Chloe’s Journal for 2/23

2/19/13:  Ashley Iguina

Ashley and I met later than usual on Tuesday to accommodate for the Monday schedule.  I was thrilled to see her come to class with the short story that I assigned highlighted, underlined, and with her comments and dictionary definitions in the margins.  She turned in a thought letter over the weekend, which touched on many of Baldwin’s major themes and stated the parts of the story she had noticed but not fully understood.  We looked at the last paragraph of her thought letter together and made a few sentences more concise.  As we began to discuss the story, I suggested that Ashley (and I) construct a timeline because the story largely operates through flashbacks.  This helped organize our thinking and then, asking questions mostly raised by her thought letter, we talked about possible topics for her essay.  She chose to focus on the nameless narrator and his progression toward understanding his brother’s lifestyle.  Ashley told me she usually didn’t make outlines before writing papers.  I emphasized the importance of outlines and how helpful they are to me, and we made a rough list of the events in the text that were important to her argument.  On Thursday night, (as I asked, mostly as a time management thing) she emailed me her introduction and thesis.  I asked a few guiding questions to make her thesis more contentious and to raise points of discussion for the body of her paper, but I expect her thesis to still need narrowing/clarity in the first draft.  I left the more detailed editing for the complete first draft and only pointed out common errors (i.e. using a consistent present tense to write about literature).  Her first draft is due on Sunday.

2/21/13: Qi Wu

Qi and I also moved our meeting this week from Monday to Thursday.  She emailed me a thought letter over the weekend, which I edited and sent back to her via email on Monday afternoon.  Her thought letter had some consistent grammar errors, but was clear overall.  Because our meeting was so late in the week, I asked her to come on Thursday with an introduction, thesis, and outline.  She was a little unclear on the thesis and had prepared a paragraph that was more of an abstract for her paper.  In her introduction, though, the last two sentences made a good working thesis.  We spent some time on her opening statement, which was very vague.  It was, I think, “China has officially kept its capital veiled.”  When I told her some of the questions this left me with as a reader, she told me out loud some much more interesting and specific information about the secrecy in China’s economic relationship with the rest of the world.  We worked this into a much stronger first sentence.  She also had questions about how to address counterarguments to her thesis because she doesn’t actually disagree with the experts on the other side of the capital flight issue she is addressing.  She told me that she thinks they have a point, but her argument gets more to the heart of the issue.  I said that this was perfectly fine to include and it would make her argument stronger to address it.  I was impressed by her outline and expect her paper to be very well organized.  We finished class with the last of the “captioning diagrams” assignment, and discussed the solutions from Professor Rothschild’s Sakai site.  After class, I was reading over the articles Qi plans on using in her paper.  I noticed a short phrase that I think she had borrowed in her writing, which can be tempting when using such specific Econ-related language, but I definitely want to address this next week and talk about strategies to catch herself and avoid doing so (and how important this is to avoid).  Her first draft is due by 2pm on Sunday.