OK: so you've read the paper, remembering to read in the ways we've instructed you to: as a common reader, to know the writer, and to prepare your response. Now its time to develop the agenda for your response.
Unlike tutors, who can get input from their tutees regarding the goal of the tutoring session, writing assistants are on their own in determining the aims of their response. Occasionally the professor will have cued you to look for and respond to certain issues in the students' papers, but more often you're left on your own to determine what advice to give.
In the process of crafting your response, you'll come up against three important questions: What does the writer need to revise? Which of the paper's problems is most in need of revising? And finally, how do you facilitate (without directing) that revision?
We hope that the advice offered earlier in the Web site has prepared you to diagnose the paper's strengths and weaknesses. But what do you do when there are several matters to address? Do you address them all? Won't the writer feel overwhelmed if you return the paper to him with ink all over it?
Of course he will. Accordingly, when a paper has many problems, you'll have to prioritize among them, limiting yourself to commenting at length on just three or four. What's the rule of thumb? In general, a weak argument or thesis is more devastating to a paper than a weak paragraph or a poorly written sentence. After all, we can help writers to compose lovely sentences, but, if the ideas are flawed, those sentences don't add up to much. As we've stated in the "Advice to Tutors" section of this Web site, we recommend that you prioritize in this way:
- First: Ideas/Argument/Thesis/Overall Structure
- Second: Structure/Logic of Particular Sections
- Third: Individual Paragraphs
- Fourth: Syntax and Grammar
Of course, you should be flexible. Some professors don't want their writing assistants to comment on a paper's argument. They prefer their writing assistants to devote their attention to the paper's overall structure, or to its style. Moreover, you should remember that every paper is different and calls for different approaches. Sometimes, for example, the problems of a particular paragraph seem important to the larger argument that the writer is trying to make. You may in this case decide to begin with that paragraph. Again, be flexible. Let the paper suggest to you the form your response will take.