Cognizance and Strategies in Tutoring

            Ryan and Zimmerlli delineate many issues that writing consults must be cognizant of in this chapter.  Every student struggles with various difficulties concerning school.  Some may struggle with math, others with science, and many, many students struggle with writing.  As writing consultants, we have to make sure that we have an ample amount of tolerance for the papers that we will be working with.  As Ryan and Zimmerlli write, students struggle with problems day in and day out.  Whether it is because of family concerns, economic concerns, or other school concerns, writing a paper is not always the top priority for many students (59).

            Every student deserves our respect as writing consultants.  We have no idea what the majority of students go through.  We must be seen as allies, not as some type of pedagogue looking to attack them for each mistake.  Ryan and Zimmerlli stress the importance of starting with the good parts and ideas of papers; approval will always give students confidence (58).  This is especially important for those students with writing anxiety.  We, as tutors, have the chance to be the encouragement that these writers need.  Encouragement and sensitivity are two huge aspects of being a writing consult (59).  Ryan and Zimmerlli do a great job of stressing this to the reader.

            Many helpful strategies exist for tutoring another with his writing.  The authors write about visual, auditory, and kinesthetic strategies that can have tremendous impacts on writers (60-61).  From color-coding text to reading notes aloud, there are a bevy of strategies that we should take full advantage of.  As I read through the thirteen ideas, I found the kinesthetic strategies to be the most fascinating.  They are strategies that I simply would have never thought of.  At the same time, however, I can see how these would be effective.  The first is to have the students read through their papers and do the highlighting/underlining themselves.  This strategy reminds me of my SAT Reading tutoring.  I was told to become really involved in each passage by highlighting important facts and ideas.  As soon as I put that strategy into practice my reading scores soared.  I can see how doing something similar when reading through your own paper could have a comparable effect.  Two of the other concepts deal with the use of self-stick removable notes.  One advises tutors to have students use the notes to rearrange the paper to better organize it.  The other suggests that students should use them to identify certain parts of the paper, such as the thesis and evidence (61).  These strategies would help me immensely as a writer; I wish that I had learned them earlier in life.  They may even be enjoyable for writers.  Reorganizing self-stick notes on your paper could seem like more a game than a daunting task.  Doing this would certainly be more gratifying than copying and pasting paragraphs on Microsoft Word.

            My question reverts back to my first point about being cognizant of the fact that many students deal with issues that we will not know about.  It, however, looks at the other side of the coin in a certain way.  What if the student is just being lazy?  Do we have the right to ask students if there are hardships in their lives that are keeping them from writing a decent paper?  It may be a tad off-track, but this is the question that the reading sprung in my mind.  Is this something that we should do?