The experience of being an ‘online’ writing coach has been both extremely useful and also a little difficult. I tend to be a person who over-explains, so to have to write my comments in the margins without ever interacting face to face with these students was hard for me. I would feel like I need to give an example of what I am saying some of the time, while other times I would make sure to write ‘this is just a suggestion’, because I didn’t want it to come off as me just telling them it shouldn’t be there or I think something else would benefit more. Never meeting these students made it a little more challenging to just be blunt about what I think they could add or change because I don’t know them and they don’t know me-so why would they want to listen to my suggestions? I understand that was the point of this, and the students seemed eager to get feedback, but some of the poetry was very personal and to give my suggestions almost felt like an invasion of privacy.

This website with 5 Tips for Giving Constructive Feedback to a Writer seemed to ease some of my weariness about what I should and shouldn’t do. For one, I felt like I needed to explain myself for everything or they might not understand it. So when I would mention that maybe they could use a metaphor, I would give an example of an unrelated metaphor. In the article they gave the example of, “Which YouTube video would you rather watch: Someone describing how to play guitar, or someone holding a guitar and demonstrating each chord? The latter, right?” So instead of just saying add this or change that, sometimes (not all the time) I would give an example or deeper thought about why I felt they could change it to strengthen their work. But I also mentioned at the end these are just suggestions and they might want to test out different things throughout their paper, because you can never have too many drafts.

With the students from the Hmong American Peace Academy, for one of my students it seemed as though English wasn’t their first language, or their most spoken language, so it made giving comments a little more difficult. As mentioned in the reading Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options, Harris and Silva say, “tutors need to distinguish between errors that will interfere with the indeed reader’s understanding of the text (global errors) and those that will not (local errors) and to give Priority to the former” (Harris and Silva, pg. 526). I an so used to editing for both content, grammar, and spelling when I help my friends edit their paper, so to give priority to global errors rather than local errors felt strange to me, but I also didn’t want to bombard them with all these suggestions so I tried to stick to this idea. I think that correcting for grammar and other local errors would be more for the teacher to address rather than me as a writing coach. Since I don’t know the student, and I don’t know to what level or degree they speak and write English I didn’t see myself in a place to address these issues, perhaps I would have felt different if I knew the student more.

I think that because the teachers and peers know these students better, that they understand the way the talk and write more than I ever could. I don’t know how they present themselves in the classroom, all I know is what they wrote in their poetry and papers, so I think that their peers and teacher would have more of an influence on the voice of their writing. I was more than willing to give suggestions and ideas on where I though they could elaborate or expand on their ideas, but I never suggested they take something out or change it completely, that wasn’t my call to make. However, I think getting feedback from a writing coach, teacher, and peers would help students to get a more well rounded idea of where to go with their revision process. Sometimes it is hard to take a step back from what you wrote and look at your work with fresh eyes, so feedback from people in different positions can really get the wheels turning on where your work can be expanded and tweaked.