This week Cheryl submitted the final draft of her second essay, while Sophie submitted an annotated bibliography in preparation for her final research essay.
Cheryl’s final draft was well-organized, interesting, and did a good job of incorporating her two chosen sources. She successfully incorporated many of the comments and edits I made on her previous two drafts. However, the final draft still contained multiple mistakes, some of which I’d highlighted before. Because I don’t directly comment on final drafts, I wrote her a letter indicated complimenting her on the progress she’d made while also indicating the continued presence of mistakes in her essay.
During our meeting Cheryl and I discussed how to approach her research essay. She’s interested in learning about men’s fashion magazines, and decided she’d like to explore either how men or women are portrayed in fashion advertisements in men’s magazines. She had never used Google scholar or any of the library search databases, so we spent some time going over how to use them and evaluating which sources would best contribute to her topic. We also discussed her final portfolio.
Sophie’s annotated bibliography did not fulfill the assignment requirements I’d laid out — to select 4-6 sources, identify the authors’ main arguments and explain how each source would contribute to her essay — but I was pleased to see that she had identified five articles that should yield good info. During our meeting I had her write an introduction, in which she synthesized a lot of the background info she’d been reading and developed a thesis that should guide her well in her editing process. (She said she didn’t find the outline she completed for her last essay to be helpful, so I didn’t force her to create one for this essay.) As with Cheryl, we discussed her final portfolio assignment.
For both Cheryl and Sophie, the final portfolio will include
- 2 polished essays
- 2 polished short writing assignments
- a writer’s manual, which will include examples and explanations of
- a good and poor thesis
- a good and poor intro paragraph
- a good and poor transition
- a well-introduced and -incorporated quote, and a poorly introduced and incorporated quote
- a good and poor conclusion
Eka submitted her first draft of the research paper last week and it was a bit of a mess. She hopes to write a political biography of Bo Xiaobo and analyze how his political life and ultimate downfall relates to corruption in China and assess what his story reveals about the CCP. But her thesis was very unclear and her details were very disorganized. We spend all of the 70 minutes going through the facts she had included to determine the most interesting and relevant details. I also highlighted areas where she can include more analysis rather than just reciting facts about his life. We especially emphasized the relationships between Bo and his father and with his security guard, who turned him into authorities at the American embassy which led to his dismissal from his government post. This week she is working to restructure her paper and elaborate on areas discussed.
Violet and I discussed her final draft during the last session and I had her make a list of things to remember when writing her final paper. We then began to look at the sources that she has collected for her outline and I showed her additional databases to use in her research. She has decided to focus on racial minorities in China and the US and to do a comparison between the legal rights granted. She also plans to read through relevant sections of the human rights reports published by the US and China for an interesting analysis. I have strongly tried to encourage her to specify a very small minority – women, religious groups, a particular culture – but so far she has not taken my advice. I will be sure to reiterate this tomorrow because right now, her topic is too broad and unspecified.
I have given both students their final assignments for the writers manual and I have a feeling I will be meeting with both of them during reading period to go over their final drafts and to help them organize for the portfolio.