10/20/13:
Saraphin wrote the final draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. The final draft was a great improvement over the first and second, particularly in terms of topic sentences and argument clarity. I wrote her a formal letter discussing the paper and she agreed with my points. She saw many areas of improvement and seems confident going into the next paper. Although I had written some comments on her final draft, we both felt that it was time to move on and that she could look at these comments later if she decides to edit the paper for a final portfolio. We discussed the plan for the next paper and she seems prepared. She will be writing about a political documentary and we discussed different ways she could approach this paper. I brought a prize-winning sociology paper for Saraphin to read. She has been working on many aspects of her own writing and I thought it would be helpful for her to see how another author approaches these same aspects of writing. She ended up disagreeing with many of the author’s choices, particularly around topic sentences and argument clarity, two of the areas in which she struggled most. We discussed ways the author could improve and I could tell that she had absorbed quite a bit from our discussions about her own writing. For next week, Saraphin will be watching the documentary, writing a thoughtletter on it, and working on an annotated bibliography for paper 3. As our meeting was pushed up due to Fall Break and she has a shorter amount of time to complete these assignments (and because she seemed so prepared and I didn’t feel there was anything we absolutely had to work on), I let her go a bit early so that she could watch the documentary.