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.
