Delanie turned in the first draft of her second paper this week. She had better topic and concluding sentences than in her last first draft, and she had a strong conclusion, but could use more specific analysis in each paragraph. She also, anticipating a second draft, didn’t have any “hook” opening statement and used a very simple working thesis. She also had many grammatical/proofreading errors. In my comments, I copied and pasted some explanations from Grammar Girl for repeated issues, and I also copied and pasted Delanie’s sentences into a worksheet to edit in class. We compared her revisions to mine and they were often very close, so she just needs to spend more time recognizing problems in future drafts. For her next first draft, I’ll emphasize that it’s a “first best effort.” For the rest of class, we went over some questions about how to insert dialogue and conversations from the film, and watched a scene together to discuss a stronger analysis in one paragraph of her paper. Her second draft is due Saturday at 8pm.
Estefania turned in the first draft of her speech writing assignment this week. She took the role of Ted Cruz, attacked the Affordable Care Act, and hinted at a bid for the presidency in 2016. I was happy with how she approached the assignment, using his real interviews and speeches as a reference and incorporating much of the advice from the reading I gave her. The speech was well written (I pointed out some awkward word choices and imagery) but her tone was very aggressive and I felt that she wasn’t making a very strong argument or providing a solution to the problem she presented. As we talked at the beginning of class, I felt my feedback wasn’t very constructive to go into a second draft and she felt she had nowhere else to go in the speech either, so we decided that she would write two drafts of a different speech in the next two weeks. On Tuesday, she’ll turn in a draft of a speech written as if she were invited by the mayor of San Antonio to speak about the downtown revitalization going on in her city. I’m glad Estefania was flexible about this and willing to start a new assignment. In class, I had her respond (much like last week) to Queen Elizabeth I’s 1588 Speech at Tilbury to continue forming thesis statements and practicing incorporating textual evidence in academic writing. The speech is short, so good for in-class writing, and I thought it would be fun to look at a different time period and pick out similarities in rhetoric. She’ll continue this next week in class.