11/24/13:
Saraphin did research and planning for her third paper for this week’s meeting. She turned in a preliminary thesis and outline as well as some free writing on her chosen subject. She had changed her topic slightly since our last meeting, deciding to focus on weapons instead of social media. We discussed her topic and it changed even more during the course of our meeting. I helped her think about all the ‘threads’ of her argument and asked her many clarifying questions. We ultimately realized that the crux of her argument lay in the US’s current interpretation and use of the Geneva Protocol. We narrowed, clarified, and narrowed again until she felt that the argument was truthful and I felt that it was not too broad. We then discussed organization and she wrote out a rough outline. We discussed the order of her introduction and I illustrated the benefits of logical sentence order. She will be using the Geneva Protocol itself as one of her sources and I encouraged her to use close reading in her paper. She left the meeting with a solid plan, although she still has some research to do. She should have enough time to do more research, as we are not meeting this week due to Thanksgiving. Finally, we went over the final manual assignment very briefly. There were some sections which we haven’t covered in our meetings and I wanted to make sure that she was clear on what they were. We discussed taking some of the sections out of the manual, as she really doesn’t struggle with them (passive voice, conclusions). I will decide and edit the manual if necessary. Saraphin will be writing the first draft of her third paper for our next meeting.