Kailin and I started today’s session by discussing the Peer Editing exercise. She found Saraphin’s essay to be informative and interesting, but she felt that Saraphin could make her argument clearer by distinguishing the relationships between Ronald Reagan/Communism in the past and Neoconservatives/Islam extremism today, and elaborate more on the latter. Kailin also felt that the argument could focus less on background information and be more thesis-driven. Looking at Lily’s journal this week I saw that these comments are some of what Saraphin is in fact working on in her current revision.
Then we went over the first draft of Kailin’s second essay. It seemed to me upon reading it that Kailin had been rushing as she wrote it, as the sentence constructions were sloppy and the ideas not well-developed. It was clearly not representative of Kailin’s best work. Nonetheless, it gave Kailin and me a foundation to build upon during class time. We mainly worked on refining her argument. When I asked Kailin to tell me what the main idea of her paper was out loud, what she said was not present in her thesis, but rather what she was saying in her conclusion. So we worked on getting that deeper argument into the thesis statement, and then have it filter through in each supporting paragraph. Kailin still has a lot of revision to do. But as class time came to a close she appeared undaunted by the task before her and said that now she has a better idea of what she’s arguing, it’s easier to write. We’ll see how the second draft comes out next week!