My first shadowing experience

My first shadowing experience!! For starters the consultant that I am shadowing is a teammate of mine so we already have a good relationship. She actually encouraged me to pursue the writing consultant position so we have conversed about papers, the position, and other things entailed in being a consultant. Since I am shadowing in study hall, all the writers are athletes so I see more than a few familiar faces. The appointment my consultant had was actually my teammate so it made it easier to shadow without having the awkward silences and looks and moments that normally come with first time meetings. The prompt the writer was given was a little ambiguous and very lengthy. It was for a leadership class and the students had to formulate a question discussing leadership and how it related to the ideas of society and the individual. Throughout their paper they had to integrate articles from class to develop a theoretical answer to the question. Overall the prompt was fairly long and pretty complex when you read it. It took about 15 min just to decipher what exactly the assignment. The nice part about it though was that the writer had yet to begin her paper so she was still in the beginning stages of developing concepts and ideas. With an assignment this complex I feel as if she had already started and been at any other stage of the writing process then there would have been a mess of problems. She might have been attached to certain ideas and editing and changing them would have created more problems. We spent a little bit of time deciding the format of the paper because organization was the key to fluidity with this topic. She finally decided to begin with her question, include the articles and then use the evidence from the articles to answer the question. For the most part she had a pretty good idea on how she was going to write her paper. The only problem encountered was formulating the thesis. There were so many criterions to cover that the writer had no idea how to fit it all into one sentence. Once this happened the consultant told her that she could actually put her thesis in more than one sentence. I had never before heard this so I questioned the consultant. She told me that it was mostly a high school thing and that if necessary you could actually have a thesis in more than one sentence. I was pretty amazed by this (and I am still a little skeptical) but hey she could be right. After that we were pretty much finished with the session. I offered the writer a few tidbits of information about different strategies and techniques that work for me, and the consultant and I both showed her the writer’s web in case she needed further help afterwards. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my time shadowing and I cannot wait to see the finished project or what grade she receives.