The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Theory to Practice
At our writing center tutors primarily focus on helping students become better writers by assisting
them with higher order concerns as well as lower order ones, when appropriate. However, tutoring a
student to write in academic discourse is astonishingly difficult when you realize that the student does not
understand the prompt and cannot discuss the paper he or she has just written. If you find yourself in this
situation, ask the tutee to read aloud. As soon as they realize you are actually listening, almost all of them
relax and become engaged in their own papers. In a sense, showing an interest in their work breathes a
little life into a dead paper that has been re-thought, if not rewritten, to the point of exhaustion. Also,
engaging in meaningful dialogue with tutees about their work, causes them to see their papers as
something of intrinsic value, one, in which they have something important to say. As a result, they begin
to let go of the mistaken notion that the writing center’s function is solely to provide free editors and
proofreaders for their work, and writing, that most daunting psychologically demanding task, becomes
slightly less difficult.
Having tutees read portions of their paper aloud also teaches them a technique for catching errors,
but if they do not have basic comprehension of their own material, reading aloud is an ineffective
strategy. When Sharon first started tutoring, she thought she was accomplishing something positive by
using the read-aloud strategy with a tutee. However, she found it had its flaws, especially when the
student was just mouthing the words. When that happened with one of her tutees, she changed gears and
had him begin to read his source material, a short story. In his first draft it was apparent from his
instructor’s comments throughout the paper, that the tutee did not understand the storyline. So, Sharon
and the tutee read the story; however, before they did so, she helped him look at the story prompts at the
end and showed him how to consider these as questions while he read. She also asked a few questions
about what was happening in the story as they read just to see if his comprehension had improved. Almost
all students are used to talking about people, so the type of question that gets the most positive response
for students struggling with fiction is to ask simply "She did what?" It causes the tutee to engage with the
character as an actual person. At the end of this one-hour session, this tutee realized that he had mixed up
characters. What we, as tutors, do not understand is how he got it so wrong when he had actually read it
before, read secondary source articles, listened to lecture in class and wrote a five-page paper. An
unedited example of this tutee’s first draft on A Rose for Emily is included in this article solely to
illustrate what may trigger you to back up and ask the student to read from the source:
Living in the early nineteen hundreths, Miss Emily was shaped greatly by the era she lived in.
Her father Colonel Sartoris and mayor of Jefferson influenced her humble virgin figure by house training
her to become a desperate figure seeking love. Being the daughter of Colonel Sartoris exposed Miss
Emily to perform in a distinct delicate lady figure at home and in the eye of the public. After her father
ceased, Miss Emily became a victim of the modernizing town's expectation to live up to a tradition south
woman figure. In the story, "A Rose for Emily," William Faulkner demonstrates the ironic twists of how
gender can influence the role of an oppressed woman, while blindingly alluding to the town’s judgments
and expectations.
Sharon states that after reading the story she and the tutee discovered that Colonel Sartoris was not
the mayor of Jefferson. Since the tutee’s paper had not only repeated this mis-perception throughout but
was also the basis of his analysis, it was easy to see how the instructor’s comments contained a significant
degree of frustration. Fortunately, the tutee's second draft was much improved, at least, insofar as the
facts were concerned. However, his analysis and interaction with the text still needed work. Had Sharon
not read with her tutee his analysis would have remained faulty. Hopefully, this is a lesson he can take
with him during his academic writing career.
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