Feelings of Incompetency :: Personal Narrative Writing

Feelings of Incompetency In my experiences at the Writing Resource Center, I have found that the biggest area of concern that I have run into is the feeling that I am an ineffective tutor as far as tutoring the students that come in search of writing assistance. I feel that I am a very inadequate means of relief for these people, yet they still come to me for help. In this paper, I will explore these thoughts and try to find out what it is that makes me feel so ineffective. In recent discussions with my peers at the Writing Resource Center, I have found that, though these feelings of inadequacy are somewhat consistent throughout the center, I feel that my feelings are a bit more strong when it comes to that of helping the student. I feel that what I am doing in helping the student is exactly what we're taught not to do, as far as assisting. The most glaring thing that I feel that I am doing wrong is that when I read a paper that is loaded with commas, I tend to point them out without much help from the tutee. Take the following paragraph, for example (which is a rough copy from a tutee of mine - who wasn't a foreigner to our country): Snowmobiles, on the other hand, are, for example, a very effective, yet costly, means of transportation. They are, as said before, expensive, but, the fact that they're worth it only enhances their, let's say, worthiness. I mean, you can buy one, for cheap, but, on the other hand, why buy a cheap one when spending a little bit more would mean fewer problems down the road. Now, after reading this paragraph, I read it aloud to him exaggerating the pauses wherever the commas were placed. Next, I asked him to tell me if the whole paragraph sounded strange to him or not. He promptly replied that it sounded perfectly fine. Upon hearing this, I tried a different approach: I had him paraphrase, or restate, what he was trying to say in the paragraph while I wrote it down. I then had him read what I had just written down and asked him what he felt about that for his paragraph instead of the one that he had on his paper. He abruptly said "no" and looked at me defiantly. Next, after trying to tell him how commas were supposed to function in a sentence, I asked him again if he felt that there were any places in his paragraph that seemed awkward and/or over "comma-ized.