Chloe’s Journal for 3/16

I asked Qi to spend some time at the beginning of the class looking over my comments on her editorial and her final draft.  We talked about the format of an editorial as an opinion piece because she had failed to adopt a strong point of view in her writing.  I said that analytical papers for Econ should similarly make an argument and show her professors that she is thinking critically about the material.  She understood all of the edits to her final paper and agreed that it had improved quite a bit from the first draft.  Next, I had taken an article from The Economist and removed all the articles, and asked her to fill them in with a, an, the, or an “x” if no article is required.  She went through the article on her own and then we reviewed it together.  Qi said that although we have been referencing the chapter on articles in the ESL book, she was working mostly from intuition.  She did really well with the assignment, and as I read it out loud with her answers, she heard errors and corrected them.  We talked about common words in Econ, like “inflation” and “government spending” that are conceptual and therefore require no article, but do when they are made specific, as in “the rate of inflation.”  She said it was helpful to note these words as it was something she’d struggled with, even in writing during her Econ exams.  For homework, she is researching the American mortgage bubble burst, narrowing her thinking to an appropriate paper topic, and writing a 2 page thought letter.  I explained the mid-semester feedback that I’ll be writing and asked her to do the same for me, letting me know what has been helpful and unhelpful, how she’d like to use class time, and topics she’d like to spend more time on.

Ashley and I are running about one week behind in our syllabus because of her problems with the very first draft, so we used Friday’s class to make up some of that time.  I began by describing three chapters from Ann Petry’s The Street that I thought could stand alone as serve as the reading for the next essay.  She chose the one with themes that most interested her.  Next, we went over my corrections to her intermediate draft.  This draft had taken a long time for me to edit; I deleted some strings of two or three sentences of summary at a time, and suggested in two cases that Ashley combine two paragraphs into one.  She understood all of my changes, but was concerned that she was leaning too much on me by simply adopting my corrections.  I understand this and answered that it isn’t a matter of borrowing my personal writing style, but being involved in an editing process with the goal of correcting mistakes, not altering her voice.  I told her to read over the new, concise version of her paper when she was finished editing and make sure that she was still happy with it as something she’d written.  She asked for more exercises in writing concisely, so I want to focus on that in class next week.  She spent the majority of class editing and asking questions about her paper.  I reread the chapter she selected from The Street and put together a thought letter assignment with questions to prompt analysis.  She agreed that to get back in line with the syllabus, she would hand in her final draft on Sunday at the beginning of break, and complete the thought letter by the Sunday at the end of break.