Student: Maud Muosieyiri
TA: Lily Byerly
2013 Spring
Final Assignment
For your final assignment, I’d like you to rework one paper and two thoughtletters. You may use my reflection letters or comments on your drafts to guide your revisions. Pay particular attention to sentence-level grammar, sentence concision, and the strength and clarity of your arguments. You may choose to make your thoughtletters more focused and argument driven, like mini papers, or you may choose to keep them in thoughtletter format.
The reworked papers are due (via email to me and as a Google Doc shared with Professor Viti) by May 13, 2013. Attach a brief cover letter (about one page) discussing how you have improved, how you now see yourself as a writer, and what you have worked on or are still working on. You may choose to include what you have learned about introductions, theses, topic sentences, logical sequence of sentences in a paragraph, use of analysis and evidence, conclusions, concision, grammar, or transitions, but I do not expect you to cover all of these areas.
Student: Haley Troy
TA: Lily Byerly
2013 Spring
Final Assignment
For your final assignment, I’d like you to create your own Writer’s Manual. Please select passages from your papers (drafts or final versions) that best illustrate the element described in the questions below. Please provide full responses to each of the questions (use complete sentences) with specific examples. The fuller and more specific your responses are, the more useful they will be to you in the future. I would like you to try to use different examples for each response, though I understand that you might need to reuse examples for different prompts. If you cannot find an example of the writing element that the prompt identifies, make one up!
Manuals are due (via email to me and as a Google Doc shared with Professor Viti) by May 17, 2013. Attach a brief cover letter (about one page) discussing how you have improved, how you now see yourself as a writer, and what you have worked on or are still working on.
Introductions
· Transcribe a successful introductory paragraph. Identify its elements (strong opener, context, thesis).
· Transcribe an introductory paragraph that didn’t quite work. What are its weaknesses?
Theses
· Transcribe a strong thesis statement. Can you identify elements in it that make it a strong thesis?
· Transcribe a weak thesis. Why is it weak?
Topic Sentences
· Transcribe a successful paragraph opener. What makes it work?
· Transcribe a weak paragraph opener. What goes wrong?
Logical Sequence of Sentences in a Paragraph
· Transcribe a paragraph that unfolds logically. Describe how it’s put together.
· Transcribe a paragraph that stumbles as it goes forward. Identify the problem.
Analytic Passages/Evidence
· Transcribe a particularly strong analytic passage. What elements make it strong?
· Transcribe a particularly weak analytic passage? Why is it weak?
Conclusions
· Transcribe a successful concluding paragraph. Identify its elements.
· Transcribe a concluding paragraph that didn’t quite work. What are its weaknesses?
Concision and Wordiness
· Identify TWO examples of sentences/paragraphs that are unnecessarily wordy. Rewrite these sentences/paragraphs in more concise language.
Personal Voice
· Transcribe a passage in which you hear your particular voice as a writer. What elements of the passage produce that voice?
Passive Voice
· Transcribe a passive tense sentence from one of your drafts. Rewrite this sentence (on your own or from a later draft) and explain why the active tense creates a stronger sentence.
Integration of Secondary Sources
· Locate and transcribe three sentences that integrate secondary source material. What strategies did you use to integrate these sources into your essay?
Transitions
· Locate and transcribe the final sentence of one paragraph and the opening sentence of the next paragraph in order to give an example of a successful transition between paragraphs. What strategy did you use and why is it successful?
· Locate and transcribe the final sentence of one paragraph and the opening sentence of the next paragraph in order to give an example of an unsuccessful transition between paragraphs. What’s the problem?
Grammar
· Locate and transcribe two different grammar mistakes that you’ve made more than once. Revise the sentences.
Punctuation
· Locate and transcribe one instance where you made a punctuation error. Please describe how you changed the error and the reasoning behind the change.
Commas
· Locate and transcribe an example of missing commas or an incorrect use of commas. Revise the sentence.
· Locate and transcribe an example of successful comma use.
Colloquial language
· Locate and transcribe one instance where you used colloquial language. Please describe how you changed the language to make it more academic.
Unsupported statements
· Locate and transcribe two instances where you made an unsupported statement (they will probably be two to three sentences long). Please describe how they were unsupported, and what you added or changed to substantiate your claim.
Please complete this sentence:
I’m sitting down to write my first paper next semester, and I am going to remember…