Today I got the chance to continue the mentor process with my original student from Hawthorne. I decided we would be best served working on editing procedures. This student doesn't really have someone who can work on editing with her. Both her parents are first generation Chinese immigrants, and can not help her writing. Out of the three writing assignments she shared with me, the one which needed the most work was a summary of Zeno's paradox about Achilles and the tortoise. The formatting and spelling were decent, and easily fixed, but the organization and the flow of the piece were choppy. She was explaining the paradox in a way which someone who didn't already know the paradox wouldn't understand. She, however, did not see the reason why the paradox hadn't been properly explained. So I gave her a few examples of why her sentences weren't fully clear, and we spoke about editing every sentence separately from each other, then working on sentence to sentence. Then, when we had cleaned up most of the short text, we tackled the couple of sentences which made her writing confusing. I asked her to explain what she wanted to say in those two sentences aloud. As she spoke, I acted as her scribe, writing out what she said near verbatim. The sentences we had come to together cleared up any confusion and made the piece fluent. So I talked about voice recordings, or speech to text, thinking maybe if she vocalized, scribed, then edited, her writing might improve. Perhaps if she can improve her sentence fluency by speaking instead of writing her ideas, the editing portion will be easier to handle.
Maybe she might even be able to turn that Achilles heel into a strength!
“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.”
― Homer, The Iliad
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