Last Blog! 5/10

On Monday, Qi and I reviewed her final research paper draft.  It had very few errors overall.  We reviewed comma usage to offset additional information because she was inconsistent with her punctuation (and I wanted to spend some time on this because I had just eliminated in from her final assignment thinking it was unnecessary).  One of her only remaining unclear statements was her thesis statement, but we quickly resolved the issue and made her sentence more concise.  Otherwise, she had some lingering problems with tense and word choice.  I showed her the Writer’s Diet Test (from Professor Viti) as an interesting tool to use before editing a draft.  Her writing scored well besides her nouns, which “needed toning.”  I pointed out that this may be because of her tendency to use the passive voice (which is sometimes hard to avoid in Econ) and that she could try to rework nouns, implementation, into verbs, like implement.  This was a nice, unexpected connection to previous material!  We went over her questions about the final and the model responses.  She asked what I thought of her writing by the end of the course, and I wish I had prepared a better answer beforehand, but I told her that her organization and arguments in the final paper unfolded really well, and pulled up one of her old papers, where she hadn’t given the reader enough help to fully follow the description of economic causes/effects.  Her sentences are much clearer too as a result of the draft process and proofreading, and I reiterated the value of thesis statements that put forward a strong, critical argument.

Ashley turned in the final draft of her paper for class on Tuesday as well.  Her sculpture analysis sections had definitely improved from her first draft.  Her biography sections still overwhelmed her analysis a bit, and I quickly went over the things I took away from Savage’s biography as a reader (for example, I don’t think her husbands’ names or her jobs unrelated to art contributed to my understanding of the two sculptures Ashley writes about).  I suggested that she go through the paper again and ask herself what each sentence is contributing to the paper, and eliminate those that aren’t necessary.  I had to do something similar with a paper on Emily Dickinson recently, so I told her about that and that even though it was hard to delete the products of her research, it would improve her paper in the end.  We worked on her conclusion in class, because she had ended in biography instead of concluding her overall argument.  I showed her the Writer’s Diet Test as well, (to end class on a light note) but the paragraph she entered scored pretty evenly in the second category (“fit,” I think).  She had an interesting question about using the word “that,” as in “the tools that she needed” vs. “the tools she needed.”  I asked my high school English teacher the same thing once and I think either way is accepted but to include “that” is definitely correct.  If anyone else has more/other insight on this, I thought I would include it here.  I answered some technical questions about the final assignment and look forward to getting both Ashley’s and Qi’s portfolios on Monday.

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One Response to Last Blog! 5/10

  1. Lynne Viti says:

    “the tools that she needed” is correct, but “the tools she needed” is better because it’s less wordy.

    Thanks for these final entries, Lily. All looks fine.

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