Today Kailin and I reviewed her first draft. Tiger Mother Draft 1 We began by talking about how the writing process went for her. She told me that she tried to begin with an outline and then write the essay, but that it made it feel disjointed, so she reverted to free writing to get the sense that her ideas were flowing. I let her know how pleased
I was with her thesis statement, which is of the appropriate scope for the assignment. I think last week’s discussion of thesis statements was helpful to her. I then overviewed what aspects of her essay we want to work on, before we jumped into the revising process. There are three particular areas I want her to focus on:
1. Making phrasing more fluid and language more exact
2. Topic and concluding sentences for each paragraph
3. Using more citations from the text to back up her points, especially in Paragraph 2.
Our biggest breakthrough was the addition of topic and concluding sentences for the body paragraphs. Adding them developed her thinking on the topic and deepened her argument considerably. It was amazing to her and to me how just a bit of revising could make for such a large improvement on the essay. She’ll be submitting a second draft to me next week.