This week Cheryl submitted the final draft of her second essay, while Sophie submitted an annotated bibliography in preparation for her final research essay.
Cheryl’s final draft was well-organized, interesting, and did a good job of incorporating her two chosen sources. She successfully incorporated many of the comments and edits I made on her previous two drafts. However, the final draft still contained multiple mistakes, some of which I’d highlighted before. Because I don’t directly comment on final drafts, I wrote her a letter indicated complimenting her on the progress she’d made while also indicating the continued presence of mistakes in her essay.
During our meeting Cheryl and I discussed how to approach her research essay. She’s interested in learning about men’s fashion magazines, and decided she’d like to explore either how men or women are portrayed in fashion advertisements in men’s magazines. She had never used Google scholar or any of the library search databases, so we spent some time going over how to use them and evaluating which sources would best contribute to her topic. We also discussed her final portfolio.
Sophie’s annotated bibliography did not fulfill the assignment requirements I’d laid out — to select 4-6 sources, identify the authors’ main arguments and explain how each source would contribute to her essay — but I was pleased to see that she had identified five articles that should yield good info. During our meeting I had her write an introduction, in which she synthesized a lot of the background info she’d been reading and developed a thesis that should guide her well in her editing process. (She said she didn’t find the outline she completed for her last essay to be helpful, so I didn’t force her to create one for this essay.) As with Cheryl, we discussed her final portfolio assignment.
For both Cheryl and Sophie, the final portfolio will include
- 2 polished essays
- 2 polished short writing assignments
- a writer’s manual, which will include examples and explanations of
- a good and poor thesis
- a good and poor intro paragraph
- a good and poor transition
- a well-introduced and -incorporated quote, and a poorly introduced and incorporated quote
- a good and poor conclusion
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