Practicing Writing Consultations

Last night my roommate was finishing up her midterm writing assignment for her history class, The Reconstruction Era.  I offered to help her edit her final draft and practice techniques that I learned from readings about being a Writing Consultant and from my experiences in the Writing Center.  Because she had other homework to do, I read through her paper and made comments and mentally took note of positive and negative patterns.  Once I went through the paper, I went through the comments I made and explained why I made them.  Some of the comments I made concerned usage of the active voice, specifying pronouns to improve clarity, and making connections from paragraph to paragraph.  Corrections that I made most often pertained to her word choice, which I corrected using the "Track Changes" feature of Microsoft word so that she could use her discretion if the changes needed to be made.  The biggest issue I found was changes in tense from one idea to the next, which I know I used to have an issue with.  She thanked me for my help and then sent it to another friend who is a history major.  He gave he the same general advice about her changes in tense and the wordiness of some of her sentences.  It goes to show that having other eyes read a paper before it is handed to a professor allows one to improve problems that he or she may have overpassed.