Across the Curriculum Online

I wonder if, as writers, most of the writer tutors share the philosophy I clung to since I was a kid, dreaming of becoming a novelist since I was six years old: because writers write what they know (to some extent), it's critical to learn as much as possible about as many ideas and fields as possible to be a good writer. Because of this, I change my major three times as an undergraduate and ended up with 3 minor equivalences, plus I came to grad school for a holistic field that borrows shamelessly from every corner of the sciences and humanities to study a big topic, human beings. This experience in writing lab reports to critical literary essays boosts my confidence in the Writing Center and some of my most fruitful, rewarding repeat students at my old WC in Rhode Island were social workers and nurses. I know less than ever, but I can fake it through the basics of most disciplines.

I've struggled with tutoring across the curriculum the few times I've hunkered down to do online tutoring here. Disciplinary lexicons in the assignment instructions imply whole worlds I hesitate to claim to understand. What exactly is a reading response paper? One particularly 15-page paper, the first I woefully claimed from the online queue, centered on applying some social work framework o evaluate how articles analyzed psychometric instruments. I wrote a paper on psychometrics. I can evaluate scientific methods and writing. But I couldn't make head nor tails of this person's assignment or, worse, the myriad questions about specific sentences she inserted into comment bubbles for the tutor. I tried my best and wrote a hearty disclaimer about subject matter uncertainty in my letter to the student, but still feel I let them down. What should I have done? Are their strategies specific to asynchronous tutoring I've missed for helping in other fields?

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