High School Student Mentoring Pt. 2

I have been corresponding through email with the high school student that I mentored about the college writing process over the last few weeks. We were hoping to get another meeting time in to talk about her essay, but unfortunately we couldn't find a time that worked for either of us, so we have resorted to email. I first want to comment and say that giving my comments over email instead of in person was considerably harder. In person I could easily make a comment and give one of my radiant smiles and say it in a nice way so that it doesn't sound too harsh, whereas over email I found that this wasn't quite as easy. I was immediately faced with the problem of how to word my criticisms without sounding too harsh. I read over her essay and was pleased that it had improved so much from the first time we talked and that she seemed to have taken a lot of my suggestions to heart. I told her that I thought it was overall a good essay but that there were a few areas that might need clarifying. I decided to use the track changes feature on word to write little comments about wording and spelling and small errors, which proved to be very helpful. I then attached her paper back in an email to her in which I gave sort of "end comments" about the paper as a whole. I realized my email was quite lengthy by the time I finished it, mostly because I spent several sentences clarifying things that I could have said quite easily in person. My real reason for writing this blog post is not to tell you about this particular consultation, but to reflect on the use of email as a means of writing comments. As I mentioned, it is particularly difficult to write comments over email, and I now understand why the writing center has a policy that students must actually come in to the writing center for a consultation rather than simply emailing their paper. Over email it is much more tempting to tell the writer what to fix rather than discussing with them about their ideas, for the obvious reason that the writer is not present for you to discuss with them. At first, when I heard about the policy of having to do a face to face consultation, I thought it seemed a bit useless, but this consultation has made me realize why that is a policy. As I was writing my comments back to the student, I was very tempted to simply cross things out and change words and tell her exactly what to fix. I realized that the process of an email consultation by its nature sets up an authoritative relationship between tutor and tutee rather than the facilitative one that we hope to have. Despite these issue, I think I managed to keep a facilitative tone rather than an authoritative one, but I'm not sure that if I were to continue to do email consultations I would be able to keep this up. In short, consultations should be in person, not over email or any other type of electronic device.