Writing Center ExperiencesWhen I started working at the Writing Center, I had about eleven years of experience teaching English as a foreign language to non-native English speakers in Germany. The experience I gained proved to be very useful. Before you can address problems in writing, like any other problem, it is very important to know the writer. If you can build a bridge between the two people, who should work together in a tutoring session, it will be much easier to discuss problems and find solutions. Since some problems may have personal reasons or it may be difficult for the writer to discuss well the reason for some obstacles in writing, a more personal basis supports any work in this way. Thinking back to the sessions I have tutored this term, I would focus on one student's problems. The student brought three papers to the center, and his papers showed problems in constructing complete and correct sentences, as well as in defining paragraphs, and some of his sentences seemed awkward. These problems occurred in all of his articles. After a brief introduction and a few questions about the content of each article, it became apparent that the author was able to tell me exactly what he wanted to talk about and in what order the document should appear. However, he had the problem of getting his thoughts onto paper. We started discussing a few sentences from his first paragraph, where he focused almost only on the content of what he wanted to say, but never on how he could express his thoughts. thoughts clearly to the reader. To him the fragmented sentences, put together piece by piece, containing a lot of information, made perfect sense, because he KNEW what he had... in the middle of the paper... he had to make the writers aware, that an essential part of the sentence is missing, it is It is necessary to use symbols that refer to the parts of the sentence. So far I've gotten great results explaining it this way: the writer needs to pay attention! The sentence ends with an exclamation point - combined with the symbols square, upward-pointing triangle and ellipse (). The three symbols placed on top of each other resemble an exclamation point (). If these three parts are separated again, they have the following meaning:= square = 's' as in SUBJECT= "V" with vertex = 'v' as in VERB= "O" = 'o' as in OBJECT. writer draws these symbols around the corresponding parts in the sentences, so it becomes visually clear which part is missing. Many people learn more easily this way and find a way to memorize the essential parts of each sentence more easily.