11/14/13:
Saraphin turned in the final draft of her second paper for this week’s meeting. The paper was an improvement on her second draft, particularly in terms of argument clarity. After seeing that Kailin had been confused about her thesis, she rearranged her introduction and clarified certain statements. I had written comments because I felt that there were certain areas needing improvement that she should be aware of before starting her next paper. Although she has certainly improved, she occasionally struggles with concision, word choice, and situations where the two clauses in one sentence don’t match up. There were also some areas where I felt she needed to go a step further or include evidence. We discussed some of my comments and she stated that she understood and/or agreed with the rest. We spent some time discussing her impressions of Kailin’s paper and what she learned from the peer editing experience. She had made quite a few comments on Kailin’s paper and we talked about some of her suggestions. After working on her own topic sentences, she is now a topic sentence stickler. We discussed the extreme differences between the two papers and what she can learn from Kailin’s style. She plans to include more examples and evidence in her next paper. We transitioned into discussion of her third paper. Saraphin had a few different ideas, including writing about US support of Israel and writing about the influence of technology (either weapons, media, or both) on how wars are fought. We brainstormed all of the options, but concluded that she should write about the influence of technology on how wars are fought. She has already done some research and written an annotated bibliography on this topic and she discovered that a Wellesley professor, Professor Goddard, writes and teaches about this topic. She will try to set up a meeting with Professor Goddard and hopes the meeting will help her narrow/focus her topic. Saraphin will be researching, planning, and writing a preliminary introduction and thesis and an outline with bullet points and free writing for next week’s meeting. We discussed making this paper more ‘evidence-based’ than the last two papers, possibly including analysis/criticism of the sources themselves, as her last two papers used only historical facts and events as evidence.