Dear Bert,

        

       My tutee included all of the necessary information when introducing the article, but needed help with summarizing it. Rather than putting the article into her own words, she used a quote from the text as her summary, claiming to have done this because she couldn’t fully understand what the article was about. However, the connection that she had made to reality implied that she did in fact have a clear understanding of the article and the real issue that she was having was putting it into writing, so we decided to do some brainstorming. 

I asked her to tell me her thoughts on the article and what point the author could possibly be making. While she spoke, I jotted down what she had told me, which was a clear summarization and I reassured her that it seemed as though she did understand the article. I then helped her use the key words that I had written down as a guide in creating a cohesive, more personal interpretation of the article which further supported the quote that she had originally used to summarize it.

The tutee had actually made two connections to reality. One very personal, and the other being something she had seen. We combined the less personal one into her summary to act as supporting evidence for her summary.

She wanted to work on the closing of her essay. I thought it worked, only she had formulated the last sentence of the essay into a question. We decided that by rewording the question into a concrete, opinionated statement, it would provide the reader with closure, while provoking further thought on the main point of the article.

After going over her difficulties with summarization and the concerns that she had with the closing, I asked her read the article out loud which helped her smooth out grammatical errors. Her errors did not seem to be consistent and she was able to notice most of them on her own.

Reading her essay out loud also allowed the tutee to make note of extra, unnecessary information. Although she recognized it, she seemed somewhat attached to it because she was concerned about the length, which was supposed to be at least 400 words. I didn’t press the subject too hard, but I tried my best in convincing her not to get too fixated on the length because she had a strong essay that included the main things that the CATW was looking for.

Other than creating a summary, the tutee’s biggest issue seemed to be confidence in her writing. She wrote with clear, coherent sequentiality, and used strong examples, although needed to be reassured of this. I feel that the tutee is a good writer and would benefit in being reminded of what her strengths are.