12/6/13:
Saraphin wrote the first draft of her third paper for this week’s meeting. She had clearly done a lot of research and thinking and had written a solid first draft. She told me that she was just happy to have all of her thoughts on paper and was pleasantly surprised to see that the organization made sense when we assessed it. We went through my comments, most of which were asking for clarification, playing devil’s advocate, or indicating minor grammar mistakes. She made quite a few verb tense and plural/singular errors, probably due to her focus on research rather than sentence-level issues. We discussed the offending sentences and she seemed to understand my explanations. She only made two preposition mistakes, so we set a goal of zero preposition mistakes for the final. We also discussed her thesis, which included lots of background info and was somewhat vague. We talked in general about weeding out unnecessary info and looking at evidence critically. I had her edit a printed copy of her paper. She included a few sources, including the primary source of the Geneva Convention. I encouraged her to bring her evidence back to her argument, as she tended to introduce a piece of information and then drop it in without any follow up. I gave her a rough list of ‘final checks’ which I do on my own final drafts. Saraphin left our meeting feeling prepared to write the final draft. Finally, I gave Saraphin a somewhat updated version of the manual assignment.