Gale_TP#13

Gale Workman

TP#13

Sept. 18, 2014, 12:30 p.m.

Hecht House

Wiwik emailed her essay to me last week, so we could review her writing in a tutoring session. I printed two copies, but we ended up working together over one copy. She was glad to have the second hard copy, as she doesn't have a computer at home and must type her work in the CIES lab between 3 and 5 p.m. weekdays. She handwrites most of her work at CIES.

Wiwik's writing form and content were strong; therefore, I began with precise, positive feedback. I pointed out how she had organized her essay using the outline presented in her class. I pointed out a few difficult vocabulary words that she used and spelled correctly. I pointed out precise facts that helped to support her thesis statement -- like Indonesia has the world's fourth largest population, after China, India and the U.S.

Wiwik is frustrated with writing and was eager to discuss how she can improve. I have spent the better part of 40 years working with writers (journalists and college students, mostly) to improve their writing. That combined with my recent TEFL education allowed me to quickly diagnose the writing problem Wiwik needs to solve first and how she might do this. The idea is to provide the writer a few techniques she can use immediately to improve her writing. I think of it as quantitative methods to improve the quality of writing.

Many times during our sentence by sentence review/discussion of her first paragraph, when I sensed Wiwik was feeling overwhelmed, fatigued, we stopped reviewing her paper for relaxed, encouraging chat. I explained how her writing problems are the same problems native English speakers have with writing. I reinforced the good parts of her writing by acknowledging how difficult writing in English is -- especially for a non-native speaker.

Basically, Wiwik use too many words in her effort to write compound and complex sentences.

I modeled the editing process, and we worked together on six sentences with lots of discussion and encouragement. Then, I stepped away for a few minutes and asked Wiwik to edit the rest of the paragraph -- two sentences. She did a great job! I returned and worked through each of those two sentences, reinforcing the writing/editing techniques I wanted her to learn.

She was eager to review for me how she had learned to improve her introductory paragraph: 1.) Use more periods, which results in fewer run-on sentences and shorter sentences in which the subject and verb/predicate are close to one another. 2.) If you use a precise noun, verb or adjective -- one that means the same thing to the writer and the reader (example: not fruit, but banana or grape) -- you don't need so many words to explain. 3.) Try reading a written sentence aloud into your voice memo app on your smartphone; when you hear yourself read it, it will likely prompt you to think of a better way to say/write it. (This may be especially useful for Wiwik because her speaking is stronger than her writing.