Helping a Writing Student With Scope

Discussing the Content, Expanding the Strong, Eliminating the Weak

Jun 17, 2009

Most students need help narrowing their scope, and a tutor can help by asking questions that challenge the student to take the necessary steps in the revision process.

Finding a narrow scope is probably the hardest part of paper writing for a college student. Minds don't naturally think in an essay-format, so students don't naturally write in an essay format. When it's time for a student to brainstorm his/her paper, it typically happens that lots of examples for various points get written down, but never get facilitated in a meaningful way. This will turn out a paper that makes a lot of quotes and references, but does not go in a clear direction. To help a student with his/her scope, a tutor should tell the student what point or points most of the content of the paper amounted to, challenge the student to expand on that point by filling in logical gaps, arguing with the student to show them where gaps still lie, and help them in other ways to eliminate the irrelevant parts of their paper.

Discussing the Content

Once the paper is completely read, the tutor should tell a student what the most prevalent messages in the paper are. The first thing this will do will be to get the student to think about his/her paper in terms of making points. The second thing it will do will be to show the student the most promising parts of his/her paper to improve and expand on.

After the student has decided upon a thesis, the tutor can ask the student questions that will force him/her to expand the argument where it is not clear enough and take the argument further, applying it to the material he/she is writing on. The tutor should also argue with the student's points, forcing him/her to defend them, define them, and actually discover the dimensions of them. When the student has been pressured to defend his/her argument against a firm and knowledgeable tutor, the student will realize the importance writing and defining clearly.

Eliminating the Irrelevant

This part could also occur before the developing of the strong content, but asking questions as to how the irrelevant material supports the student's claims will get the student out of the mentality of trying to throw words down, and into the mentality of all words being meaningful. A student will realize he/she needs to have responsibility for his/her writing, and that nothing can be said that can't be challenged. Or, maybe the student already had that mentality and only needed to refine their understanding of relevance. Whatever the case may be, papers usually need filtering.

Helping a student with the concept of scope involves showing them what to write more of and what to filter out, which even the best of writers still needs help with.

The copyright of the article Helping a Writing Student With Scope in Essay Writing is owned by Elisabeth Sharber. Permission to republish Helping a Writing Student With Scope in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.