Experiences in the Writing Center Essay -- Personal Narrative Writing

Experiences in the Writing Center When I started to work at the Writing Center, I had about eleven years of experience in tutoring English as a foreign language to non-native English speakers in Germany. The experience I had gained from that proved to be very helpful. Before you can address the problems in writing, like any other problem, it is very important to get to know the writer. If you can build a bridge between the two individuals, who should work together in a tutoring session, it is a lot easier to discuss problems and find solutions. As some of the problems might have personal reasons or it might be difficult for the writer to discuss the reason for some obstacles in writing well, a more personal basis supports any work in that way. Looking back at the sessions I tutored in this quarter, I would like to focus on the problems of one student. The student brought three papers to the center, and his papers showed problems in constructing complete and correct sentences, as well as defining paragraphs, and some of his sentences sounded awkward. These problems occurred in all his papers. After a brief introduction and some questioning about the content of each paper, it became obvious that the writer was able to tell me exactly what he wanted to talk about and in what order paper should appear. Yet, he had the problem of bringing his thoughts onto his paper. We started to discuss some sentences of his first paragraph, where he concentrated almost only on the content of what he wanted to say, but never on the way HOW he could express his thoughts clearly to a reader. To him the fragmented sentences, put together piece after piece, containing a lot of information, made completely sense, because he KNEW what he w... ...hod to make writers aware, that an essential part of their sentence is missing, is to use symbols that refer to the parts of the sentence. So far, I have had quite some good results in explaining it that way: The writer has to pay attention! The sentence ends with an exclamation mark -- put together with the symbols square, upward triangle, and ellipse (). The three symbols put together on top of each other resemble an exclamation mark (). If these three parts are separated again, they have the following meaning: = square = 's' like in SUBJECT = "V" with top = 'v' like in VERB = "O" = 'o' like in OBJECT. If the writer draws these symbols around the corresponding parts in the sentences, then it becomes visually clear which part is missing. A lot of people learn easier this way and find a way to memorize the essential parts of any sentence easier.