This week Sophie turned in the third draft of her essay and Cheryl turned in the second draft of hers.
Sophie’s essay is coming together very nicely, and I think we will both be happy with the final draft she’ll turn in the week after spring break. She still had a few awkward sentences that we worked at strengthening during our meeting this week, but these were fixed quickly and easily. She chose to use two pseudo case studies to explore and defend her arguments, and one is much better supported than the other, so we worked at evening out the emphasis she places on each one. We discussed her tendency to use informal phrases or wording in her essay, and why it’s important to avoid such informalities; she seems pretty comfortable with the concept and was able to easily change her writing where I pointed out she needed to be more formal. She expressed excitement about having produced a piece of writing that she feels is well-structured and clearly communicates what she wants to say (this made me happy!).
Cheryl’s second draft still had several paragraphs that were largely unrelated to her thesis, so I had her write a reverse outline, which I think helped a lot. She was able to line up her thesis with the one-sentence summaries of her body paragraphs, and she finally seemed to understand how some of them fit much better with her essay than others. We discussed specific strategies for rewriting these problem paragraphs, and I stressed that she should delete portions of her essay if at any point she feels they don’t strongly support her thesis. I emphasized that I often end up deleting large chunks from early drafts of my writing, which she seemed comforted by. We also spent some time working on her conclusion, which was essentially a two-sentence restatement of her thesis. I found a helpful handout online (http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html) that I had her read. She rewrote parts of the conclusion with a focus on synthesizing rather than summarizing, and we agreed to revisit the conclusion next week when all of her arguments are in place.
After break, I’d like to meet with you for about 15 mintes to talk about Cheryl’s progress. First I will read the midsemester report. Sign up for a time on my Conference signup sheet in Google docs. Thanks1