Minte Irmer
Personal Blunder of Paper Writing: I talk a lot, so I almost always say too much. It’s tempting to keep adding cool details and extra information to a paper rather than staying concise. Usually I let it all out in the first few drafts, but I’m vicious with my red pen later and end up eliminating words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs.
Main Tutoring Advice: Drafts don’t have to be pretty. Just power through the writer’s block and get something, anything, out on the page. It’s much easier to improve a bad sentence than to improve a sentence you’ve never written. (Of course, your final draft should be pretty. But don’t let that scare you away from the first try.)
Best Class Taken at Hillsdale: I loved my Austen and the Bronte Sisters class with [Assistant Professor of English Lorraine] Eadie. We examined discursive and figural reasoning in the texts, and our conversations about it were really beautiful. Also, it was over the summer, so we had a really small class and a lot of healthy discussion.
Favorite Movie: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — It is so choice.
Aaron Shreck
Personal Blunder of Paper Writing: Deep down, I think almost all of my troubles with essay writing, be they organization, syntax, or even writer’s block, stem from failures of understanding. If I can’t take an overarching idea, state it clearly in the form of a thesis, and divide it into a series of explanatory paragraphs, then I really don’t know what I’m talking about. So I try and think better, usually by drafting the paper multiple times, each time getting closer to saying what’s really going on. Every paper I’ve deeply invested myself in perfecting has paid me back many times over in a clear understanding of the issue at hand. As George Saunders says, writing shows us what we really think.
Main Tutoring Advice: I spend most of my time at the Writing Center talking about the relationship between a thesis and its topic sentences. The former should be a pithy distillation of the paper’s overall purpose (what is this paper trying to do?), and each of the latter should move us a step closer to agreeing with that thesis.
Best Class Taken at Hillsdale: That’s probably a tie between [Provost David] Whalen’s Victorian and Modern and [Profesor of English Justin] Jackson’s Anglo-Saxon.
Favorite Movie: Tree of Life.
