blog post for 2/6

I was interested to read in Talk About Writing about analysis of the "shape" of a tutoring session. Mackiewicz and Thompson give examples of two different tutoring session shapes: one is a chain, "beginning with the idea of a new focus of the paper, moving sequentially through potential subject matter, and ending with a new focus for the paper" and the other is a circle, in which the student/tutor pair "worked at the sentence level for a while, then moved to the global level, then moved back to the sentence level, and so on, until [the student] understood that she needed to expand the ideas in the draft." I think that my sessions have so far been circular, which I think corresponds to the way that I like to write. It's helpful for me to concentrate on getting one sentence right so that I can think my way through the rest of the paper, and thereby catch other micro-level things that aren't working. Before I delved into this week's reading, I had been thinking that the shape of such a tutoring or writing sessions would be "scatter plot" or something like that, but learning that Mackiewicz and Thompson define that kind of session as "circular" gives me hope. I think it would be a good idea for me to pay more attention to the path of the session, and see how the advice and questions that I am giving the student might be connected to each other. The sessions so far have ended with the student feeling as if they had direction, so perhaps a circle is as good a way as any to get from point A to point B.

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