9/29/13:
For this week’s meeting, Saraphin wrote a thoughtletter on the readings for her first paper. She told me that she had struggled with repetition and had left in a few of her repetitious sentences so that we could talk about them together. We talked about these areas (not as many or as grave as she had thought) as well as sentences which could be phrased more concisely or clearly. We also talked about prepositions and a few other grammar rules (commas, semi-colons, misplaced modifiers). These sentence-level issues are not a huge struggle for her, but the few mistakes she does make stand out. We went over my comments on her thoughtletter, most of which asked for clarification/specificity or identified issues she may want to bring into her full paper. She plans on using the readings to take a stance on US intervention in Syria. The thoughtletter summarized the readings and explained why she agreed with the writers, but it did not have a specific argument. While discussing her potential argument, we realized that she agrees whole-heartedly with both writers and that both writers agree with each other (they are all anti-intervention). We discussed possible arguments which would stay true to her beliefs but keep her argument from sounding like a summary of the readings. She suggested that she argue for intervention as practice. She said that her friend disagrees with her and that, after talking to him, she could write the paper against the readings. We entertained this possibility for awhile, but ultimately decided that she should argue for the side that she truly believes. I told her that I was concerned that her paper would suffer if she was arguing for something she disagreed with. I did encourage her, however, to include all of her friend’s arguments as counter-arguments. Her final plan, as we left it, was to write a ‘situation analysis’ paper in which she uses the readings, her friend’s point of view, and her own beliefs to discuss all sides of the argument and ultimately conclude that the US should not intervene. I helped her make a list of most of the arguments for and against intervention and we discussed how she can organize her paper around some of these points. She seemed confident with the plan at the end of the meeting. Finally, I gave her an article I had seen about a sarcasm punctuation mark (http://www.geek.com/news/new-punctuation-mark-created-to-aid-those-who-write-sarcastically-1055331/) just for fun. (My hidden intention was to discourage sarcasm in her paper).