Primary Consultations 1-5ish

In the past few days, I've completed my first sessions as a primary consultant! Sessions 1-3ish were in the Library, and Sessions 4-5 were in Bessey. Here's how they went:

Session #1
My first session was with a girl named Megan. She looked to be about the same age or younger than me, so I wasn't too intimidated. She had scheduled a half hour session to go over her paper on Allende and the left wing activists, which then translated into Latin America's wanting to break away from the U.S. These were topics her professor had given her to write about. I asked her what she wanted to focus on. Stronger thesis, making sure the paper flowed well, and creating a conclusion, she said. "Oh, and of course grammar." Ah, yes, the old standby.
She quickly read her paper out loud, stopping every now and then hesitantly. Whenever she stopped, I made a little mark on my copy of her paper (this girl was on top of things; she had her paper paper clipped together, with an index card with my name and the appointment time on it, and even made copies of her paper for me!) Needless to say, I was impressed. So every time she paused I made a little mark or dash with a small comment next to it (i.e. Confusing? Repeated same phrase?)
When we got to the end of her paper and her sentence long conclusion, we then went over the main idea of each paragraph to make sure the topic of each one was relevant to the thesis and had a topic sentence. I wrote down each main idea in an outline, so Megan could visually see how her paper was laid out. When we got to her last paragraph on Latin America, I expressed my discomfort as a reader - she correctly guessed that it was because there were no lead-ins or transitions to the paragraph. Every other paragraph in her paper was on Chile's political movements and suddenly she began talking about Latin America.
After we went through the main ideas, we took a look at her thesis again. Did it cover everything she was talking about? She had a three sentence long thesis, but it did not cover that last paragraph on Latin America. Together, we linked Latin America's discontent with America to Chile's discontent and consequential voting for Allende (change) and I thought it made her paper cohesive.
We never got to the conclusion because we ran out of time. I gave her a quick synopsis of the conclusion: in a nut shell, re-summarize the intro. I asked her if the session had helped and she said "Yeah, it did! I really think I needed to talk about it [her paper]". So that was good - not bad for a first session, eh?

Session #2-3
I insist that this session should count for two because: A) It was two hours long B) It lasted an hour after I was supposed to be out of the Writing Center C) I was twice as drained as I would've been in a regular session. :)
The ESL student I was helping was really nice. She printed out her paper and then we went over her assignment guidelines. She began reading the paper, and in the middle of her 7 page paper she decided that she wanted me to take over, which was totally fine.
I read for comprehension and skipped the many grammar issues that permeated throughout the paper. She asked for help on her thesis, paragraph organization, and GRAMMAR (naturally). I am slowly coming to see grammar as the if nothing else, please just make sure I used the right punctuation here! But she did not mind that we skipped over most of it. Her paper was due at midnight that night, and we spent a long two hours slowly working over each section of her paper. Every time I saw a grammar or sentence structure mistake, I bit my tongue and remembered how I write in Spanish class - translated, it would probably looks something like this.
The main problem with the paper was the profusion of information she had to include. She had some great topics and information, but there was so much of it it was becoming hard to keep track of. She had to compare about 6 or 7 different economic and social aspects of 3 different countries. And her topics were all over the place! I found one topic was merely touched on in the intro, and nowhere else in her paper. She did not have a legitimate topic sentence, so I asked her what her paper was about, and covered it up with my hands. She laughed and told me her main topic, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. Whalaa! Un nuevo Thesis! This strategy REALLY works; I'm definitely going to continue using it.
So then we went through each topic, and formulated comparisons for each one. I didn't know how much she was supposed to compare in her paper, but in her paragraphs, she simply outlined and explained each topic for each country. I showed her how to break the topics up into separate paragraphs, as well, which was apparently a new thing for her.
All in all, it was a very productive session. But I was so exhausted by the end of it. After awhile it just seemed like I was pointing out things and asking her what she thought about them. She would either ask me how to fix it or stare blankly. Also, while we read the paper she did not pick up on a lot of grammar issues.
Another problem we ran into were citations - she practically didn't have any. She asked me sometimes if her sentences sounded too "professional, not like she would say them". She said that the information from the sources she got already sounded so good that she would probably screw it up if she tried to paraphrase or rephrase any of it. I told her that her writing and analysis is really what the teacher wanted to hear in the paper, and reassured her that what she had written by herself was necessary for the paper. But every time we ran across information that I thought could not be from her mind, like quantitative research and percentages, I would ask her how she had known that. After awhile, she began inserting little parentheses at the end of the sentence to remind herself later to include a proper citation. But I was still reminding her of it, and I don't think she got the complete idea because she said something about how nearly everything in the paper was not her thinking... Something like that.
So I tried really hard to convey the importance of citing another's work, and the importance of her opinions and comparisons. We created a new thesis, reworked her entire intro, and she dictated topic sentences to me and I wrote them down for her.
She asked me if I would be working in the library's Writing Center in the future and I honestly did not know what to tell her. I don't know where I'll be working next semester! She left happily, but I was thinking about how much work she really had to do that night on her paper...

Session #4
In this session, I was working with someone who was "looking for direction" in his paper. I think we found one together. He brought his computer in, and I asked him about his paper. His teacher had basically told him that she liked a sentence in his conclusion (after his 5 pages were written), and that he should focus his paper on that. She also told him to keep his intro and conclusion basically the same, with some editing. The main idea was that teachers/schools should not teach standardized English over the slang and/or language learned at home. It was a really interesting topic, and he had some great research. I asked him to read his paper out loud - it was about 5 pages long and we had an hour long session.
So he began to read, and after he finished a paragraph we went over the main idea it conveyed. I explained what had struck me as the main topic of that paragraph, and asked him if that was what he, as the writer, had been going for. He was really hesitant, and thought a lot about everything I asked him. He eventually responded, and it seemed like he was trying to make the session productive.
I asked him about his thesis, and he admitted that he did not have one. So I asked him what he wanted to prove by writing his paper, and as he spoke, I wrote down what he was saying. As we went through the paragraphs, we related each one to his thesis. If it didn't relate, he made a comment next to it on Word or deleted it entirely. He needed to add an entirely new source to the paper as well, so what we were working on was a really rough draft with some remnants of an old, irrelevant rough draft. For each paragraph, we wrote down the main idea and at the end, produced an outline of each paragraph he already had, and some paragraphs he needed to do more research on. I definitely did not agree with his teacher on the intro and conclusion - after a little editing, they would still not be satisfactory. They needed to be completely reworked.
I really hope the session helped - we went to the Writing Center's website and scheduled another session in a day or two, after he had written more of his real paper. The final is due Friday.

Session #5
I really enjoyed myself in this session. The client was in James Madison or Lyman Briggs or something (I can't remember now), and she came in with a paper on how the United States government is actually promoting fatness. I actually laughed at some parts in her paper because it was hilarious! I learned a lot about her topic.
She told me she wanted to focus on making sure her thesis and argument were strong, and also work on some grammar. So she read her paper out loud, and it flowed really nicely. She fixed a lot of her mistakes as she was reading. Some of her sentences were really long, and I just had to point out one with 4 distinct clauses in it. Other than some slight errors, most of which she ended up fixing on her own, her paper flowed very well, and the argument was very well developed. She still needed another paragraph and a conclusion to her paper, but the overall idea was strong.
I got to use one of the strategies we tried in class on her thesis. It was long because it covered a lot of topics. In her writing style, all of these topics had to go in the same sentence. So we broke it down. I pointed out a part of it that I had not seen in the paper, and she realized that she did not need that part of that sentence because it wasn't even touched in the paper. So we deleted some of it. She then eyed me warily as I tore off four strips of paper. "Okay, this is what we are going to do to make your thesis stronger. On these strips of paper, we'll write down the parts of your thesis. And then we'll tape them back together after we've come up with a satisfying order." She immediately began copying down the four parts of her sentence. We went through the possible orders, and finally settled on starting generally, and ending more specifically. We used a thesaurus to find new words that could more strongly convey the argument of her paper.
Then it was grammar time. Her teacher had given her a checklist, and told them to go through their papers and circle all of the there ares/are/is/that, etc. and replace them or re-structure the sentence. So we found one and I showed her a way she could reword it. She used it as an example, and highlighted the old sentence and then inserted the new sentence so she could see how to fix the problem later on at home. On the next sentence, we just both sat there. After about 2-3 minutes of looking at the same sentence, I called Katie over and asked her if she could think of a way to reword the sentence and she gave a suggestion. The client liked her suggestion, so we used it. Then I had the client do one on her own, and she understood by now that she really just needed stronger or more specific verbs.
I asked her if the session had helped her out, and she said it had. We ended on very friendly terms, and I felt like I had accomplished something.