What is tutoring?
Tutoring is, by definition, a one-to-one or small group activity where a person who is knowledgeable and has expertise in a specific content area or discipline provides tutelage, help, or clarification to one or more who do not.
The goal of the tutoring is to make you an independent learner, a more successful student. It is not to do the work for you. If you are having a problem with an assignment, you can reach out to tutoring for assistance. (You should reach out to your professor first.) The tutor will work with you for a few sessions so you can come to a place where you understand the material and how to do the assignment. It is your role to do your own work. That is why there is a limit on the number of hours of tutoring that we allow.
What is the role of the tutor?
The role of the tutor is not to do the work for you, it is to help you understand how to do the assignment.
In the area of writing, the tutor’s role is to point out what you are doing wrong and then for you to look and see if you have made similar errors throughout your paper and, if so, to correct those errors. The tutor’s role is not to proofread or edit your paper. The goal of the tutoring is to make you a better writer not do the writing for you.
In the area of math, the tutor’s role is to help you understand how to do a problem. Then it is up to you to take that knowledge to solve additional problems. Again, it is not the tutor’s role to do the work for you.
And, in other subjects, it is the tutor’s role to help you understand what you are reading, not to give you the answer to assignments.
Here is more information on writing and the writing process:
Step one: Prewriting
Use strategies like Brainstorming, listing, clustering and freewriting to generate ideas for your essay.
Step two: Write a draft
Write a first draft of your essay. Get all your ideas down on the page. It will be messy, but that is ok. You will fix the draft in step 3.
Step three: Revision
Revising involves “re-visioning” or “re-seeing” your paper. After writing a rough draft, you should revise your paper by reading it over with a critical eye—ask yourself whether each sentence and paragraph makes sense and accomplishes your intended goals. You should reassess the paper’s thesis (or main argument), supporting points, development, organization, paragraph structure, sense of audience, word choice, and overall persuasiveness. After revising, you are ready to edit and proofread your rough draft.
Step four: Editing and proofreading
Editing and proofreading involve carefully rereading your draft to ensure that your writing will look and sound “correct” to a reader. In other words, editing and proofreading ensure that your draft meets the standard writing conventions regarding punctuation, mechanics, spelling, sentence structure, and formatting. These are important final steps in writing a good paper, and you can effectively edit and proofread your papers by reading them out loud and paying attention to every little detail, checking to see that all words are spelled correctly, that every sentence is complete, that punctuation is correct, and that no words are inadvertently omitted.
Why aren’t the tutors editing and proof reading the work for you?
If tutoring edited and proofread your writing, you might end up with a more polished paper, but you would not understand what tutoring had done to make it better! You would have to come back to tutoring every time you wanted to improve future papers because you would not know how to do so yourself. On the other hand, when tutoring teaches you to self-edit/proofread, you learn how to make not only one paper better, but how to improve every paper you write! Thus, you not only improve the paper you bring to the tutoring, but your overall writing skills.
Adapted with permission from Colorado State University Writing Center (Source:https://writingcenter.colostate.edu/)