Chloe’s journal 4/26

On Sunday, Qi turned in a thought letter meant to mirror the organization of her research paper.  She chose powerful quotes from her sources and interacted with them well in her own voice, as we practiced last week.  I pointed out places where she would need more explanation behind certain concepts.  Her introduction was interesting – she had set the scene of the Eurozone crisis dramatically, using the present tense.  I admired her creativity but wasn’t sure what to make of this in an academic paper, so I asked Professor Viti, who confirmed that it was a fine line and said the opening would have been appropriate for a non-fiction narrative, but not for a research paper.  Qi will revise to the past tense.  For the more technical errors in her thought letter, I made a worksheet in which I copied her sentences and pasted them into three categories: tense, articles, and word choice.  She did well correcting her mixed tenses (temporal and singular vs. plural) and article usage.  Word choice was a bit more difficult, both for her to correct and for me to explain her errors, but I think we had a productive conversation.  We talked about, for example, the difference between “rise” and “arise” and the need for an actor to “exacerbate” something.  She emailed me on Thursday with another question about introducing her thesis, and I suggested the few pieces of information a reader would need to make sense of her thesis statement.  Qi’s first draft of her research paper is due this Sunday.

 Ashley brought the outline of her research paper and her final pieces of research to class on Tuesday.  I checked over her sources, which seem complete now, and have a good variety of text, photographs, and an interview.  Ashley’s outline also showed solid organization.  She is writing about Augusta Savage, a sculptor who lived in Harlem.  She broke down her biography into two major periods and will be analyzing one sculpture from each period of her life (1920s and 1930s).  In class, I had Ashley organize her sources into her outline and write her topic sentences.  We revised some for wordiness or vagueness (specifying in place of the word “values”).  She also wrote topic sentences for the paragraphs of biography that mentioned the sculpture she planned to discuss in the following paragraph.  I explained that these might be misleading to a reader, but that they would serve as great transitions at the end of the paragraph to connect her life events to her work.  Ashley seems very passionate about her topic and I’m looking forward to reading this paper and her analysis of the artwork.  Her first draft is due on Sunday night as well.  For both students, I plan to modify the “Writer’s Handbook” final assignment with some of the common issues I see in each of their writing.