will discover more of what is on your mind.  They are “exercises” that will help you perform what most great writers do naturally every time they write.  Perl’s questions how the writer writes, how does a writer come up with what they are writing? And what is going through their mind when they do?  Perl studied both professional and unskilled college writers and reviewed how well the vocabulary use was, how organized the writing was, how long the writer stood on topic and how well the thesis statement was answered (if there was any.)  Always remember to continue writing, even if you don’t have any idea of the subject or if you’re still on topic.  Stop a few times to ask yourself “What’s this about?” And always make sure your writing expresses what you exactly need to say.  By doing this with your work you notice your careless mistakes in your writing whether it be spelling, vocabulary, or running off topic this guideline helps people look over their writings and eliminate their mistakes as they write more following these rules.

            However Perl’s ideas sometimes do not work the same for everyone, or everyone’s situation.  What is true and the best thing to remember is that Perl states that “they are supposed to have flexibility, for you to use these rules in your own way.”  Not all people are able to follow strict rules for writing and not all people have the same outlook on writing.  Some people admire it some don’t, some people have different ways of organizing their data which needs to be taken into account. You should not follow the exact formation of words in Perl’s idea but that it is meant to be explored and adapted in different ways according to people’s situations and the different ways people express their writings.

            The discovery of this important guideline in composing was resulted in what was the most important idea Sondra Perl has contributed to the field of theorizing the writing process.  Perl used an innovative method to analyze her students asking them to verbalize all of their thoughts by writing.  In other words she made all her students talk to her about their thoughts while writing.  She then listened back to what she recorded and turned them into codes that could be used to analyze the students writing.  These codes broke the writing down into planning, editing, writing, and unrelated thoughts.  She figured out the time used by students in completing their writing.  She developed a scientific procedure to study people’s thoughts while writing.  As a result from this study she came up with the guide line to re read a short section of texts that halfway through your writing to help writers progress in a higher skill.

            Perl’s contribution to the field of theorizing the writing process is one of the most important contributions related to writing.  Perl broke down the psychological process of writing and helped many unskilled writers figure out and find a way to improve themselves and their writings.  She created simple guidelines and important methods for all writers to use in their own way.  The fact that these guide lines can be personalized to your own strengths and weaknesses makes it one of, if not the best contribution to the field of the writing process.

           

-Perl, Sondra. “Understanding Composition” December 4^th 1980. web. http://www.jstor.org/pss/356586.  College Composition and Communication.

-Blau, Sheridan “Book Review felt sense: Writing with the Body” 2004.web. http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resources/1988.  The Quarterly Vol. 26 No. 3.

-Elbow, Peter. “Sondra Perl’s Guidelines”  1987.web. http://www.focusing.org/perlprocess.html.   May 30, 2006, The Focusing Institute, 2003.