10/6/13:
Saraphin wrote the first draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. She was a little late to our meeting due to being held up at a Help Room for another class. We discussed changing the time of our meetings so that she doesn’t have to rush/be late. She will let me know by email if she thinks a time change will help. We spent the majority of the time looking at my comments and discussing her first draft. Saraphin wondered whether it was okay that she had added a few more sources and whether she had cited them correctly. We discussed ‘common knowledge’ and when a citation is necessary. She may use footnotes in the final draft. I thought that she did a nice job of incorporating her many sources while still maintaining her own unique argument. It was clear that she had put a lot of work into this paper. She said that her biggest struggle was organization, but that she was ultimately happy with the order of her paragraphs. After reading it for the first time, I thought that her organization was unclear and confusing. Her thesis statement seemed different than her actual argument, she didn’t have true topic sentences, and the counter-argument paragraphs were not identified as such. We started the ‘writing the main point of the paragraph in the margins’ exercise and spent some time revising her topic sentences and transitions. We discussed changing the order of her paragraphs, but I stopped the exercise when I realized that her out-dated thesis was the root of the problem. I helped her see the shortcomings in her thesis and she rewrote it to include the counter-argument (using an ‘although xyz, …’ construction). I used a three story thesis handout to help her revise. After seeing her revised thesis, we decided that her paragraph order could remain the same. We also discussed some places which would benefit from elaboration and specificity. Saraphin seemed confident about writing the second draft and said that she may turn it into the final draft. I thought that she could write the final draft for next week and told her that she could start the second paper a week early or do another short writing assignment. Finally, Saraphin requested a preposition activity for next week. I may make one up based on her particular struggles with prepositions. Depending on the quality of her final draft, I may also discuss her “voice” in the paper.