Blog Post 3: Bedford Ch. 2, Patchen’s and Lundin’s essays

This chapter covers skills and qualities that will help make the writer feel more comfortable and the tutoring session to be most effective. Lundin explains in her essay that “writing is a social, emotional, cognitive, and rhetorical activity.” Having a friendly ambience, a comfortable work place, and a warm welcome/introduction are part of the first interaction you will have with the writer that will set the tone for a productive session. A helpful first step during the session is to set an agenda and manage the writer’s expectations of what they will be getting out of the session during the limited time you two have. During the session, asking questions, listening actively, facilitating by responding as a reader, and using silence and wait time to allow a writer time to think will help you and the writer understand each other best. 

I think that responding as a reader is such an interesting approach to providing feedback. Not only can you provide feedback that the writer’s audience might have, but you can support the writer through non-verbal communication. This is something I talked about in my first essay about the value of human tutoring. AI can give you generic feedback and encouragement, but a human tutor can smile with understanding, nod in agreement, or wrinkle their brow in confusion. Patchen discusses this in her essay and explains that human tutors can do everything AI can do, but AI cannot do everything that human tutors do. These human qualities in tutoring are valuable for a writer because a human will be reading or grading the paper, so getting that human feedback is going to be more helpful than using AI. 

What are some other non-verbal ways of communication that AI cannot replicate?