Please submit a Statement of Purpose...What?

As I am faced with the end of my Undergraduate career, I find myself absolutely freaking out over applying to Grad schools. Perhaps the scariest aspect of the application process is writing the Statement of Purpose. The schools I have looked at so far ask for essays ranging in word length anywhere from 500 to 2,000, and some do not even specify. The SoP, I believe, is slightly different from the personal statement, which I am very familiar with. Since I'm not a 4.0 student, I really need to make myself more appealing. Does anyone have some wise words for muh? Cheers, Ashley #1

Body Language in the Writing Center

Yesterday, in one of my "teacher classes," we examined an interesting article entitled "How to Train Your Mate," by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. While the title evokes a potential Cosmo article, it raises some interesting psychological questions that actually can be connected to education--and, as I found, perhaps tutoring. Dowd quotes anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love," as follows: "Men and woman tend to get intimacy differently," she [Fisher] explained. "Women get intimacy from face-to-face contact. We do what we call the anchoring gaze. It comes from millions of years of holding your baby in front of your face. Men tend to get intimacy by doing things side-by-side, because for millions of years they faced their enemy but sat side by side with their friends." I'm not suggesting we should read this article to gain helpful tips for flirting with our clients. Rather, we should examine the ways in which body language affects how we appear to our clients when sitting at the round table. Maybe sitting face-to-face with a male could be interpreted differently than it would be sitting next to a female, or vice-versa. Also, body language can be interpreted differently according to culture-- something else to think about in our diverse WC. Body language is another important way in which we listen to and respond to our clients Eager to find more information on this topic, I googled "Tutoring Body Language" and found the following links that may be worth a glance or two: Penn State iStudy, The Positivity Blog - 18 Body Language Tips, and Strategies for Intercultural Tutoring. Not only should this be useful for our client-tutor rapport here in the Writing Center, but also in our future careers.

From: Esther Cadili (atebo1874@gmail.com) To: Writing Center Friends Picture Book Dummy Creation (Children's Literature) A picture book contains 24/32 pages You need 16 pages to fold into the dummy= 32 pages (You can buy a large artist pad from Michaels and then simply fold and staple. Always buy your supplies on sale.) Think about: Idea--Format--Theme--Age-level Theme is the universal that binds/drives the story e.g., my story idea is about a dog and his/her peers. My dog feels bad because he is not accepted because he is different. My dog has a very long tail. Something big does not have to happen on each page. David Weisner, the latest medal winner who makes a ton of money, leaves pages blank and then each reader must think about what is happening. I'm good at the blank page. Retell your favorite fairy tale in your own words--create a dummy. See you soon. Esther Cadili

Difficult students and cultural barriers

I know we've all had the difficult student. The student who just wants to come in and get their paper edited by us, not contributing to the appointment, or worse, using their cell phone or writing emails on their laptop. I have been thinking about this recently, not due to the way that students act here necessarily, but from other situations that have come up lately with students in my HC group. I decided that since my appointment did not show up today, I would search Google for information. I typed in "difficult students in the writing center" and this was the first link that popped up. I think this provides an interesting view of "difficult" students and the tips are useful for us all to remember while in one of these sessions. http://www.lynchburg.edu/x2420.xml Additionally, the website had a link to information on bridging the cultural gaps. Being an Anthropology major, this is something near and dear to my heart. I think this is a pretty basic look at cultural differences and how to handle them, but it's still interesting! http://www.lynchburg.edu/x2415.xml The other links are interesting as well. Feel free to check them all out! Renée

Hi Everyone, One interesting concept has caught my eye regarding what some writing centers are doing these days. I ran across an example of a WC handbook http://www.psu.edu/dept/cew/writingcenter/handbook.htm Please feel free to peruse, I thought just the concept of a handbook for a tutor was interesting. I note that we do not do everything the exact way this particular center does, nor should we. I was just looking more at the concept of laying out a handbook. Just an idea:)

Two Different Pages, One Assignment.... Cultural Awareness, Communication, and Coping Strategies for Tutors of ESL Students

Hello All, If you are not already aware, Ashley, Rebecca, and I are presenting at the MWCA Bright Ideas Conference at Madonna University next Saturday. Going from the title, I can briefly explain that we are going to explore the challenges that culture and communication can present while working with ESL students. In response to those challenges, we will provide a variety of coping skills for tutors. The presentation will include a lecture, hands-on assignment, and a discussion session. As things are starting to mesh together for our presentation, I felt it would be a wonderful opportunity to find a common theme that the tutors at the OU Writing Center use based on your own training and tutoring style. If anyone has any interesting stories that include a specific challenge, a new way to approach this challenge, and the response from both the writer and yourself, I think we may be able to incorporate that experience into our dialogue. In any case, I love stories, so even if you have one that is not ESL specific, I would still read it! Regards, Genevieve

ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors

Hey everyone! In my downtime I read an article titled "ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors" by Cynthia Linville. I found this article to be pretty interesting. It gave a scenario of a writing consultant who was tutoring an ESL student. The student came to the writing center because he wanted the tutor to fix the errors in his paper so that he would get a passing grade. This is a lot like what we have been talking about with students e-mailing us their papers so that we can "fix" them and how people tend to view writing centers as basic fix it shops. Anyway, this articles goes on to talk about tips that writing consultants can benefit from when working with an ESL student. It says that we need to let the student know that we aren't going to just focus on lower order concerns, but we will address them when necessary. We, as consultants, need to be patient and help any student we are working with. The author states that it helps to take an ESL students paper and just go line by line to help them with sentence structure and verb agreement. This helps the student pinpoint exact places in their paper where they may be having difficulty. Even though at times it may be hard, we should try and avoid making corrections for them, they need to learn from their mistakes so they can correct them in the future. This will help students to become better writers. Our focus is to make every student a better writer rather than making better papers. I think this was a great article to read. It brought out existing points that I had previously learned and it also enlightened me with new information. At the end of the article the author gave some links to helpful websites. Here is one that I will share with you: http://a4esl.org/q/h/grammar.html