This week Cheryl and Sophie worked on the second drafts of their first essay. Sophie handed in a second draft, and we continued to discuss many of the elements of organization and structure that we talked about last week. Because Cheryl and I weren’t able to meet last week to discuss her first draft, we instead spent two class meetings this week working on her first draft; she’ll turn in a second draft next week.
Cheryl has been a little difficult to work with in terms of reorganizing her essay. Several chunks of the body of her essay don’t strictly relate to or support her thesis, even though she’s adamant that they do. I’ve tried walking her through her argument several times, asking her to look at her essay from an outsider’s perspective, and telling her to test every paragraph against her thesis to see if what she’s writing truly coheres with her principal argument. She’s ceded a bit, and her essay is better focused than it was a week ago, but I still think parts of her essay should be either deleted or entirely reworded. Is there a way to get this across to her without outright saying that much of the body of her essay has very little to do with what she claims to be arguing? Besides this, she continues to make strides in terms of clarity of her sentence structure, and she seems to be communicating her ideas better than she did at the beginning of the semester. I’m also seeing a much lower frequency of article misuse and other minor but previously prevalent grammatical errors.
Sophie’s essay continues to be very promising. She decided to make her arguments by giving examples drawn from two case studies, which we both agree has strengthened the essay. Her second draft included a thesis paragraph, where her argument was broadly laid out over several sentences at the beginning of the essay, so this week we did another exercise on thesis statement writing. I had her read Indiana University’s “How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One” and measure her thesis against each of the handout’s four points. We were able to determine exactly where her thesis is strong and correct weaker elements of her thesis. Her essay is still short—two and a half pages—so for next week she’s working on expanding her arguments and incorporating some finer edits into her writing.