10/13/13:
Saraphin turned in the second draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. She had originally planned to make it the final draft , but, after reading my comments, decided to keep it as the second draft. She will turn in the final draft for next week’s meeting. The paper was much improved since the first draft. She had updated the thesis and introduction to more truly reflect her argument and she had worked on transitions and explanations throughout the paper. Her sentences were clearer and less vague. I had written her a short letter outlining what I thought were the three main areas needing the most improvement and she agreed that these were her weakest areas. We first discussed matching the order of the introduction to the order of the paragraphs and fitting her now five sentence thesis into one sentence. We then discussed cutting out a section of the paper which seemed tangential and unnecessary. Finally, we discussed her topic sentences. We tried the reverse outline exercise and went topic sentence by topic sentence. She was quite receptive and her resulting topic sentences were much clearer and more argument driven. Saraphin had requested more preposition exercises because she continues to struggle with them (particularly when to use “of” vs. “from,” “to,” “on,” “about,” etc.). I gave her two links which she will look at on her own: a silly preposition game (http://www.eslgamesplus.com/verbs-followed-by-prepositions-esl-grammar-activity-online/) and a list of words and prepositions which almost always go together (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/prepositions.htm). I thought that she struggled most with preposition use in academic papers (she has no trouble understanding the simple prepositions which most of the online activities cover), so I took all the prepositions out of one of my college paper introductions and had her fill them in. She found the activity helpful and we discussed which prepositions are interchangeable and which ones change meaning. It is hard to find an exercise which targets her specific difficulties, so we decided to continue to look at her use of prepositions in her own papers. She may highlight prepositions she is unsure about so that we can discuss them together.