This document summarizes an interview with a writing tutor about strategies for helping students with content-related issues in unfamiliar disciplines. The tutor, Megan, discusses her experience tutoring a hotel management student. While unfamiliar with the content, she was able to draw on her retail experience and ask leading questions to understand the student's needs. When unfamiliar terms arose, she had the student explain them. For feedback involving vague content, she had the student strengthen connections between ideas. Overall, building trust through understanding the student's language background and asking questions helped the tutor support the student's content mastery, even in an unfamiliar field.

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Jessica Morley
AU 697
December 17, 2014
Navigating Unfamiliar Content in LAC Tutoring Sessions
I. INTRODUCTION
GWAR, upper-division, and graduate students all share a common thread: they are studying a
specific field of knowledge in which they hope to become experts in. Working with these future
subject-matter experts poses a difficult challenge for LAC tutors. Specifically, tutors must learn
how to support students who present needs in unfamiliar disciplines, genres, and topics.
Furthermore, tutors need to weather these tumultuous waves of uncharted content-related issues
at every level of the writing process. For example, students may not understand key concepts in
the required reading material, or instructor’s prompt. Conversely, students may have a strong
grasp of a subject, but need help adapting their ideas to a genre or format of writing that the tutor
does not have experience with. While student needs are diverse, there are strategies tutors can
use to help support content-related needs any student may present. This paper attempts to
highlight a collection of these strategies, which tutors can use to navigate unfamiliar territories of
knowledge through a combination of tutor reflections and adaptable activity plans.
II. THE INTERVIEW: A CASE STUDY
Megan is a second year reading, writing, and study skills tutor at the LAC. I talked to Megan to
find out what challenges she has and strategies she uses with students who need content-related
support in topics she doesn’t necessarily hold a mastery of knowledge for. In the first part of the
interview, we reflect on her experiences with a weekly student who gets help for her Hotel

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Management (HTM) GWAR class. In the second part of the interview, we open the conversation
up to include the breadth of Megan’s experiences over the course of her employment related to
working with unfamiliar content. Megan’s reflections demonstrate how building trust, asking
leading questions that strengthens contextual relationships, and even using her own vast pool of
tacit/experiential knowledge have all worked as effective strategies for producing positive
outcomes in her tutoring sessions.
Jessica: I first want to ask if you have any personal experience or knowledge about the HTM
discipline. How did you familiarize yourself with this subject?
M: Yes I did, mostly because I had worked with a GWAR student in the same major last
semester, and also because I had a lot of the one-time students earlier in the semester for this
one class.
J: Did you have any experience with the writing genres for the HTM class and the expectations
the teacher had?
M: When I first tutored for this class last semester, I didn’t, but this semester I had a better
sense. However, the professor actually changed the format of the assignment, so before, it used
to be a group project and now it’s a solo project. So having to tailor the lesson plan to a solo
project was something of a significance.
J: How did you familiarize yourself?
M: By looking at it from the perspective of the customer and then using the customer’s mentality
to analyze it from a management standpoint. Asking, “so what do customers expect when they go
to a hotel of a certain rating?” And by looking at whatever list is generated asking, “how could
you as a manager of a hotel or an auditor make sure needs are met?”

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J: Was this your own rhetorical approach or a required analysis for the assignment?
M: This was my own rhetorical approach because, it was noted that on my student’s yellow form
that she has trouble relating to customers because she’s never had a job before.
J: What was your main strategy to help your student understand her prompt?
M: I would read through the prompt and ask her if she understood and then ask her to point
along the way when she didn’t understand the prompt. Her issues were usually vocabulary
because English is not her native language, and when we were discussing the vocabulary she
had learned it in a different context.
J: When you came across content related things, how did you navigate something that you didn’t
understand, or did you understand everything that she had to read?
M: I understood it for the most part because my other job is in retail so you do a lot of customer
service work, and customer service across the board is generally the same.
J: Great, so you’re pulling from your own tacit knowledge to support her content. Similarly, I
wanted to know if there was any reading material that came along with the prompt that she had
to work with.
M: Earlier in the semester she had a textbook that she had asked for help with. For the HTM 531
class she didn’t have any reading, and she had to essentially wrestle it with because the
assignment is basically student generate. But there were supplementary readings that she would
reference, and I would have to pull meaning from her, like, “how does this fit into her project?”
J: What kind of questions would you ask, would you ask leading questions?
M: I would basically ask her “could you explain to me a little bit more about this article?” or,
“could you explain how it’s relevant to what your report is saying?” That sort of stuff.

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J: I see, your basically reading things from a text that you had some idea about because you’re in
the retail industry, but did you ever come across anything in the text that you had no context for
and didn’t understand the content, and if so, how did you deal with that?
M: When we were going over her textbook there were words I didn’t understand, so I would ask
her “could you explain to me a little bit more about this?” And sometimes it was because I
misunderstood what she was asking me to help her with and she had a cursory understanding but
didn’t understand the context of the book. But other times it would be her explaining a topic they
would discuss in class.
J: Did you find it useful to go through this process, and what kind of outcome did you have from
this conversation?
M: It only happened once so I can’t say its overall impact, but I can say it did give her a little
more confidence in me in knowing what I was talking about, so she could trust me in being able
to help her.
J: So she was appreciative that you had some context for where she was coming from, it was
important for helping her with content?
M: Yes.
J: When you worked at the draft level, what were your student’s main concerns?
M: Well, actually it’s interesting because we almost never worked at the rough draft level—we
worked on helping her understand the teacher feedback on her final drafts. But also when she
just started out, we would brainstorm for ideas and how she would tackle the assignment.
J: When you had teacher feedback, was there anything from the feedback that was specific to her
understanding the content and how did you help her navigate that?

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M: A lot of the teacher comments for those sort of content issues were mostly that the professor
didn’t understand what she was saying— it was a lot about vagueness. So I would end up
reading through her paper and asking her “how are these two concepts related?” because she
would introduce an idea of how hotels that allow pets are more appealing to customers, and
customers enjoy pets because they would feel like part of their family. So I would ask her to
strengthen the connection between the two, and when it either became apparent that she didn’t
understand the connection, or she wasn’t explaining it thoroughly enough, we would go back
and try to get a stronger connection between the two ideas.
J: So you talked about strategies you used for working with content and it seems your student
was really receptive to your content related suggestions, but did you ever come across an
instance when your student wasn’t receptive, where they lost trust in your ability to understand,
and if so how did you work through that?
M: I don’t think we ever lost trust in that aspect. During our first session, when she found out I
was actually Chinese, it sort of helped her relate to me in a way that wasn’t just teacher-
student— it was more because I understood her native language a little bit, I could understand
her grammar troubles. And because I understood her grammar troubles, I could actually help
form the sentence focused exercises more towards her understanding of how English language
works versus how Cantonese works. Cantonese doesn’t have verb tense in the verbs themselves.
It’s defined by a time marker in the sentence. So what she does is she’ll write in Chinese and
literately translate into English. And because of that, there would be verb issues in terms of
subject-verb agreement and also verb-tense agreement. So because I knew that Chinese doesn’t
have verb tenses in the same way English does, I would tell her, “so for English if you are saying

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this time-stamp, what does the verb form need to be?” She had an easier time looking at those
errors than if she were to just look at it from her paper.
J: Now I’d like to ask you some more general questions outside of your one HTM student, just to
get an idea of your overall experiences and history with your students, and working with not only
GWAR but maybe other grad students and students in upper division class, and students with
growing subject experience and knowledge in different disciplines. So, I’d like to know overall,
do you feel equipped to handle knowledge that you don’t necessarily have enough familiarity
with when students come up with content related issues?
M: It honestly depends on the subject for me because so many HTM students come through, and
I’m fairly comfortable with that major. History I’m fairly comfortable with too, just because I
actually really like history. But when it comes to HED, Health Education, it’s a little bit harder
because they usually ask for APA formatting, and a lot of it is more research based, which I am
comfortable reading, but having to help someone else navigate or how to use research based
materials in your own writing is a little trickier for me.
J: What do you think might help your ability to work with these content related issues in areas
you are unfamiliar with? This is kind of a brainstorming question.
M: Maybe if we go through APA formatting a little bit during the tutor meetings at the beginning
of the semester, that may be helpful. I could also bring it up in the weekly meetings. Another
thing might just be getting access to syllabi, which we do, but because I usually have my
appointments back-to-back, I don’t have time to read the syllabi and get prepared in that sense.
J: Aside from you experience with the particular student we had been talking about, what other
strategies have you used to support students with content you are not familiar with?

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M: I usually end up turning it on them and asking them “can you explain to me what this
means?” or, “can you explain to me these ideas?” And what I try to do is make it clear that they
don’t have to bring it from their own knowledge, but they can refer to their notes, and I think that
takes off a lot of the stress that the students feel because they initially freeze up. And you can see
them freeze up when you ask that question. But by letting them know it’s okay if you don’t know,
and that you can look it up yourselves, I think it makes them more willing to do the work to do
the assignment.
J: So maybe giving them the ability to access resources, and in that way, you’re not expecting
them to know the answers right away, you’re expecting them to find ways and strategies to find
those answers.
M: Yeah, basically there’s no penalties. And by taking that off the table, you can see them relax
and be more willing to engage with the material.
J: Have you ever told a student “I don’t know the answer to your question,” and how did they
respond to that, and how did you feel about saying this?
M: Yes, actually a lot of what I’ve been helping students with are advising issues. And so they’d
come asking me “where do I go to do this GE again, and how many times can I fail this GE?”
And I don’t know so I would tell them places they might know. So I would lead them to other
resources that would be able to help them.
J: I think I’ve already touched on this question, but what resources or support do you think you
and the LAC could benefit from so that you may improve student outcomes with content related
issues?
M: The problem with content related issues, is it really falls on “what does the tutor know?” So
it really depends on the tutor. A lot of what I’m drawing from when it comes to content comes

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from the AP’s I took. So it’s about me being able to retain all that knowledge I learned years
ago.
J: You mean AP classes from high school?
M: Yeah, I mean I’ve reinforced it through the hobbies that I do, so the knowledge I did learn is
still there. I can’t say that for other tutors, but maybe having sessions where tutors can meet with
each other and talk about classes and ask what the basic things to help a history major, a HED
major, or a HTM major are. If we had that resource pulled, we could gear ourselves up for these
sessions, especially if it’s a one-time session and we don’t know what we are walking into.
III. INTERVIEW REFLECTIONS
Megan’s thoughtful reflections demonstrate a key strategy every tutor can implement when
working through content-related issues, which is to clarify opaque sections of a paper by
strengthening connections to related content. When Megan’s student had issues with vagueness,
she simply asked, “how are these two concepts related?” In doing so, she was able to assess and
work through her student’s knowledge of a particular subject by having her student strengthen
connections between two loosely tied statements in a draft. Similarly, she explained that if she
realized her student didn’t know how the two things were related, she would guide her student
back to the primary source material.
While this strategy was demonstrated through Megan’s experience with a particular Hotel
Management student, tutors can use this strategy to support a whole spectrum of students in a
variety of disciplines at any stage of a student’s academic career. For instance, although I am an
undergraduate Technical and Professional Writing (TPW) student, I was able to support a student
in the graduate Counseling program to make meaningful connections between his case study and
an academic journal article he was reading. My student asked me to help him understand how

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different outcome models represented in the article supported and or related to his case study. I
began by asking my student to explain the different outcome models to me, and when I realized
he didn’t understand what these models represented, we broke down the explanations from the
article into parts that he could understand. Once we were able to flesh out the meaning of the
models through cartoons of easy to understand situations that fit the outcome criterion, we
transferred this understanding to his case study and he was able to effectively analyze the
relationship between the models and his case study in his own words. This experience also
demonstrates how tutors can help students build connections at every stage of the writing
processes, even (or especially) during a heuristics exercise.
On the other side of the academic spectrum, I have been able to support my weekly English
214 students using similar relationship-building strategies. When helping one of my students
revise an expository essay, it became clear that his thesis was not fully supported in the body of
his paper. By using the T.E.A. structure (Topic, Evidence, and Analysis), I explained that the
topic sentences should directly connect to his thesis, which are then supported with evidence and
an analysis of the evidence. I also explained the importance of using transitional phrases and
adverbs to build connections between body paragraphs. By working with the TEA method, not
only was my student able to build a structurally more cohesive essay, he was also able to focus
on and build stronger connections to his whole paper. In this case, strengthening structure
worked hand-in-hand with building supportive content.
Another important strategy Megan reflected on was her ability to harness her unique
academic knowledge and occupational experiences (i.e. her tacit knowledge) to work with
content-related problems. For instance, Megan had a strong understanding of her HTM student’s
audience. Consequently, Megan was able to help her student develop a stronger audience

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analysis in her writing by asking leading questions such as “how could you as a manager of a
hotel or an auditor make sure needs are met?” Essentially, because Megan knew the basic
professional roles in a retail business, she was able to help her student think about her audience
on a sophisticated level. Similarly, Megan explained that she often employs what she learned in
her high school AP classes, as well as her growing knowledge of history, which is prompted by
her personal interest. Personally, some of my favorite tutoring-sessions have been when I can
explain important aspects of a paper by using my own tacit knowledge of a subject or genre. For
example, last semester I took a grant writing class for my TPW major, and this semester, I had
the opportunity to help a student write a grant proposal for a business class. I was able to explain
the important components of a grant, and help her build her draft around this specific genre of
writing. Not only did I help my student gain some clarity on how she should express her
proposal, I was also able to create a bond of trust because she knew I had a strong understanding
of her rhetorical needs.
Alternatively, tutors can build trust and support a student’s content-related issues by
admitting when they don’t know something. Megan demonstrated how it’s ok to say “I don’t
know,” but explain that she makes an effort to find the resources that can help her students. In
doing this, students can feel supported and know that their tutors won’t stray them in the wrong
direction. Author Catherine Savini, in the article An Alternative Approach to Bridging
Disciplinary Divides agrees with this approach, arguing that the first step in supporting students
who present unfamiliar content or genres is to “make transparency part of our protocol.” She
explains that tutors should know they aren’t supposed to be encyclopedias of academic
knowledge and believes that “directors should provide [tutors] with model sentences to help
them capitalize on their lack of expertise.”

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By building connections, employing tacit knowledge, and learning to be transparent with
students, tutors can effectively support a large portion of the student population that comes into
the LAC with content-related issues. While many tutors may already implement these strategies,
or variations thereof, there are some possible avenues of support tutors could utilize that are not
yet in practice. Megan suggests that if the LAC tutors and coordinators could have meetings that
cover basic content issues for specific classes, tutors could “gear ourselves up for these session,
especially if it’s a one-time session…” Similarly, Savini suggests that writing centers should
hold workshops with faculty and tutors to help tutors get a better understanding of the
expectations instructors have for their students. While this preemptive strategy for supporting
students with content issues may take extensive time, planning, and cooperation, there are some
basic activities that tutors need little preparation for. In the following sections I have laid out a
basic description of effective strategies through easily adaptable activities that tutors can use to
support students who have content and discipline related needs. These activities are especially
useful for students in upper division and graduate courses, where tutors may be completely
unfamiliar with the material or genre a student must work with.
IV. ACTIVITY ONE: BEAUFORT’S RUBRIC
Sometimes the generalist approach of making connections and clarifying meaning falls
short from successfully supporting a student whom must conform to the literary conventions of a
particular academic discipline. As we already know, different disciplines typically adhere to
specific style guides, e.g., MLA is often used in English, Chicago is often used in history, and
APA is often used in social sciences. In addition, different academic disciplines generally have
different types of documents students are expected to produce. For instance, a biology class may

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want students to write a research paper that has a very rigid organizational and rhetorical
structure. As tutors, it is impossible to be experts in each discipline, but there are ways to help
activate and assess a student’s awareness of his or her disciplinary expectations.
The following rubric of questions created by Columbia University’s writing center and
adapted from Anne Beaufort’s essay “College Writing and Beyond” helps to engage students
with their disciplinary expectations. Tutors can use these questions to help build meaningful
connections to their specific course demands by getting students to investigate the different
levels of knowledge they already know and narrow in on what tutees have yet to discover about
their discipline. These levels or “domains” of knowledge include: discourse community, writing
process, rhetorical, genre, and subject matter knowledge. These categories of knowledge
support student awareness of the relationships between their assignment and their discipline,
while giving them a sense of how they are developing as experts in their field. Rather than using
this questionnaire from start to finish in a session, a tutor can pick which questions from each
domain are most relevant to a student’s assignment. Below is an annotated version of the rubric
(annotations are marked in blue).

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Prompts for Investigating Unfamiliar Disciplines
Discourse Community Knowledge:
Discourse Communities, defined by linguist John Swales, are “groups that have goals or purposes, and
use communication to achieve these goals.” For example, a University is a discourse community, and
University students write academic papers for review by their instructors to ultimately achieve degrees.
Do you know what is considered “common knowledge” in this community?
E.g., should you write formally, or informally, should you use citations? Should you write in first person?
Essentially, what are you expected to know without explicit direction from you instructor?
What are the different genres practiced in your discipline?
E.g., are you expected to write expository essays? Narratives? Research reports? Rhetorical analyses?
Reflections?
What have you figured out about your discourse community?
E.g., why do you think your discourse community communicates the way they do? What expectations are
you learning? What do you think about the expectations in your discourse community?
What do you feel like you still need to know?
Writing process knowledge:
Writing process knowledge refers to the steps you need to take to complete your writing assignment.
Have you discussed this assignment with a professor/advisor? What feedback have you received?
Also, have you reviewed the syllabus or your classes’ iLearn site to see what your professor expects in
your writing process?
What research, reading, and writing have you done to get to this point? What’s left to do?
What do you need help with? What do you want to prioritize?

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Rhetorical Knowledge:
Rhetorical knowledge is the understanding of how audiences, purposes, and contexts are communicated
in texts.
What is the assignment? What occasion is motivating this writing task?
I.e., what does the prompt say, and why did your instructor assign you this writing assignment?
What is the goal of this text?
I.e., what is the goal of your writing assignment? What should it communicate?
Who is the audience?
I.e., whom are you writing for?
Genre Knowledge:
Genre knowledge is the knowledge a person has on what type of text they should write (e.g. expository
essays, lab reports, case-studies, book reviews, reflections, grant proposals, etc.).
Do you have a model?
Did your instructor include a model text you could use as a guideline? Are there model texts in the
bibliography of your prompt, syllabus, or class iLearn site?
What is your experience with this genre?
What do you think are the expectations of this genre?
Have you written in this genre in another discipline?
Or, have you written in this genre in another course?
Subject Matter Knowledge:
Subject matter knowledge is the knowledge you have for your particular field of study, or for your specific
course. For example, you may be writing a research report on single-cell organisms, and your knowledge
on single-cell organisms is your subject matter knowledge.

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Why did you decide to write about this?
I.e., why did you choose your particular subject or argument?
What is your experience with this subject? How new are you to the material/subject?
What do you know about this subject? What do you still need to know?
I.e., what have you learned about this subject in class?
What kind of research/work has already been done on this subject?
Or, what reading material or resources have you used to support what you are writing?
How are you framing your work in relation to other writers/scholars on this subject?
I.e., how are you expressing your understanding of your knowledge similarly or differently than other
classmates or scholars on this subject?
V. ACTIVITY TWO: THE MODEL APPROACH
“There is nothing private about the models of a discipline’s discourse community; they may
be internalized, and they may be tacit, but they are held communally and they can be
articulated. It is probably better to help students understand how the things they want to say
mesh or do not mesh with these models, and why, than to ignore them.” – Kate Chanock in
“How a Writing Tutor Can Help When Unfamiliar with the Content: A Case Study”
Students have a lot to gain from reading model texts. This activity demonstrates how
tutors can successfully activate students’ reading skills to develop a rhetorical understanding of
genre models. Students and tutors will use model texts for the purpose of exploring the expected
or conventional rhetorical practices used in a particular discipline. In this activity, tutors will first

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need to ask their students if they have a model. Instructors may provide model texts for their
student’s assignment, syllabus, or class iLearn site. If there is no model text, it may be possible
for the tutor and student to find a model text either in the LAC library or online. Once a model
text has been chosen, tutors can help their students understand the genre expectations of their
assignment by having students read the model text to discover the purpose of each part. Tutors
and students can work together or separately to highlight and annotate rhetorical aspects of the
paper. Students can then use this annotated model as a reference when applying the discovered
rhetorical methods to each part of their own writing.
To demonstrate this model approach in action, below I have developed a possible
scenario that tutors can use to adapt to their own sessions.
Situation: Vanessa, a student in ENGR 697GW Engineering Design Project II-GWAR class must
write an abstract for a laboratory report. Vanessa said that her instructor wanted her to revise
her draft and asked her to refer to the model abstract provided for the assignment as a guide for
how to write an abstract. Ricci, a reading, writing, and study skills tutor has a history
background and has never written an abstract, or studied engineering for that matter. This is
Ricci’s first encounter with this writing genre and discipline.
Activity Plan: Vanessa will analyze her abstract draft alongside the model abstract to find
rhetorical differences and commonalities.
Goal: Vanessa will apply the rhetorical conventions from the model abstract to her draft.
The Process: Ricci asks Vanessa to use a different highlighter for each part of the model
abstract that presents a different rhetorical purpose. Ricci then asks Vanessa to annotate those
differences on the margins of the abstract (Ricci could demonstrate how to highlight and

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annotate if Vanessa needs clarification). Next, Vanessa will repeat these two steps with her own
draft. After Vanessa highlights and annotates her draft, Vanessa and Ricci will make a list (on a
note card or on the chalkboard) comparing and contrasting the different rhetorical features and
how they were presented in the two abstracts. Finally, with the time remaining, Vanessa and
Ricci can work on implementing the desired rhetorical features and conventions found in the
abstract.
Example of the Highlighting and Annotating Process: (Adapted from the Georgia Tech School
of Civil and Environmental Engineering class CE 3020 Laboratory Reports.)
The Model Abstract
Article Title: Women Engineers in Kuwait: Perception of Gender Bias
Authors: P.A. Koushi, H.A. Al-Sanad, and A.M. Larkin of Kuwait University
Abstract
The greatest obstacle to the development of policies for the curtailment of gender bias is lack of
information on the scope and effects of the problem. This study represents an attempt to
quantify attitudes toward gender bias among profession women engineers working in the State of
Kuwait. The major findings that emerged were as follows: a) Since 1970, Kuwait has witnessed
an enormous growth rate in the participation of women in higher education. b) With respect to
the job-related factors of salary scale, professional treatment, responsibility, benefits, and
vacation, a clear majority (68%) of the professional Kuwaiti women engineers surveyed
expressed a feeling of equality with or even superiority to their male counterparts. c) The one
job-related factor in which significant gender bias was found to be in operation was that of
promotion to upper management positions. In this criterion, the women engineers surveyed felt
“less than equal” to their male colleagues.
Annotations: [Can be written in the margins]
(1) The abstract presents a problem
(2) This abstract presents a succinct objective of the paper.
(3) The abstract uses third person, creating a very formal, technical tone.
(4) The abstract summarize the actual results and how they were obtained.

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Abstract – Vanessa’s Draft
Article Title: Elements of an Optimal Experience
Author: Vanessa XXXX
Abstract
This paper presents and assesses a framework for an engineering capstone design program. We
explain how student preparation, project selection, and instructor mentorship are the three key
elements that must be addressed before the capstone experience is ready for the students. Next,
we describe a way to administer and execute the capstone design experience including design
workshops and lead engineers. We describe the importance in assessing the capstone design
experience and report recent assessment results of our framework. We comment specifically on
what students thought were the most important aspects of their experience in engineering
capstone design and provide quantitative insight into what parts of the framework are most
important.
Annotations: [Can be written in the margins]
(1) This abstract begins well with a concise statement of the objectives of the paper, but then
changes it’s tone away from a technical writing style.
(2) The abstract is written in the first person (e.g. “We explain…”, “We discuss…”, “We
comment…”, etc.).
(3) No results are presented. This abstract only describes the organization of the paper.
...
Outcome:
Reading skills— Vanessa will learn to rhetorically analyze model texts as well as her own
writing, utilizing highlighting and annotating methods.
Writing skills— Vanessa will learn to write with conscientiousness and purpose, considering the
rhetorical elements of her writing and genre conventions.
Study skills— Vanessa can adapt her ability to use models as guides for writing in other courses.
Vanessa can also begin to critically think about the expectations and conventions that are typical
in her discipline.

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VI. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS:
My own unique experience as a Technical and Professional Writing major working at the
LAC as a reading, writing, and study skills student has led me on a path to understanding how to
help others communicate subjects I am not familiar with, and subjects that may be technical in
nature are of particular interest to me. While academia may not be designed for many
interdisciplinary opportunities in the classroom, working at the LAC as a tutor facilitates the
ability to make connections between great divides of knowledge. This is one way I find my
tutoring sessions some of the most rewarding and engaging learning experiences I have had at
San Francisco State. By adopting this perspective of co-learning in the tutoring session and
applying the strategies discussed in this paper, LAC tutors can navigate uncharted territories
outside their frames of reference and into the vast sea of academic discourse with a sense of
confidence, curiosity, and compassion.
VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaufort, Anne. "College Writing and Beyond, A New Framework for University Writing
Instruction." Composition Forum 26 (2007): 177-206. Composition Forum. Utah State
University Press. Web. 17 Dec. 2014. <http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/college-writing-
beyond-appendix1.pdf>.
Savini, Catherine. "An Alternative Approach to Bridging Disciplinary Divides." The Writing Lab
Newsletter 1 Mar. 2011. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.
<https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v35/35.7-8.pdf>.

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Chanock, Kate. "How a Writing Tutor Can Help When Unfamiliar with the Content: A Case Study." The
WAC Journal 13 (2002): 113-31. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University. Web. 17 Dec.
2014. <http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol13/chanock.pdf>.
"Examples of Abstracts; Good, Bad, and Ugly." Georgia Tech School of Civil and
Environmental Engineering. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.ce.gatech.edu/~kkurtis/labstyle.pdf>.