A trip to the writing center, while somewhat late (the only available slot was the same day it was due), was decently helpful to me. The mentor helped me to develop my ideas better, helped me to weave my miscellaneous ideas into body paragraphs, helped me improve my conclusion drastically and fixed a number of grammar, punctuation and syntax errors that I probably would’ve missed otherwise.
I went in with my original essay, about one half of my revised draft, a list of my ideas, and two different peer reviewed essays. I left with a good idea of how I could tie all of it together.
We started by her reading out what I had written aloud. This made punctuation errors, grammar errors and run-on sentences much more obvious than they would’ve been simply sitting on the paper. After reading an individual paragraph she would discuss with me what she thought about my ideas, whether they made sense and how I could build on them. She encouraged me to bring in more evidence in certain places, and helped me to make smoother, more logically-ordered transitions between each body paragraph.
It helped that she had read Frankenstein and was familiar with Genesis, for my essay revolved around both. This allowed her to understand points I was trying to make, and to help me make them more clear.
I am not very good at conclusions, so it was great that she seemed pretty knowledgeable about them… she advised me to go through each individual body paragraph and sum up the point of that paragraph with one sentence, and then to make sure that my conclusion touched on all of those points, and tied them together under my original thesis.
stustuffblog 