Alexandra TP 10

TUTORING PARTNER 10 – Ahmed, Meeting 2

Today I worked with Ahmed (who has been preparing for his TOEFL for the past few days). Although Ahmed knows he will have further opportunities to take the exam, he is currently being very diligent on improving his writing (the skill that he requested help from me with today) and has spent the last few days in the library. In preparation, Ahmed sent me four separate essays which he wrote in a timed fashion, and given the time constraints, though the samples had many errors, conceptually at least, they were quite well developed. I reviewed his essays ahead of time for grammar as well as for stylistic problems, focusing mainly on those which could be improved in a short amount of time. Since it would have been difficult to make any tremendous change in his writing abilities in the space of three days, I scanned for repeated errors.

Once the writings had been proofed, we met at the Strozier library café and set upon fixing a few of the most critical errors found throughout the four pieces. One of main goals today was ensuring proper numerical agreement. Given Ahmed’s overall ability, I’m not exactly sure why this essentially basic concept is still an issue for him and am curious to find out. Though he is certainly capable of fixing these problems when pointed in the direction of a mistake, I hope to continue to work with Ahmed to see if I can find any trends, and therefore clues, as to the logic that is causing this problem. I also hope that we’ll be able to root out any other basic grammatical issues that may still be lingering and weakening his otherwise positive progress.

Ahmed and I also discussed the possibility of tightening up his introductions and conclusions, as well as how critical being as direct and deliberate as possible in both of these areas is for creating the impression of a clear, and well-managed piece of timed writing. I suggested that Ahmed spend the first few minutes composing, proofing, and then tightening his introductory statement as well as his concluding remarks on scratch paper, even if at the slight expense of a few other lines in the body. Ahmed seemed to agree that this was probably a good idea. At the end of this session, we agreed to meet again and go over some of the other issues we had uncovered in his work.