WRIT 199 TAs

12/14/13:

Saraphin wrote the final draft of her third paper for this week’s meeting. She had revised it substantially and the result was a solid, well argued paper. I wrote her a reflection letter on the paper and we discussed it during the meeting. In particular, we discussed the length of her sentences and the need to cut down the number of clauses. We discussed the waxing and waning of the writing process. Overall, however, Saraphin’s final paper was a great improvement over past papers and drafts in terms of grammar, clarity, and use of evidence. We discussed the many things she has worked on, how she has improved, and how she can continue to improve. Finally, we went over the manual assignment. She seems confident with the assignment and had no questions.

12/6/13:

Saraphin wrote the first draft of her third paper for this week’s meeting. She had clearly done a lot of research and thinking and had written a solid first draft. She told me that she was just happy to have all of her thoughts on paper and was pleasantly surprised to see that the organization made sense when we assessed it. We went through my comments, most of which were asking for clarification, playing devil’s advocate, or indicating minor grammar mistakes. She made quite a few verb tense and plural/singular errors, probably due to her focus on research rather than sentence-level issues. We discussed the offending sentences and she seemed to understand my explanations. She only made two preposition mistakes, so we set a goal of zero preposition mistakes for the final. We also discussed her thesis, which included lots of background info and was somewhat vague. We talked in general about weeding out unnecessary info and looking at evidence critically. I had her edit a printed copy of her paper. She included a few sources, including the primary source of the Geneva Convention. I encouraged her to bring her evidence back to her argument, as she tended to introduce a piece of information and then drop it in without any follow up. I gave her a rough list of ‘final checks’ which I do on my own final drafts. Saraphin left our meeting feeling prepared to write the final draft. Finally, I gave Saraphin a somewhat updated version of the manual assignment.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, Delanie and I had a meeting that wasn’t originally scheduled, to catch up from her decision to change final paper topics.  She wrote a thought letter about women in Norman Rockwell paintings and brought the books she used for research.  I shared a simple document about art analysis to help her brainstorm as she examined each painting and she did some free writing for one of the paintings in class.  I think some of the reason for her awkward phrasing in past essays came from the fact that she was writing about documentaries (it’s difficult to describe everything going on in a scene between director, actors, viewer) and I was happy to see strong descriptions of the painting in her writing.

We had class this Monday (12/2), where we reviewed her first draft of this Rockwell paper.  Some sentences were still wordy and/or passive, and I made a list of a few words that were repeated too much throughout the paper.  We also talked about organization, because she analyzed the paintings thematically but out of chronological order. We mapped out the intersections of each’s paintings themes and she decidedly to keep her current organization but be more explicit in justifying the connections between paintings to her reader in topic and concluding sentences.  Relatedly, she hadn’t fully synthesized her analysis of the paintings individually into a specific thesis statement about the relationship between the women and American society.  She’ll turn in her final draft for our last class on Monday!

Estefania’s roommate issues have continued on this side of break.  I emailed her early in the week asking if she would like to do a textual analysis or response to an article instead of doing research for her last paper, because she’s already completed the requirement of a research paper, but she wanted to go ahead with the paper analyzing Mayor Julian Castro as a presidential candidate.  We met today (Thursday) and she had found a book to use as a reference for the qualities of a good president and had organized these traits into an outline, but her research about Castro was still underway.  We decided that she would send me her first draft by Saturday and then we would have a class session on Sunday.  I plan on giving her feedback on the final draft via email and then she can incorporate last changes into her Writer’s Manual assignment.  She’s going home when reading period starts so I do think she’ll have a chance to catch up on assignments then and give this last paper and her final a good effort.

Kailin and I had a very productive class session today. We finished up Essay 2, fine-tuning verbs from passive voice/past tense to active voice/present tense, and making all the phrases as clear as possible–paying special attention to the concluding sentences of each paragraph.

We then discussed Kailin’s final assignment, a writer’s manual. We talked about how she would approach it: by reviewing over her first drafts, and comparing them to the final essays she produced.

Lastly, we looked over the Annotated Bibliography Kailin had put together and talked about how she was going to structure the essay. We discussed the merits of taking a chronological approach, versus each paragraph directly comparing the past and present conditions. Kailin opted for the latter, as we think it will make for a stronger essay. We then put together an outline to provide her with a “road map” of her ideas when she goes to write the essay. She is submitting a draft of it to me later this week.

Today Kailin and I reviewed over the list of potential sources she had submitted this week for Essay 3. I was slightly disconcerted because the sources were web pages found through Google, not academic articles found through Wellesley SuperSearch. So I showed Kailin how to do research through the LTS website, and we found some more potential sources that she might use in her essay. Kailin caught on quickly and I think now she’ll be comfortable using it.

We also continued work on Essay 2 by making the wording of her phrases as specific as possible. And now that her ideas are more fully fleshed out, we worked on the order in which they unfold. Twice this meant bringing her concluding ideas into the introductory sentences, to strengthen the argument and make each paragraph feel more focused.

Today we began our discussion of Essay 3, the research essay, because I wanted to get a sense of what topics Kailin was potentially interested in researching. She is split because she’s really interested in Chinese American immigration, but she’s curious about the immigration of other Asian groups as well. She said she might focus on one group, or compare/contrast different groups. I asked her to do some research, select her topic, meet with a research librarian, and send me a list of potential sources for next week before she goes ahead and does the Annotated Bibliography. I also emailed her some  sources that might give her a starting point from an immigration class I had taken last semester.

We then worked on the revision of Essay 2. Her argument was repetitious at times, so we worked on cutting out that repetition and instead having her say it once as clearly as possible. Her argument (about New Orientalism in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club) also contained many unfounded generalizations about Easterners and Westerners, so we worked on how she could specify her points by referring to the characters in the Joy Luck Club text.

11/24/13:

Saraphin did research and planning for her third paper for this week’s meeting. She turned in a preliminary thesis and outline as well as some free writing on her chosen subject. She had changed her topic slightly since our last meeting, deciding to focus on weapons instead of social media. We discussed her topic and it changed even more during the course of our meeting. I helped her think about all the ‘threads’ of her argument and asked her many clarifying questions. We ultimately realized that the crux of her argument lay in the US’s current interpretation and use of the Geneva Protocol. We narrowed, clarified, and narrowed again until she felt that the argument was truthful and I felt that it was not too broad. We then discussed organization and she wrote out a rough outline. We discussed the order of her introduction and I illustrated the benefits of logical sentence order. She will be using the Geneva Protocol itself as one of her sources and I encouraged her to use close reading in her paper. She left the meeting with a solid plan, although she still has some research to do. She should have enough time to do more research, as we are not meeting this week due to Thanksgiving. Finally, we went over the final manual assignment very briefly. There were some sections which we haven’t covered in our meetings and I wanted to make sure that she was clear on what they were. We discussed taking some of the sections out of the manual, as she really doesn’t struggle with them (passive voice, conclusions). I will decide and edit the manual if necessary. Saraphin will be writing the first draft of her third paper for our next meeting.