Over the past semester, I have spent time tutoring a fellow student; let’s call her Stacy. Stacy and I live on the same dorm floor, which is how we initially got connected. We were talking about our classes in the bathroom, when she told me how much she struggles with writing papers that are concise and make sense. I told her I would be glad to help her out, and since then, I have spent approximately forty-five minutes every week looking over or talking through her papers with her.
At first, this was a somewhat intimidating experience for me. I have little experience tutoring or teaching my peers—my previous teaching experiences all included students much younger than me. Stacy is very much my peer, and I respect her a lot, which made tutoring her a bit of a challenge. I did not want to step on her toes or in any way insult her intelligence, but at the same time I wanted to ask her hard questions and make her think about the way in which she was writing.
The first few times we met, her papers were short—usually reflections on books she had read for her Women’s Studies class. I would ask her what she thought she needed to work on with in the paper, and then I would read it for myself. Usually, Stacy had a good idea of the things she needed to change before I even read her writing. As I read, I would make marks on the phrases or sections that needed work. We would always talk about those things that needed fixing, rather than just leaving them as marks on the page. I found that the best way to go about discussing these problems was to ask Stacy what she thought was wrong with the underlined section. She usually had a good idea, and if not, I found that the use of scaffolding—or asking leading questions—was really helpful.
Most often, Stacy had issues with creating a logical format to her papers. Once, her paper seemed like she had just written a number of paragraphs and put them in an arbitrary order—she told me that’s how she felt about it. So, we cut them up. By physically cutting the paragraphs apart, Stacy and I could look at each paragraph separately and decide what order made the most sense. When we did this, Stacy put the paragraphs where she thought they should go—and the second time through made so much more sense than her first attempt. But, Stacy would always ask me first if I thought that was where it should go.
Based on that experience, it came to my attention that perhaps the reason that Stacy feels like she cannot write logical papers is simply a lack of self-efficacy. Stacy is a good writer. She’s capable of writing complex sentences, using semi-colons and colons correctly, and has a broad vocabulary. I asked her if she thought she was a good writer, and she told me that she didn’t think so; that it was just a little too hard for her. I found that interesting, because I definitely think of her as being a good writer. Over the weeks that we worked together, I kept trying to get Stacy to recognize her own skills as a writer: both by not giving her the answers but by using scaffolding questions, and by pointing out the good things that she was doing as a writer.
Over the span of the semester, I definitely noticed a change in Stacy’s attitude toward writing. When we would talk about things in the beginning, she was always very hesitant and seemed worried about what I thought was correct. She came to me multiple times with papers, usually once to talk about what would make a good thesis and then later to read the finished product. As the semester progressed, she came to me less often at the beginning, and more often at the end. She also began to come with certain things in mind, like asking me to look at her use of the words affect/effect. Whether she was becoming more comfortable with her own writing skills, or simply more comfortable with me, I noticed a definite increase in her levels of self-efficacy when it came to writing over the past weeks.
What do I do with this experience now? For me personally, I realized the importance in making multiple drafts. I often assume that my first draft will be pretty close to perfect, and that I should not consider drastic rewrites. But through tutoring Stacy, I realized that good ideas often hide amidst poor wording or awkward sentence structure. I also realized that in creative writing, what we, as the writers, find important is not always something that the reader will value. I think it’s important for me to remember the value of one-on-one help, especially with something as personal as writing. Increasing self-efficacy in relation to writing is very possible, it just requires more intentionality from the teacher. I also think that talking through papers verbally really helps to be able to write a good paper—in my experience, if you can talk intelligently about the topic you are going to write about, your paper will be just fine.
