Taking Flight With OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work

Editorial Reviews. Review. An important topic about which too little has been written. Taking Flight With OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work - Kindle edition by James A. Inman, James A. Inman, Donna Sewell. Download it once.
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• Taking Flight with Owls: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work

I would encourage you to bring the paper in for a face-to-face session, where we can usually accomplish much more. Please feel free to make an appointment through the Peer Tutor office in the Academic Success Center. If the deadline for this paper is too soon for an appointment, try to schedule a session with a writing tutor for your next paper.

We look forward to seeing you in person. This format has several advantages: It precludes the possibility that the inexperienced tutor may lapse into editing. And it provides the tutor with a specific, comfortable structure, as opposed to the frightening blankness of the fresh page.

Obviously the template alone provides only organization; it cannot, of course, determine the substance, the questions, and the possibilities. For that, we need the tutors themselves. How can peer tutors learn to respond electrically? But like all good practice, improved tutoring demands consideration and reflection; repetition alone cannot lead to progress. And so as director, I tutor the tutors. I would like to use examples from the year-long development of one particular tutor. Here is how Rebecca handled an online student paper analyzing a speech by President Truman for an introductory class in Organizational Leadership.

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I have omitted her inserted in-text comments for concision and to focus on the end comment, although the marginal comments do provide greater specificity and clarification than the conclusion alone suggests. First, I really enjoyed reading your paper and learning about Transformational Leadership. Your paper was very informative and I definitely learned new things about President Truman through his inaugural speech! I have attached your paper with a few additional comments boxes to the side.

Your paper is well-formatted and easy to follow, so I only had a few comments on the actual structure of the paper. One thing I would recommend would be to provide a more detail about how the portions of President Truman's inaugural speech you selected represent each of the four "I"s - each of your explanations seemed very reasonable examples of the four "I"s but many could have benefited from more detail so that your reader understands the point you are making. One more thing I would recommend doing is to cite the website or web page that you used to obtain President Truman's speech.

You have in-text references to specific paragraphs but have not cited the website that the teacher wanted you to use as your source. It is unclear from the assignment description if your professor expects you to cite the website in a reference list, but it is usually considered an important step to writing college and graduate-level papers.

First, it is thorough, so I again want to caution you against spending more than an hour on your reply, and even better, try to limit yourself to 30 minutes. I'll also continue to caution tutors against over-exuberance, which is a little sad, since I like enthusiasm in the face to face sessions. Here, though, watch out for eager adverbs and punctuation: I think your point is a good one, but it may help to elaborate on this point to help your reader understand it more clearly.

How is President Truman using the concept of democracy to inspire his listeners? Further explanation may help your readers understand your meaning. The other comments are fine, of course. But these two ask the writer to go deeper and think harder about the paper. It was important that students felt good about themselves and their papers though! That balance—between criticism and support—is difficult to achieve, both face to face and electronically.

Yet interestingly, it may be easier virtually, with no need to hide any pained expression or continually, and perhaps insincerely, reassure. First, the content of your paper seemed solid, and it appears to meet the assignment requirements for format and organization. After reading your paper I was well-informed on the importance of the hippopotamus to Egyptian culture and how the piece from the St. Louis Art Museum fit into Egyptian artistic depictions of the animal. I have made a few comments to the side of your paper, which I have attached to this email.

Most of the comments focus on continuity of your topic and helping your reader follow the flow of the paper more easily.

For your concern about whether your wording is strange, my biggest suggestion would be for you to read your paper out loud. By reading your paper out loud, you may catch phrases or sentences that are not written the way you would say them. I have highlighted a few instances where I believe this is the case in your paper. While reading your paper out loud, make sure to pay attention to the times that you don't say the words that are on the page - perhaps you said what you meant rather than what is actually written, or perhaps you said it more clearly than the way it is written.

When you find a phrase or sentence like that, try to rewrite it to match what you said, or in a way that you think someone would understand your meaning if they could not see your paper and only could listen to you read it to them. The comments in the margins are good as well, in part because they convey some nuts and bolts ideas that students really should know and follow; in , we're still reminding students to spell-check!

But is there a way to phrase it so that the person has a question rather than an instruction to consider? My own response, in retrospect, is not perfect.

It is difficult in an online session for tutors to anticipate or answer such questions in their responses, and in the last year, tutors have attempted to convey their questions to writers as genuine rather than rhetorical, creating a back and forth stream of responses. First, your paper appears to meet most of the assignment requirements for format and organization. Also, after reading it I was better informed about the history of cannabis use. Most of the comments focus on clarity and helping your reader understand your meaning.

My biggest suggestion would be for you to read your paper out loud. My other suggestions would be to utilize your professor's comments as much as possible, since the comments are an indication of what he or she is looking for and would like to see revised. Based off of your assignment description, the points that would appear to benefit the most from further work are the following:. Many times your sentences have extra verbs, such as your sentence: Use correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Write in complete sentences.

This can be addressed through using SpellCheck and looking for the squiggly underlining, as well as reading your paper out loud. This is another thorough and helpful response to the student. This was even a tricky submission because the paper was, on the one hand, reasonably strong compared to the examples I keep giving during meetings, anyway and because there are so many variables: That means a lot of discrete decisions on your part.

I may have to make this paper, and your response, required reading for the other tutors. And yes, I'm using the superlatives that I told tutors not to use. Reflecting at the end of her first year, Rebecca felt more secure in her tutoring: Indeed, it remains difficult to determine whether student writers agree that they have indeed improved. Over the past three years, the number of electronic submissions has increased more than threefold.

While I want my tutors to help as many students as possible as well as possible, they themselves are also undergraduates with lessons to learn and lives ahead of them to lead. Rebecca continued to tutor for another year, until she graduated. She is now a graduate student in Occupational Therapy and a skilled communicator and rhetorician. Skeptics abound in the literature of online writing centers, but I, for now, am a cautious convert. Creating Productive Peer Reviewers.

Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Language and Media Alan Durant. Working with Texts Ronald Carter. Linguistic Categorization John R. The Language of Comics Mario Saraceni. Working with Spoken Discourse Deborah Cameron. Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader Margaret Wetherell.

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