Today in class with Chimuanya we reviewed the first draft of her essay.
First I asked her how she felt about her first draft. She responded that she felt her beginning was strong, but by the end had “run out of ideas.” My impressions mirrored her sentiment, and we talked about merging the last two paragraphs together to make one coherent paragraph, to make for a stronger finish.
She had clearly not proofread her draft, so I asked her to review the essay for grammatical errors. This allowed me to note which errors she was able to identify and fix herself, and which errors she did not pick up on due to unawareness of the grammar. For instance, we went over the difference between “it’s” (contraction) and “its” (possessive).
Then I went through my feedback with her in detail. I had spotted a hole in her argument, which I brought to her attention, and she orally articulated to me how she would address it in her writing. She understood well what I was saying, and described to me in detail how she would incorporate my feedback in approaching her second draft, which she will send to me by Thursday evening.
Had Chimuanya “run out ” or ideas or been unable, rather, to transfer ideas from her head to the screen or page? Please comment on what you think si happening here, and what strategies you can give her for leaning to go through the process you did in class, on her own, eventually.
Thanks, Lynne. So to explain the situation better, Chimuanya had two paragraphs at the end of her essay that were both about the No Child Left Behind act. In the first paragraph, she stated her main ideas, and in the second paragraph, she was rehashing those same ideas. Thus, the solution was cutting out the repetitious material and condensing the two paragraphs together. Because her ideas were more developed by the second paragraph, some of her wording was clearer in the second than the first.
In response to your question: At this point in the essay, Chimuanya had reached the end of her argument, but wanted to make the essay longer. So she continued writing about her last point instead of going back to other previous arguments and expounding on those. Because Chimuanya was already self-aware of this predicament, I believe that the process of writing multiple drafts is a strategy that would naturally encourage development of the essay. Do you agree?