Marissa TS #10

For our second tutoring session, Stephen sent me a longer sample of his writing in English. He actually has a strong enough grasp on written English (having consumed a large amount of English literature) that he writes his own fiction stories in English. He chooses to do this because he knows it will have a wider audience appeal than works written in Spanish, even though his Spanish writing would come across more fluidly and naturally. I read and carefully went through about 1000 words of his writing and focused on a few specific and repeated grammar and stylistic errors. Like other Spanish speakers, Stephen often has trouble using “it” in impersonal statements and sometimes forgets pronouns in sentences, resulting in the subject being unclear. There were occasional examples of run-on sentences and awkward paragraph divisions that split up ideas and made the progression unclear. We largely worked on ways of rewording sentences and paragraphs to make them sound more natural and clear.