2nd Session as Client

Today I had my second session as a client. My writing consultant was ... eclectic, but I thought we worked well together on the whole. Basically, I had what I thought was a good start - a very rough draft. But then I went to my TA and he told me I wasn't being argumentative enough. He gave me some suggestions, and since I had scheduled my client session a week before, I just came in with a bunch of research and a half-complete rough draft.

The tutor jumped right in - he didn't want to make copies. We didn't read anything over... but then again how could we? I didn't have a real draft. So what I needed was an argument. And I am not an argumentative person. Since I had just gotten this monumental task 10 minutes before the session, I was feeling a little overwhelmed. My tutor didn't ask what my paper was about. I had to explain it to him after he made some random, and wrong guesses about my paper's content. It was a little difficult - I had no assignment sheet because it was my term paper, and he didn't give out one for it.

So we ran through what I had thus far, and came up with a new, argumentative thesis that would reflect the research I had put so much time into. I'm on a major time crunch for all of my projects, so the session really helped me make use of my time... My writing consultant helped me develop a new outline for my paper. Since my paper was very political, we discussed politics for some of the session. After a half hour, I had what I needed: a rough thesis and an outline with paragraph topics. After all of that work, I was ready to go! I realized that sometimes I cannot visualize connections between topics unless I visually write it out. My consultant was jumping ahead of me, and I had to write it down before I could comprehend and suggest further ideas.