Q: I asked a student what she wanted to help with, and she said grammar, but her paper had more problems with citation. Should I try and fix everything?

A: I commend you for your concern for the student and your willingness to negotiate a session’s goals from the start. This is tricky because we can’t fix everything, and we should try to focus on what the student asks. Keep in mind, though, that students don’t always use the same writing vocabulary as we do. I’ve found that students will ask you to “help with grammar” as a catch-all phrase when they’re not totally sure what they need to work on—maybe they receive papers from professors with lots of marks and circles, and they’re not quite sure what they’re looking at.

If a student asks you for help with grammar but you notice more pressing issues with the paper, someone must make the call between focusing on , say, “that/which” errors or on plagiarism. Try communicating this with the student and leave it up to them. Say something like: “We can definitely try to look for patterns of error in your grammar, but I’m noticing a lot of quoted material that hasn’t been cited. You don’t want to unintentionally plagiarize your source’s words – do you want to tackle that first and then use the remaining time for smaller grammar mistakes? It’s up to you.”

A response like this does a few things:

• It shows that you’re actively listening to them and letting them direct the work on their paper, thus giving them ownership of their work
• It reminds them that plagiarizing is a more pressing matter than small grammar mistakes, especially if it’s happening frequently in a paper
• It demonstrates that you’re looking at the writer and the paper holistically, not as a minefield of mistakes to be diffused for an A paper

Would you approach this differently? Share your own answer to this question in the comments.