May 11, 2016: tutoring takeover #2 reflections

Grad tutor Sam Holley-Kline kindly let me take over a half-hour Tuesday afternoon appointment with an undergraduate. I introduced myself to the student in the hallway, and we chatted briefly while Sam was finishing up with a prior tutee. My tutee identified as a first-generation low-income college student and frequent Hume Center visitor. His enthusiasm about the Center was heartening. In this case, he had come into the center for help writing an e-mail to a prospective employer. He was renewing a past correspondence with a contact there, and there was a personal situation that he needed to explain. The student already had a draft and was worried both about length and tone. He wanted to shorten the e-mail, and he also wanted to come across as professional and as enthusiastic, without seeming too personal or too desperate.

With the situation laid out, my first move was to reassure the student, based on my own experience working in an office, that anxiety about this sort of correspondence was normal and to acknowledge how smart it was to put time and effort into writing business e-mails carefully. I also offered some rough guidelines, from experience and a few business advice books that I know, so the student had some rules of thumb he could depart from or not, based on his sense of the situation and his relationship with the correspondent. These were: first, a rule of thumb about the length of such business e-mails (definitely under 500 words, preferably closer to 250, though this depended on the importance of the background he needed to communicate); second, a possible strategy, to send such an e-mail as a reply to prior correspondence and cut the reply thread down to the most recent two or three e-mails, so that the recipient could scroll down and quickly see where she had left things last time; and, third, a tip about the mechanics of composing such an e-mail—we copied the text out of the student's e-mail program into MS Word, so that we did not accidentally send it while composing, and so that he would leave the session with his original draft still intact.

He felt overly familiar with the text of the e-mail himself and asked me to read it aloud. I did, encouraging him to listen as I read from the recipient's point of view and, based on his concerns about length and tone, think of whether it was clear to her what she was being asked to do, how each piece of information was relevant to that, and whether the order she was receiving it in was easy to follow. After a first read-through, the student took control of the keyboard, and we repeated these prompts as he scrolled through each paragraph.

On this first go-round, the student ended up condensing the information about his personal situation and his Stanford program, making the information about his professional goals and experience related to the internship more specific and more prominent. As he knew the Hume Center's tutoring practice, we quickly fell into a rhythm where he generated language or made edits and I occasionally offered an informal correction that I thought might go unnoticed, like, "Okay, grammar thing—dangling participle." When the student expressed discomfort with certain sentences as he came to them, I made observations about the sentences or paragraphs, like, "Well, the request is phrased as a question," and this was occasionally successful in allowing him to identify what was bothering him. I noted we were close to the half-hour mark, had been through the e-mail once and done a good job of tightening and focusing it, though the student should go through it all again, and asked if he had other priorities.

I did note we had an open slot after this and that I could work over time, if okay with Sam. Sam confirmed, and the student wanted to work further. Since Sam had been taking some notes and I had just looped him into the conversation, the student asked if he had opinions, as well, and Sam pulled up a chair for a second pass-through of the e-mail, which we all did together for another 20–25 minutes of the open appointment slot. Sam followed up on some questions about the order of information that had been raised earlier, and, on a second round of prompting, some of it more direct about how quickly the recipient could see what she was being asked, the student could now see that the order of some of his paragraphs might change further—in particular, that he might consider moving his actual request to the employer earlier in the e-mail. When we wrapped, we had been through two rounds of revision on the e-mail, one of 30 minutes involving only the student and me and one of between 20 and 25 minutes involving the student, Sam, and me.

Sam handed the session to me to close. The student told us he was going to continue working and had narrowed his goal to working further on one paragraph of the revised (MS Word) e-mail, which he was going to reread against the version of the same paragraph in his original (e-mail program) draft. This sounded good; I only added that, since the student said, in the e-mail, that his updated resume was available on request, he might also consider updating his resume before he sent the e-mail, so that if the recipient did request the updated resume, he could send it quickly. After he acknowledged this, I closed by expressing hope the session had been helpful, noting that a willingness to spend an hour or two to make an important e-mail rhetorically effective was one of the marks of a successful workplace communicator, that it was always smart to get advice on job materials from multiple people, and that the student could return to Hume if he wanted more help. Sam and I then briefly debriefed.

Some things that worked: Sam confessed he had never seen a student come in before for help writing correspondence and agreed that, in this case, offering some rules of thumb from my own office experience was helpful in getting things started. He felt the tips were appropriately couched in motivational scaffolding (e.g. about successful business people spending a lot of time on these things, too). Sam also thought it was helpful that, whenever asked about wording, I offered multiple alternatives. I wish the student had noticed one major point about the order of information that came out on our second pass-through earlier, but perhaps he simply needed to go through the material more than once.

Some things that I could do differently: Sam suggested two very concrete tweaks when we debriefed afterward. First, when I was looking at the student's e-mail and suggested we should work in Word, instead of the e-mail program, and the student agreed, I then opened Word and copied the text into a file, as he had already asked me to read it. Sam suggested I could have asked the student to do this, and then tilt the screen back to me to read, to affirm his control over the written material. Another useful tweak he noted is that, when asked how something felt or sounded to me, I sometimes expressed my response and followed it with the question "Does that make sense?" Sam agreed it is good to return the ball to the student by asking a question, but suggested favoring questions like "What do you think?" that couldn't be answered "Yes" or "No."