Blog Post (3/6)


                I haven’t had the opportunity to do any asynchronous online tutoring yet, so I’m not really sure what the challenges or advantages could be. There is a risk that I would go full on teacher-mode and start grading the draft and making edits instead of pointing out one or two mistakes and asking the writer to go through and identify/remedy the rest – a tendency that the Bedford Guide calls “antithetical” to best Writing Center practices (93). Remington’s article convinced me of the efficacy of modeling good writing in my feedback, “demonstrating the skills I discuss” (3). I also agree with Remington that asynchronous online tutoring allows the tutor to take on the role of the “abstract reader,” helping students realize how important writing for your audience can be (2). I’ve also (rather guiltily) use stock responses when grading my Rhetoric papers, especially when I see the same problems over and over in every paper. I’ll usually tweak the stock response to fit the paper, but it saves a lot of time and it just makes sense. I was surprised and grateful to read that Bedford actually recommends using stock responses. Maybe we could work together as a class to come up with some of the more common errors we see in papers submitted online? That way we could have our own stock responses to pool from when online tutoring (always, of course, tailoring them for the piece of writing on hand).

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