Alyssa's Blog

     Chapter 4 of the Bedford Guide discusses the types of writers you may encounter during a tutoring session. Writers have different learning styles, skills, and concerns, and it’s important to know how to navigate them. Presenting yourself as a sympathetic ally and giving specific, manageable tasks may be more helpful to a writer who is experiencing a lot of anxiety about their assignment than it would be for a writer who only needs help with sentence-level suggestions. The chapter also discusses the importance of cultural sensitivity when it comes to working with multilingual writers. Cultural differences often influence the rhetorical choices multilingual writers make when they are writing in English, so it’s important to listen to what writers are trying to say on paper and help them make sense of it. Bruffee’s article discusses the importance of collaboration during a tutoring session. He argues that thoughts often originate during conversation, and conversation fl...