Haley, 3/2/13:
Haley wrote the second draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. She had emailed me a draft on the day the paper was due and stated that she needed to do more work on it, but had been very busy. I gave her a slight extension because I wanted her to feel that the draft was her best effort, but I reminded her that future deadlines are firm. Her draft was better, in my opinion, than she thought it was. However, she continues to struggle with keeping her argument in the forefront of the paper, as well as with topic and transition sentences. (We had not yet had a chance to discuss these more fundamental skills in previous meetings because I had decided to focus first on developing a solid argument.) We discussed my comments, focusing particularly on one paragraph and the ways in which she can introduce detailed scientific material so that the reader understands its link to her argument. I suggested that she use the “In order to understand xyz, we must first…” tactic and she wrote multiple possible sentences. Her first attempts were very literal and did not quite reflect what she wanted to argue. I reminded her to keep both her reader’s knowledge as well as the paragraph’s larger purpose in mind. Although her ideal reader is familiar with general neuroscience terms, I decided to encourage her to write for the “lay reader” in order to encourage her to spell out her thinking and to think of the larger picture. Once she has done this more successfully, I plan on showing her that clearer writing is also necessary if one is writing for an informed audience. After we had discussed most of my comments, I printed out the rubric and we discussed how her paper fills the requirements. I asked her what her main concerns were and she stated that she is worried that her paper doesn’t contain much analysis. She is working with material which is fairly sparse, making concrete analysis difficult. We looked at some examples in her paper and I discussed ways in which she can include more analysis, which were, essentially, the same as bringing her reader back to her argument, which I had already been encouraging her to do. I also pointed out that she includes an unspecified “this” rather often. We discussed the importance of specifying “this” and ways in which she can fix this problem. Finally, she asked whether she should have somebody without a neuroscience background read the paper. I thought this was a good idea, as I am losing my status as an uninformed reader as I read her many drafts. Haley will submit a third draft for next week’s meeting. She was relieved that she has one more draft before the final one, but also liked my idea that I bring different writing exercises for her to do during our next meeting so that she can work on paper-related skills without getting “papered-out.”
Maud, 3/2/13:
Maud wrote the first draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. Maud’s paper was nearly clear of sentence level issues, a great improvement over her first thoughtletter (leading me to believe that she is a fast learner and has been working hard on sentence-level problems). I could not find her thesis when I commented on the paper, so was prepared to work on theses with her, but in the meeting she pointed the thesis out to me: it was buried deep within the introduction. Therefore, we discussed the importance of thesis-placement and worked on restructuring the introduction so that the thesis was more obvious. She asked where and how she should introduce the authors and we discussed ways in which she could smoothly incorporate their introductions with her argument. She had disagreed with one of the authors, but she did not include this disagreement in the paper. We discussed how this disagreement could help her argument and she decided to incorporate it into her introduction of the two authors. She chose the order: author she agreed with, author she didn’t agree with, her argument. I illustrated how it would be smoother to introduce the author she didn’t agree with first (I used the sandwich analogy- in this case ABA would be more confusing than BAA), and she found this explanation very helpful. We then went through every one of my comments, most of which were asking for clarification, specification or argument-driven analysis. One of her introductory paragraphs was very broad and included no sources. She stated that the facts in the paragraph were taken from her own experiences and we discussed whether it would be clearer and stronger if she bring herself and her experiences into the paper more explicitly. She stated that she has often wondered whether she should include herself in a paper and was unsure of how to make it work. She will try to include herself in next week’s draft, I will give her feedback, and she will decide whether it helps or impedes her paper. I also noticed that there were a few things she had written about in her thoughtletter but had left out of her paper. She stated that she planned to add some of these things and we discussed where she could put them. I also emphasized the importance of subject sentences and transitions, but we will only be able to work on these problems once she has solidified her structure and argument. Finally, she said something which made me think that she was going to simply address my comments and leave the paper at that, so I told her that my comments do not necessarily address everything and that she should still be reading the paper to herself. I wrote very many comments this week, which, on reflection, could have been overwhelming and could have served as a crutch. I will, therefore, reign in my comments on her next draft. Maud will be writing her second draft for next week.