Delanie turned in the second draft of her second paper this week. Many of her sentence-level issues, including some we had specifically pulled out to work on last week, remained and she hadn’t carefully proofread the sections of analysis she added. I only made comments on structural and thematic issues and wrote in my letter and talked with her at the beginning of class about the draft process and the importance of taking as large a step forward as possible with each set of edits. In class, I shared “Writer’s Diet test” website with her, which showed she had two many nouns and “be” verbs. I explained how both were related to the passive voice we had talked about in earlier weeks, and asked her to edit the paragraph we ran through the website. She usually writes in class by hand, so we didn’t run it through the test again but I thought it improved significantly and quickly during class. I think (and she said) that a simple tool like the test is a good starting place for her editing, because she’s consistently been able to correct her sentence-level errors once I point them out, but has some trouble knowing where to start the editing process. We turned to her introduction and went through it together, editing the sentences that I had highlighted to be cut down or combined. She did well again, and I said that this intensive process should take place for every paragraph of her final draft. We briefly discussed some places to dive into deeper analysis, and her final draft is due on Saturday night.
At the start of class with Estefania, we talked about the first draft of her new speech assignment, this time about the revitalization of San Antonio’s downtown. I suggested that her second draft be more of an addition process than an editing process, incorporating more concrete images to the great emotional appeal she made to the city’s pride and culture, and a “call to action” to answer the audience’s question of what they should do after hearing her speak. Next, I asked about my midterm report and any feedback she had as we moved into the last weeks of the course. She brought up her own time management, so for her final paper, we may break down the draft process even further during the week. I said that Writ 125 and 199 are designed to show students the benefits of multiple drafts, although this is sometimes hard to replicate in other courses. I talked about my own writing process as well, and how much can be accomplished through thinking about a paper even before starting to write (I like to think about an 80% thinking, 20% writing time management breakdown). She brought up Professor Johnson’s cover letter assignments in 125 that she had misinterpreted at the time, but said she now understood what she should have written when asked about her thought process for each assignment. She also brought up some feedback she’d gotten from her other professors. She had pulled good quotes but hadn’t explained them thoroughly in one paper, and in another her professor pointed out run-on sentences and paragraphs that were too long. During next class, we’re going to look closely at Emily Dickinson’s “If I can stop one heart from breaking,” to force a close analysis. Estefania felt like she was wasting a limited word count explaining quotes, but I told her to think instead about making it “worth it” to include the quote and explaining it so that it would further her argument as much as possible. For next week, she’ll turn in the second draft of her speech and I gave her a “thinking assignment” – just to think about the poem, why she likes it, and how she might write about it in class. I was glad we had a long discussion about some of these more technical issues that have been missing in the less conventional speechwriting assignment.