Today Kailin and I reviewed the outline of her second essay. Kailin had a lot of midterms and papers due this week, and wasn’t sure where she wanted to go with this essay, so I told her doing an outline would be acceptable. It actually ended up being great because I was able to help her develop her argument and ideas further before she actually went to the trouble of writing the essay through. And it was good because it required her to map out and structure her ideas in advance, so I predict rambling will not be an issue for this paper.
I was in fact quite impressed with the outline because Kailin had constructed an argument of her own, rather than just piggy-backing off the ideas of the readings. Furthermore, she took it upon herself to find some other sources to incorporate in and back up the argument she wanted to make.
We worked on fine-tuning her thesis statement from something that was initially very broad and general, to something more specific and refined. I had also noticed the end of each proposed paragraph lacked concluding ideas to deepen her argument, so we talked about how she can explicitly bridge the specific ideas presented in the paragraphs to her overall point. This was a feature Kailin’s first essay initially lacked too, but I think the draft next week will show improvement in this regard.