First week on the clock

It's been an interesting week, for sure.  I've had an ESL writer, a grad student, and two APA papers.  None of which are particularly in my comfort zone.  Sooo, they had mixed results, but overall it was a successful first week.

I'm still thinking about the ESL appointment.  It didn't go so well, because I ended up at cross-purposes with the writer but I didn't know what else to do.  He came in wanting help on how to expand the ideas in his paper, of which he had 3 out of 6 pages written with the rough draft due that day.  I started reading it, and immediately realized that he had a lot of grammar issues.  Sentences without verbs, run-ons, etc, that worked together to make a paper that was incredibly hard to follow.  So, I found myself working on that sentence-level stuff that was so overwhelming.  But what he wanted help with was expanding his ideas.  We did talk about that at the end, but I could tell that he was frustrated on how much of the session we spent re-writing nearly every sentence. We both walked away from that appointment frustrated, but I don't know what else I should have done...

Other than that, my consultations this week went really well.  I had a grad student come in with a literature review for a 500 level Health Science class.  My experience with lit reviews amounts to proofreading one my mom wrote once.  So, all I really knew about them is that it's somewhere between a research paper and an annotated bibliography (I think!).  I asked her to explain the assignment to me, and then we started in on her paper.  I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I could help when both the type of writing and the subject matter were so far over my head.  But we still worked on things like re-ordering her paragraphs and picking out ideas that needed more explaining (after I asked stuff like "is this a concept that someone in your field would understand without much explaining from you?").  I was immensely satisfied with that session.

My other APA paper was a woman that came in wanting help with citations.  This was alarming to me because I have only ever written one paper with APA and I'm reasonably sure I did it wrong.  So I went and grabbed the style manual and set to work figuring out how to cite a quote she found in one of her sources that was from another source.  I told her the best and least complicated thing to do would be to find the original source, but she sort of ignored me when I said that.  So we figured out how to do it, and she went away happy.

Basically, I'm pretty satisfied with this week.