Helping with Rhetoric and Poli Sci


Since I haven’t taught Rhetoric, I am helping almost all of my enrollment students with work in areas that are not within my discipline (I also tutor a Political Science major with work in his field). As described in chapter five of the Bedford Guide, I find myself helping them a lot with process. With my Rhetoric and Poli Sci students, we’ve spent sessions working on research techniques (What is JSTOR and how do you use it?), pre-writing activities (brainstorming and outlining), and grammatical/syntactic deep dives (How to know when to use a semi-colon or comma).

One of my students is a Creative Writing major working on their fantasy novel which features a dense, complicated mythology and an invented language system. We began our work on it together with the third-to-last chapter. In a way, this text proved perhaps even more foreign than the Rhetoric or Poli Sci essays, and we even took one 25-minute session so they could outline for me all the major pieces of character, plot, and world-building information I would need to know to navigate the final sections of the text. However, it’s still filled with names and information I don’t understand. So, I instead focus on how each chapter works structurally and how individual scenes come together, along with syntactic/grammatical issues. This has helped me better think through how I’m aiding the other students as well who are dealing with content I am not immediately familiar with. And even when tutoring students in unfamiliar fields, I usually feel confident that I can at least help them locate areas in their work in which they are not specific or analytical enough.

Comments

  1. Rachel P. RiendeauNovember 13, 2019 at 6:58 AM

    "And even when tutoring students in unfamiliar fields, I usually feel confident that I can at least help them locate areas in their work in which they are not specific or analytical enough." I agree with this, and default to it frequently. Writing shares some commonalities no matter what is being said about what kind of content. Well put, Kyle!

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