Tutoring Across Disciplines

This is a timely subject for me this semester, as I've found myself tutoring students in the writing center whose instructors have each required them to utilize topics that interest them in their own disciplines in order to apply rhetorical analysis in ways that may be relevant to their broader academic careers and/or interests. Both of my students are in business/finance, and while one has been working on a research project which spans the entire semester, asking her to consider the ways in which researchers in her field apply rhetorical strategies to advocate for one investment method over another, my other student is often invited to frame individual assignments through the lens of economics if he can make a case for its relevance. This puts me, as a tutor, in a liminal space, trying at once to translate assignment for my students, and the conventions of their discipline through teh filter of rhetoric in order to be able to assess whether they've adequately offered the relevant information from their fields that the assignment requires of them.

One of the biggest challenges, for me, emerges in attempting to offer guidance about analyzing rhetoric in articles and studies whose approaches and methods I'm not familiar with--articles written by multiple co-authors for instance, or those that are written to feature a data-set or a market trend. It is at times difficult for me to be able to ask the kinds of questions that will help my students understand teh persuasive strategies at work, because I'm not always sure myself--given that I'm also not a rhetoric instructor, nor have I ever taken a class in comp or rhetoric, so my bank of knowledge about the appeals tends toward the general and/or the unsophisticated. While it's true that good writing is good writing, and I can always help my students flesh out an argument or clarify their thinking, that's not always the most pressing issue given the specs of the assignment, and in thirty-minute intervals, all of that translating takes up sometimes all of my time.

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