A Writer's Wanderings

          As a tutor it has been incredibly difficult to refrain from grabbing a pencil and editing a student’s paper. Believe me, I want to. It is so much easier to read through a paper and tell someone what is wrong with it, than sit there and help someone come to their own conclusions. We can’t do that though. Many people don’t seem to understand that we can’t just fix their essays. But, why? Well, we tutors can’t just fix people’s work because our goal isn’t your good grade. Our goal as tutors is that each student walks away from a session with a little more knowledge about writing than they had before.             When it comes to papers and writing, we genuinely care about your ideas. That’s the reason we ask questions and give tasks. Through these techniques, we are hoping to get the wheels turning in your head so that you can write things from your own perspective. Writing is a form of expression,...

While writing, fallacies seem to come easy if you do not keep an eye out. It is key to process each sentence while writing, or you may fall prey to a logical fallacy. There are many different types of fallacies to look for while writing essays, journal entries, or discussion board posts. Generalizations : This is when a conclusion is applied to an entire group of people, even though the sample was from a small and inadequate group. For example, if you have one or two friends that wear glasses and like to read, it may be easy to generalize that those who wear glasses like to read. This would be a generalization, because many people that wear glasses probably do not like to read. Post Hoc : This occurs when the writer assumes that because “event B” happened after “event A,” “event A” caused “event B.” For example, if you take the trash out and then the garbage truck comes the next day, it might be easy to assume that the garbage truck came specifically because you took th...

Do the margins of your note pages look like a kindergartener with a new pack of crayons? If so, you’re on the right track to absorbing more information than if you were simply staring at your teacher’s powerpoint, drool making its way towards your chin. According to TIME Magazine, a study conducted by the University of Plymouth, by psychologist Jackie Andrade, has proven that doodlers absorb far more information during a meeting or lecture than non-doodlers. To conduct such an experiment, Andrade took a group of forty people, asking twenty of them to shade in small boxes while listening to a dull recording, while the other twenty were not asked to do anything but listen. Afterwards, the forty participants were tested on what the recording was about. Overall, those that were asked to doodle remembered nearly 30% more than those that were not asked to doodle.             Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution , claims tha...