An Organic Dissection of a Tutoring Session :: Personal Narrative Writing

An Organic Dissection of a Tutoring Session When Delvin (that's what I will call him) walked into the Writing Resource Center I was a little worried because I knew him from another class and a few social events, besides talking with him on occasion around the campus. I had had a bad experience earlier in the year when tutoring a friend of mine who'd asked me to help him with punctuation. I ended up just giving him a punctuation sheet and tried to work on some deeper level problems with word choices and development. He didn't see the problems or seem to want help in those areas, so he was offended at my attitude towards the content of his paper. (He thought that it was a near final draft except for a little editing.) Right away, though, Delvin said that his paper was in an early draft stage and he need some help "making it clear" because he was dealing with a difficult topic for Philosophy 205, Aesthetics. Now, Aesthetics is a complex topic dealing with ideas, objects, feelings, and theories as to what is beautiful and what is ugly. And Philosophy has a mode of thinking that is complex. At the time of my session with Delvin I didn't make the connection between the two, but prior writing to this paper the magnets reached their poles: the connection between philosophical thinking and writing development and also their ability, when done properly, to deal with complex issues. The main connection between the two is their ability to start with a topic and break it down into simple ideas and then reconstruct it into a theory or paper that displays, argues, questions, or proves the topic to a reader or listener. The philosophers main mode of dissecting a topic is by questioning every factor that is relevant (and even some that are irrelevant.) This is basically the same thing a writer should do when he or she begins to organize his or her paper. They need to find out, "who did what, when, where, and why?" Many writers and philosophers can organize these questions and answers in their head so that it makes sense to them, but the problem lies when they have to communicate multitudes of simple ideas to someone other than themselves. The overall idea won't make much sense to a reader if the writer spits it out like a madman babbling about the apocalypse.