This week Sophie and Cheryl were given short writing exercises (2-3 pages) to identify an argument in an assigned reading and explain whether they agreed or disagreed with the author.
Cheryl’s assignment was well-organized, which was a huge improvement over her first assignment, which was extremely disorganized. A few of her sentences were awkwardly phrased, but she was able to fix them fairly quickly when we looked at them together during our meeting. We had a second meeting this week because she missed our meeting last week, during which we discussed how she could structure her first essay as an editorial. I had her do a writing exercise to create an outline for an editorial about a randomly chosen topic (whether there should be a dress code at the Grammies); while she initially struggled with editorial structure, she seemed to grasp it by the end of the meeting.
Sophie’s assignment was an improvement over previous weeks in terms of grammar—especially tense—but was very poorly organized. We spent a good part of our meeting going over the basics of essay structure, which she seemed to have very little background on. I had her do a writing exercise to write a pseudo-essay on whether she liked dining hall food, including an introduction and providing evidence for her argument. She seemed more comfortable with organization by the end of the meeting, but we planned to continue to work on this in the future.
Their first essay drafts are due next week. For their first drafts, I requested that they focus on organization, formulating a clear thesis statement and arranging their arguments and evidence into sequential body paragraphs.