Qi’s intermediate draft of her paper was very well done. This time, I edited for mostly grammatical errors. She brought a great “long term versus short term” idea into her argument in the conclusion, which I had asked her to make stronger. Her thesis, while strong, was still missing a “third story,” and when I asked about it, she said that she had thought the third story was brought into the paper at the end. I clarified that it’s fine to appear both in the thesis and conclusion (referencing the handout with red, green, and blue sentences that I shared with Qi). I think she’ll be able to tie the paper together nicely with the information in her conclusion. I pulled out a few passive sentences for us to correct. She seemed confused at first, and thought it was an issue of word choice (i.e. the noun “interpretation” is too heavy so wanted to change it to “view”) rather than one of construction (we’re going for the verb “interpret”). She seemed to understand in the second example, and I pointed out others left in the paper for her to edit on her own. Next, we went over the chapter on article usage in the ESL Writers book, in an attempt to answer her question from our first class. I liked learning the terminology for count and noncount nouns and thought the examples were helpful. She asked questions and said it was helpful as well. I found some handouts and flow charts online that summarized the same information and sent it to her. She used the last part of class to work on her editorial assignment from last week. She needed a little more time, so will email me that page and the final edits to her paper for next Monday.
Ashley’s second version of her paper (the first version with the new thesis) still needed a lot of work. She had written a paragraph for each of the “supporting points” in the outline we made, as opposed to using them as evidence for a total of only three body paragraphs, and her paper was six pages long when I had asked for four. A huge portion of it was still summary. I began class by asking her out loud “What are you writing about?” She was able to answer with her argument very clearly. Next, I had her write a reverse outline by looking back at her paper and writing the main argument of each paragraph into an outline. I was pleased to see that in the introduction, she chose the statement that I had recognized as her thesis but was not in its proper place at the end of the paragraph. We deleted everything after this sentence because it was superfluous. I told her our miscommunication about the outline, by pointing out that many of her paragraphs in her reverse outline made similar points. She seemed shocked that I thought she could fit everything she wanted to say into three body paragraphs on four pages.
Instead of editing the draft line by line, I decided to ask analysis questions about each of her points. I organized them into the strict three paragraph outline that I envision. I told her that each of the questions could be answered in one sentence, or two at most. I also clarified that an analytical paper answers questions that reveal something about the text not apparent at first glance. She has great analytical points in discussion and some in her writing, but she so often falls into summarizing, so I hope I made it clear that all of her writing should consist of answering my questions. I told her that she would need to delete a lot of her draft to eliminate summary, even though that’s hard to do. I hope this strict outline will result in a better next draft, and going forward, I will probably give more specific guidelines initially for the second paper. If anyone has good exercises for organization or making outlines, I would be happy to hear them! I plan on maybe reading something short and making a “sudden outline” in class, but I’m not sure if there are better starting points for breaking down an argument into body paragraphs. I want to also work on recognizing summary vs. analysis, maybe in other student writing (or maybe just mine).
See everyone tomorrow!