I've been tutoring Shanshan since our class ended. She is almost too good to tutor anymore! What do I do when the student has surpassed the need for instruction? I guess I just have to keep running her through some essay writing drills, instilling her with the confidence she needs to kick the serious ass that is the LSAT writing section.
I recently started having her write the essays by hand, to mirror the LSAT conditions, and also keeping the composition time under 35 min. To my surprise, this actually improved her writing! One of her problems seems to be a lack of confidence in her first thought. This is actually a common creative writing issue, people going back over and nit picking at something until it's neutered of the original vitality it had. Her typed essays weren't this extreme, there were just a few points in every one where, as I know can see, she tried to insert ideas in the middle of sentences and thereby screwed up the rhythm, grammar of them.
She also said recently: how can I make my sentences less primitive? I almost got angry at this. I told her emphatically that her sentences were not primitive, and in fact her intellect of argument was well expressed, her creativity in analysis as well. This is what the admissions people are going to be looking at, not the rhetorical flights of fancy.
She's a great student. I'll have to keep her number on file for when I need a defense lawyer :)
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