Gale_TP#14

Gale Workman

TP#14

Sept. 18, 2014, 2:50 p.m.

Hecht House

Since Week 1, Jianwei has said she wants help with her writing. Finally, after my encouraging her every week to email me a writing sample, she emailed a sample last week. We met today to review her essay on the impact of social media.

Jianwei seeks to enroll in a master’s program in digital media, so this topic interests her. That’s where we began the lesson. I pointed out how well she had organized her essay and asked if she could show me the outline her teacher had provided. She did, and I pointed out how her essay followed the outline precisely.

We also discussed the excellent content of the essay, as Jianwei had focused on three areas of social media that are timely and trendy/controversial: addiction, electronic shopping, and privacy/security. I wanted to generate conversation with Jianwei about the content of her essay because she is a more fluent speaker than writer. She knows about the impact of social media and can speak more confidently about it than she can – at this point – write about it.

Often when a writer tells the story aloud it helps to clarify how she can write the story on the page. This was a good strategy for Jianwei.

I wanted Jianwei to learn a few techniques she could use right away to improve her writing. I modeled – reviewing/editing her first two sentences – replacing commas with periods to create shorter sentences, S-V-O. All still her words.

Jianwei perfectly (and proudly) self-edited her third sentence using the techniques. She’s a quick study.

The fourth sentence, which was her thesis statement, presented a problem of parallel construction. Jianwei understood this grammar term. We worked together to employ newly learned self-editing techniques AND correct the parallel construction.

She was very satisfied with her edited thesis statement.

We reviewed the editing techniques she had learned, and Jianwei assured me she could use them to edit the remainder of her essay. I suggested if she wanted to review it together again, we would.