Writing across genres and subjects.

A couple of hours ago I was thinking about how vastly writing can differ when it crosses genres and subject matter, and how this relates to our task as a writing consultant. An integral part of helping tutees with their writing is to understand the assignment, and on a deeper level, to get an idea of what kind of writing is expected from the student. For example, within the English courses, one can be expected to write papers on a variety of things. I wrote a few papers on novels in my modernism class, and now I have to do an in-depth paper on poetry in the Milton seminar that I'm taking this semester. Writing about prose is very different than writing about poetry, and the strategies that a writer needs to adopt for each kind of writing are very different and require time and practice to master. As both a writer and a writing consultant, I think it will be very important to keep these ideas in mind when helping a tutee improve their writing because the strategies that I choose to share with them will differ based on the kind of writing they are asked to produce.