Amit Klingner is one of two SSWCA Tutor Representatives and a Senior tutor in the Herndon Writing Center.
The time has come for Seniors to write personal and often creative pieces for their college applications. As writing center tutor, no matter your age, you will most likely tutor a college essay soon! It is completely normal for underclassmen tutors to fear working with a seemingly more mature Senior tutee who asks to have their college essay tutored. What should you do? You’ve never written a college essay, so how could you possibly give them any advice?
Wrong! You are in the writing center because you know how to help peers with writing, and most likely, you have a pretty good idea of how to write a college essay–you just don’t know it!
College essays are just personal narrative essays! Seem a little less scary now? The only difference is that a tutee’s intended audience is their college of choice. You don’t need to have first-hand experience writing college essays in order to tutor them. Keep in mind that tutoring these essays does not require a hidden level of maturity that only Seniors have!
Here are a few points to keep in mind when tutoring these essays in order to create the most productive session with you and your tutee. Although these tips are super important for all writing center tutoring sessions, these points should be the main area of emphasis while tutoring college essays.
Help Tutees Brainstorm
One of the most important parts of tutoring college essays is the idea-generating portion. Try to ask your tutee open ended questions or questions that make them clarify what they mean in different parts of their essay. These questions help the tutee think more about their topic, and help them feel more confident with what they are trying to emphasize or say in their essay.
It is quite common for stressed Seniors to come into the writing center with college essays that are in its early stages, and hope to seek help from a tutor. As a tutor, you may feel stuck in helping them generate ideas, but don’t fret! If that situation ever happens, you can spend the session helping them do a number of brainstorming and idea organizing activities. Have the tutee create a mind map. It is really helpful for the tutee to draw out ideas and map them out on a visual surface, by drawing it out, he or she can draw lines to make connections between parts of their essay.
Another good tip is to have them create an outline of what they plan to write in the essay. If they have a lot of ideas and things that they want to add to their essay, try to get them to make an outline of what they want to write about. This outline can be in the form of bullet points, but this method is really helpful, so they get an organized “to-do” list of things that they would like to mention in their essay.
Remind your tutee that writer’s block doesn’t mean they don’t have any good ideas about the topic. It is more of a mental state of being overwhelmed or critical of the ideas in your head.
Be Supportive
Being supportive of the tutee and their ideas is another key part of tutoring someone working on a college essay. College essay writing is very personal and can make any writer feel vulnerable about the content of their essay. It is important, especially in these personal narrative tutoring sessions, that you make the tutee feel comfortable with sharing their ideas with you.
One amazing tip is to create a compliment sandwich when you are giving constructive criticism on their essay. An example of a compliment sandwich is if a tutor were to say “I really like that you included this part into your essay, and if you make your point more clear here, then your essay will be stronger than it already is!”
This does not necessarily mean you should be walking on eggshells the entire tutoring session, but just remember to be mindful of how you approach explaining your constructive criticism. If they are feeling stuck and overwhelmed, assure them that having too many initial ideas is better than having none.
Help Tutees Make Their Writing Shine
Another thing to look for when tutoring a college essay is that their writing is vibrant and unique in some way. To be more specific, try to help the tutee’s personality shine in the essay through tone, writing style, and diction. This doesn’t necessarily require you to know the person writing the essay, but having some vibrance in the writing will sure put the “person” in personal narrative. One tip to tell the tutee is that a friend should be able to read their essay, and be able to know who wrote it!
You Can Do It!
By following at least some these tips, hopefully some of the pressure of college essays can be relieved from you and your tutee! Regardless of you grade level, any writing center tutor is capable of tutoring a college essay–it’s just how you approach it!