[Introductory material deleted in each report]

REPORT 1

X's ideas were sometimes ambiguous. I also felt many of his ideas were on the verge of nonsense. We read through the assignment and tried to breakdown his conceptualization of the topic into outline form. This took a great deal of time. I felt he was jumping from one author's point of view to the next without clear intention. Unfortunately, there was just not enough time to adequately revitalize his paper. I recommended that he come back in the future at various stages in his writing process. In this way, we could address his problems satisfactorily.

Y came in rather discouraged about "making her draft flow." She had worked with your writing fellow but had not felt that the Fellow was able to offer much assistance.

We looked over Y's revised introduction and the rest of her first draft. Y said that she doesn't read her drafts aloud, which accounts for some of the wrong-word errors I saw. This is not the major source of difficulty in Y's prose, however; for the most part, she relies upon too many verbs of being and repetitious wordings. Y stated that her high school writing teachers forbid the use of "it" or other demonstrative pronouns! I worked with several sentences, and had Y work with the others, to improve the sense of transition between points.

We also worked together as Y eliminated redundancies and added action to the sentences. Finally, she plans to revise her conclusion to discuss how order is restored: in the Odyssey by Odysseus' return and in Mencius by the people's appeal to another ruler.

I told Y to try working with her Fellow again and with me next semester. I also gave her a guide for eliminating weak verbs in writing.