Majoring on Minors

Today I feel like I witnessed an extreme case scenario on what NOT to do as a writing consultant.  Brace yourselves people.

The student didn't bring a hard copy of his paper but rather his laptop, and as my consultant had neither read nor printed the paper, she proceeded to work with him from the copy on his computer.  Harmless right?  WRONG!  After she gave the paper a once over (silently), she made a few comments on the lack of a thesis in the intro paragraph, which engaged the student in a brief discussion of what the teacher mentioned in the writing assignment.  Subsequently, my consultant asked what the student wanted to work on for the paper--grammar, syntax, concepts, or everything--to which the student, looking confused, responded, "Everything, I guess."  The consultant immediately dives into the paper, going sentence by sentence (with full control of the laptop and keyboard) deleting words and punctuation, changing words to what she would rather say ("I'd definitely say 'would' instead of 'could' here," as she simultaneously inserted her alteration) and completely restructuring sentences, with little to no input from the student besides a response of "okay" or "yeah."  At one point, she mentioned that a particular sentence didn't add much to his overall argument, so she just deleted it, without the student having said to do so.  What made it worse was that after tinkering with a few sentences in the first paragraph, she mentioned that if she had any suggestions for conceptual items, she would just put them in parenthesis for him to look at later.  I couldn't believe that all this was happening and that all those changes were done on his actual original document--not a copy of the original saved as anothr version, not with tracked changes.  Unbelievable.  The rest of the session proceeded much in this fashion, although toward the latter half of it, she began to engage the student a little more by talking through some things that she thought could improve the paper.

As you can imagine, I was quite disturbed by the way this session went.  There were so many times when I just wanted to stop her and tell her to let him talk and think of ways to improve certain aspects on his own, but I felt that I would have been interrupting the session and that it wasn't my place.  I'm not certain how long she's been a writing consultant, but I don't believe she's new at it.  If that is the case, I think that maybe it would be beneficial for some writing consultants to revisit the material from our Comp Theory class, so that they are actually benefitting the writers instead of handicapping them.  I hope that my consultant doesn't get in trouble for this, but if this is how most of her consultations go then I think some intervention needs to occur at some point to at least bring her focus back to "making better writers."

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
     --Chinese Proverb