University of Delaware Writing Center

Writing Center Tutoring Resources

Tutor Training: Essay Simulations

During tutor training, you will have the opportunity to conduct practice online conferences through four to seven (4 - 7) simulations and two (2) reflective exercises found in these WebPages. These simulations come from seven original student essays and each has an assignment description (some detailed and some written as students might convey their assignments in a genuine tutorial). The students have different level experiences and are writing in different courses and in different genres. Combined, these exercises offer you a broader practical experience.

At the Online Tutoring Center, we read and comment on student writing as part of a writing process: the writer develops his or her ideas, drafts the writing, receives our feedback, and then redrafts. If a student wants a second (or third or even fourth) round of comments, then he or she can resubmit the writing to the Online Tutoring Center. We call this process an online writing conference, or tutorial. It is an asynchronous process because it occurs over a period of time and not in "real time."

We hope that our feedback will be helpful to the student in his or her writing process. As tutors, though, it’s important to remember that ultimately it is the student's responsibility to use that feedback in redrafting and editing the paper. We don’t "correct" student writing or mark all of the errors. And we don’t edit or proofread for a student. That’s his or her job as a writer.

Our job as online tutors is to read the paper, comment on writing strengths, and offer both general and specific suggestions for developing ideas and improving the writing. Our responsibility includes being accurate, clear in communication, and straightforward, while being kind. Real people write the essays that we'll see in the Online Writing Center and real people will read our responses. Practice being both forthright, yet tactful in your tutorial response.

  1. Begin by reading chapter 3, "Online Writing Instruction in Asynchronous Environments" (pp. 67-96) in Hewett and Ehmann (2004) Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes.
  2. Click here [tutor_essay_example_1.pdf] to review an example of one online tutor's conference with "John," who writes about his interest in teaching music. Notice that the tutorial is relatively short and to the point, consisting of at least five (5) parts:

  1. Tailor the greeting so that it reflects your personality, is friendly, and introduces the writer to the tutorial process. You might tell the student whether you've used bold black font or comment balloons to embed your comments in the text, for example.

  2. Use the Writer's Strengths as a place for naming and praising some specific strengths rather than simply making suggestions for changes. We do this for two reasons. First, it’s important to point out what is working in this piece of writing so that a writer can make similar choices as he or she redrafts the paper. Second, it’s important for the writer to know what he or she is doing well or where the writing is generally strong because that will help him or her to make good choices in future papers.

    In this example, you’ll see that the tutor (Beth) is telling the student (John) some of the ways that his paper is especially strong. These strengths will help John to think about how to improve the weaker parts of his essay.

  3. In the General Comments, you should offer an explanation of where the writing needs improvement. You should expect to find at least one example of a problem area and provide some kind of specific suggestion for how to improve it. Look for at least one (but no more than three) significant content-based issue and/or a rhetorical pattern that reveals some kind of confusion in the writing. The tutorial makes more sense and is going to be more useful to the student if you do not dwell on the small sentence-level errors here -- unless, of course, the writer is ready to address only simple editing and proofreading concerns.

    In this example under “General Comments,” Beth is telling John about his use of the modal verb “could” and the way it influences his readers. She provides John with some sample changes that depend on the effect John wants to have on his readers. Beth hasn’t “fixed” his paper for him because the choice is John’s to make. But she has given him some specific strategies for revising his paper. These strategies are "problem-centered" and provide her with a way to teach rather than simply tell about the essay. It is important to teach the student about a problem and specific ways that writers might correct it because just telling him or her to "fix it" doesn't provide enough information. Most likely, the student already knows it needs to be "fixed," but is uncertain of how to do so.

  4. The Next Steps are a tutor’s way of providing revision guidance. While revision choices ultimately are up to the student, we like to explain some of the most important decisions he or she could make. It’s always up to the student to decide whether to take this advice and, if you have been clear and straightforward, it generally is not a reflection on your tutoring if the student decides not to follow the advice. Remember that the student also generates his or her own ideas and is influenced by his or her teacher, peers, and other readers outside the online or on-campus tutor.

    In this example, Beth suggests that John work on the verb tenses that she has pointed out. She also suggests that he think about which sentence is his thesis and where he wants it to be placed. Finally, Beth tells John to proofread for errors, and she suggests that he proof the paper by slowly reading it aloud. These next steps give John a potential plan in a general order of importance to follow.

  5. Embedded Comments can occur in a variety of ways.

    (1) One way is to highlight using a particular color and to tell the student in the General or Embedded Comments why that part is highlighted; yellow or green are common and generally easy to read. A similar strategy is to change the font color for a particular word, phrase, or sentence while providing a similar explanation for its appearance; blue or purple, but not red -- for affective reasons -- are good choices. Please remember that just the appearance of a colored highlight or font is not sufficient to convey your thoughts to students; in an asynchronous conference, you need to explain your comments and reasoning more thoroughly, perhaps, than in a traditional, face-to-face conference.

(2) Another way to embed comments is to use bold black font [enclosed in brackets]. This method is especially effective when you're not sure that the student is either using Microsoft Word or rich text (.rtf) as the primary word processing software. WordPerfect, for example, might not show other embedding methods once the essay is back on the student's own computer.

(3) Finally, you might use a comment balloon that appears off to the side of the paper and is attached by a line to the place or places in the paper to which it applies. In Microsoft Word, you can access this comment balloon through the "Insert" pull-down menu under "comment." Use your cursor to highlight the part of the paper that you want to emphasize and open a comment. When you're finished typing the comment, simply click back onto the paper and your cursor will leave the comment balloon.

Click [NEXT] or [Simulations] or some other connector to the next node.

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