1/30. Comments Emi

I have to say that the empirical research is just amazing. It’s a lot of work that the researchers put in this project, and seems they got very interesting results. Moreover, I believe that having a taxonomy available is the beginning for a lot of more research to come. The book was published in 2015, which is pretty recent. So, I believe it has a lot of potential for future publications on Writing Center research.

As for the approach of reviewing form Higher Order Concerns (HOC) to Lower Order Concerns (LOC), I admit is very hard to concentrate only on the global issues, especially when there are a lot of mistakes on the essay. However, I think I got much better at this. I realized from my own writing that too often I would correct a paragraph to later realize that I actually did not even need that part. Also, when students get a paragraph reviewed in terms of grammar, then they feel they have to keep it, and they refuse to get rid. Therefore, it’s definitely much more efficient to have the ideas reviewed first, and then move to the grammar issues once you have a more finalize product.  


As for the reviewing steps provided in “priorities in reading a draft”, I think I got a little skeptical. The questions too general, too broad, and too difficult to be applied on an essay (especially if it’s some kind of creative writing). It definitely represents the order in which I would take the review, but I believe there are better and more targeted questions to be asked, which ideally could be provided by the teacher (eg. in a peer review activity). That would facilitate a lot the job for writing center tutors.

Comments

  1. EleanorJanuary 30, 2018 at 9:57 AM

    I agree it can be really hard to focus on HOC first! Especially if you're like me and you managed your time poorly... I had a student who had two things to talk about in her 25 minutes, and that was a bit of a struggle. I'm not going to do that again if I can help it! I definitely agree that if you help fix grammar, it's hard for the student to want to edit it again later, for fear of making more mistakes. So if the ideas change, that can be a problem. But I think dramatic problems with LOC become a HOC, if it makes the text confusing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing to Learn, Learning to Write

I'm familiar with different approaches in different contexts. As an instructor, I'm most familiar with learning to write, because even my content-based assignments receive extensive writing attention. As a student, though, I was and am more familiar with writing to learn. But I'm still displeased that as a student in English at the undergraduate, MA, and PhD levels, there was/is not more attention placed on learning to write. At this stage, this seems to be something professors take for granted. (I was recently told: "That's not how you title a dissertation chapter." And I responded: "Can you please tell me how you title a book chapter? I have never done this.") I think also in liberal arts required courses, writing to learn is prioritized in many (most?) disciplines. I'm not particularly persuaded by one form over another, though I have never succeeded in writing to learn language models. But I am partial to the idea that learning to write sho...
Read more

Emi 03/27

These two case studies consider two different research methods that will inevitably lead to very different discussions and presentation of the ideas.  T he non-fiction case study (Lorraine) is purely qualitative, while the academic case study (Fei) is a mixed methods study in which qualitative data is quantitized and the rest of the collected qualitative data (e.g. interview) mainly serves to enhance legitimation. These two different focus, qualitative (Lorraine) and Mixed methods with a focus on quantitative (Fei) are well accepted in research. However, the way that readers approach them may be very different. The qualitative (non-fiction) case study is more engaging, more relatable, and easier to read. As promoted in Qualitative research, the authors present the data as if it were a story and include very detailed anecdotes (called vignettes) that represent the main point to be conveyed. The study is not replicable, but the authors do provide additional information to ensure...
Read more

4/17

In my tutoring sessions, I've been most familiar with the 'learning to write' paradigm. I felt Ortega's statement that "...LW places at the center of attention the cognitive activity of the writer and her or his authorial voice" encapsulates the work my students have called on me to do. Whether they're working on a Peace Corps application, a psychology paper, a global health paper or a speech for Rhetoric, I've found my work can be described in Ortega's twofold statement: helping students put in writing first, their cognitive activity (their opinions, arguments, and questions) and second, their authorial voice (by airing confusions, doubts, and identifying needs for further research). In class, I'm wondering if we can have a discussion about the overlap between LW and WLL when it comes to students picking up specific language necessary for academic assignments. As Ortega writes, there is a difference between students "learning to write abo...
Read more