1/3/13:
Saraphin turned in her annotated bibliography for paper three and her first draft of paper two for this week’s meeting. Her annotated bibliography was carefully written and will be a solid start to paper three. We went through my comments on her first draft of paper two. I did not hold back with my comments this week, as she appreciates constructive criticism and has been able to make many changes to previous papers. Her argument is controversial and gutsy (She is essentially arguing, based on evidence from a BBC documentary, that Neoconservatives are similar to Muslim Extremists in, among other things, their use of fear to unite the masses and to spread their ideologies.), so I played Devil’s Advocate and helped her strengthen her argument. We also worked on clarification, cutting down the number of clauses in each sentence, and word choice. Saraphin’s introduction included a lot of information which was necessary but somewhat jumbled. We worked on re-ordering the introduction. Saraphin’s argument was very clear throughout, but her first few topic sentences lacked the tension in the thesis. We worked on adjusting the topic sentences and the paragraphs they represented to directly follow the argument in her thesis. She discovered that moving her paragraphs around (and merging two of them) helped strengthen her argument. As she is comparing two groups, we discussed different ways to organize comparison essays. At the end of the meeting, she seemed confident with her new construction. She was slightly concerned that her argument was similar to that of the documentary, but she feels that her argument takes the message in the documentary slightly further. I told her that she cannot always be completely original and that she should be true to what she feels, but that if she feels that she is simply spitting back the facts in the documentary, we should discuss adjusting her paper. However, she did not feel this way. We also discussed different ways to cite the documentary. She will be sharing her second draft with Kailin.