Fog

My experience with online tutoring, or tutoring by typing something out, has revolved around workshop critiques and a few newspaper articles. I've never had anyone ask me to look over a paper for them via e-mail, but it doesn't seem like a very daunting task.

In my creative writing classes, I am tasked to write a critique of someones work on the computer before class so that both the professor and the writer can have copies in print so that there is some chunk of text to read from beginning to end about a particular piece. The only difference between these critiques and an actual online submission to the Writer's Room would be the focus on grammar. Which, based on the examples from Raforth's "Responding Online," seem a little confusing to do for someone not familiar with the genre of online tutoring. He bounces one response after another with some spacing to emphasize points for the writer to look at, but if you've worked with Microsoft Word recently, the ability to track the changes you've made to the document seems to be the best route for a more hands-on online approach.

To the right, or left, of the text there are red lines leading to little bubbles with descriptions of what changes have been made. This, along with a written critique of the work not necessarily talking about overall reaction but talking more about clarity and repetitive grammatical errors, seems to be an easier way to make direct comments on the text. Sending a response with the attached edited copy would offer an immediate document for the writer to compare to their original draft. Bouncing text like that back and forth to showcase the progression of the conversation would keep the progress clear and create a history of documents to look back at and point out errors and awkwardness. Otherwise, things get foggy.