Writers are supposed to develop a thick skin so we can deal with all the nit-picks and criticisms we get. No problem, I got that. There are a lot of careers (and I dipped my toe in most of them) where that is true. I can listen to people take my work apart all day long, as long as it’s stuff I already know about or they are just plain wrong.
Most of the time,
In my role as and Educational ASL Interpreter, my students have learned that I make a darned good tutor when it comes to their English papers. And a frustrating one as well. What causes this particular set of feelings is the way that I tutor them. Word by word, without ever telling them what to say, I pick apart their sentences until each one is grammatically correct. Once one sentence is correct, I send them off to fix the rest of the paragraph on their own.
