WRIT 199 TAs

This week was a bit of a setback for both of my students.

Delanie turned in a thought letter on Saturday for the paper she’d been planning since the beginning of the semester, about Orange is the New Black and prison re-entry.  She found some good resources about re-entry and reintegration, but when we got to class, she was having trouble finding enthusiasm for the paper, because she predicted her thesis would be really similar to her last two arguments in 199 (about how people make “home” from whatever system of security, comfort, personal relationships, etc. are available to them) and a lot of what she is studying in her anthro and sociology classes.  We brainstormed different directions she could explore.  She was leaning toward another documentary but I thought the new material in her thought letter had been the fact that Orange is the New Black, although based on a memoir, was written for entertainment.  I suggested a different feature film, show, or even a short story, painting, advertisement, or other piece of pop culture.  She seemed relieved and exciting to open up the paper to this material.  I asked her to email me her final topic by Wednesday and submit a thought letter with a plan for putting all of her research together by Saturday.  She met with a research librarian and chose two Norman Rockwell paintings that depict “a woman in a man’s world.”  We’ll have class on Monday (we didn’t originally plan to) to make up for this week’s class and get back to our schedule.

Estefania requested extensions on her work this week because of a roommate problem, so she wasn’t able to do research for her third paper before our class on Thursday.  We still met and used the time to make a plan for her research.  She’d like to assess the mayor of San Antonio as a possible political candidate and hopes to interview him over the phone as part of her research.  We made a preliminary outline and discussed how she’ll need to have empirical evidence of what personality traits and policies make a “good” or successful president, so she’ll have a standard for her comparison of the mayor’s job performance.  We also went over the format of an annotated bibliography and I asked that she complete an informal one for next week, simply listing her sources and how they will work in her paper.  She also asked to spend some time on an assignment for another class.  She had submitted a research proposal for her Poli Sci class and we reviewed her professor’s comments and worked on making the language of her research questions less vague.  She had to leave a few minutes early to meet with her RD, but we continued working on the Poli Sci questions via email Thursday evening/Friday morning.  Her outline and annotated bibliography are due on Tuesday, assuming her living situation improves!

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.

11/10/13:

Saraphin turned in the second draft of her second paper for this week’s meeting. The draft was an improvement over the first draft in terms of organization and clarity. We looked over my comments (there were fewer than usual in anticipation of Kailin’s peer edit). We discussed moving some parts of different paragraphs and clarifying some of the examples. We tried some fixes on her computer and discussed the pros and cons of different approaches. We also discussed her ideas about the third paper. She had many ideas and I encouraged her not to bite off more than she can chew. Saraphin will be turning in her final draft of paper two for next week’s meeting. Finally, we decided that she will complete a handbook for the final assignment.

Kailin and I started today’s session by discussing the Peer Editing exercise. She found Saraphin’s essay to be informative and interesting, but she felt that Saraphin could make her argument clearer by distinguishing the relationships between Ronald Reagan/Communism in the past and Neoconservatives/Islam extremism today, and elaborate more on the latter. Kailin also felt that the argument could focus less on background information and be more thesis-driven. Looking at Lily’s journal this week I saw that these comments are some of what Saraphin is in fact working on in her current revision.

Then we went over the first draft of Kailin’s second essay. It seemed to me upon reading it that Kailin had been rushing as she wrote it, as the sentence constructions were sloppy and the ideas not well-developed. It was clearly not representative of Kailin’s best work. Nonetheless, it gave Kailin and me a foundation to build upon during class time. We mainly worked on refining her argument. When I asked Kailin to tell me what the main idea of her paper was out loud, what she said was not present in her thesis, but rather what she was saying in her conclusion. So we worked on getting that deeper argument into the thesis statement, and then have it filter through in each supporting paragraph. Kailin still has a lot of revision to do. But as class time came to a close she appeared undaunted by the task before her and said that now she has a better idea of what she’s arguing, it’s easier to write. We’ll see how the second draft comes out next week!

Delanie turned in the second draft of her second paper this week.  Many of her sentence-level issues, including some we had specifically pulled out to work on last week, remained and she hadn’t carefully proofread the sections of analysis she added.  I only made comments on structural and thematic issues and wrote in my letter and talked with her at the beginning of class about the draft process and the importance of taking as large a step forward as possible with each set of edits.  In class, I shared “Writer’s Diet test” website with her, which showed she had two many nouns and “be” verbs.  I explained how both were related to the passive voice we had talked about in earlier weeks, and asked her to edit the paragraph we ran through the website.  She usually writes in class by hand, so we didn’t run it through the test again but I thought it improved significantly and quickly during class.  I think (and she said) that a simple tool like the test is a good starting place for her editing, because she’s consistently been able to correct her sentence-level errors once I point them out, but has some trouble knowing where to start the editing process.  We turned to her introduction and went through it together, editing the sentences that I had highlighted to be cut down or combined.  She did well again, and I said that this intensive process should take place for every paragraph of her final draft.  We briefly discussed some places to dive into deeper analysis, and her final draft is due on Saturday night.

At the start of class with Estefania, we talked about the first draft of her new speech assignment, this time about the revitalization of San Antonio’s downtown.  I suggested that her second draft be more of an addition process than an editing process, incorporating more concrete images to the great emotional appeal she made to the city’s pride and culture, and a “call to action” to answer the audience’s question of what they should do after hearing her speak.  Next, I asked about my midterm report and any feedback she had as we moved into the last weeks of the course.  She brought up her own time management, so for her final paper, we may break down the draft process even further during the week.  I said that Writ 125 and 199 are designed to show students the benefits of multiple drafts, although this is sometimes hard to replicate in other courses.  I talked about my own writing process as well, and how much can be accomplished through thinking about a paper even before starting to write (I like to think about an 80% thinking, 20% writing time management breakdown).  She brought up Professor Johnson’s cover letter assignments in 125 that she had misinterpreted at the time, but said she now understood what she should have written when asked about her thought process for each assignment.  She also brought up some feedback she’d gotten from her other professors.  She had pulled good quotes but hadn’t explained them thoroughly in one paper, and in another her professor pointed out run-on sentences and paragraphs that were too long.  During next class, we’re going to look closely at Emily Dickinson’s “If I can stop one heart from breaking,” to force a close analysis.  Estefania felt like she was wasting a limited word count explaining quotes, but I told her to think instead about making it “worth it” to include the quote and explaining it so that it would further her argument as much as possible.  For next week, she’ll turn in the second draft of her speech and I gave her a “thinking assignment” – just to think about the poem, why she likes it, and how she might write about it in class.  I was glad we had a long discussion about some of these more technical issues that have been missing in the less conventional speechwriting assignment.

1/3/13:

Saraphin turned in her annotated bibliography for paper three and her first draft of paper two for this week’s meeting. Her annotated bibliography was carefully written and will be a solid start to paper three. We went through my comments on her first draft of paper two. I did not hold back with my comments this week, as she appreciates constructive criticism and has been able to make many changes to previous papers. Her argument is controversial and gutsy (She is essentially arguing, based on evidence from a BBC documentary, that Neoconservatives are similar to Muslim Extremists in, among other things, their use of fear to unite the masses and to spread their ideologies.), so I played Devil’s Advocate and helped her strengthen her argument. We also worked on clarification, cutting down the number of clauses in each sentence, and word choice. Saraphin’s introduction included a lot of information which was necessary but somewhat jumbled. We worked on re-ordering the introduction. Saraphin’s argument was very clear throughout, but her first few topic sentences lacked the tension in the thesis. We worked on adjusting the topic sentences and the paragraphs they represented to directly follow the argument in her thesis. She discovered that moving her paragraphs around (and merging two of them) helped strengthen her argument. As she is comparing two groups, we discussed different ways to organize comparison essays. At the end of the meeting, she seemed confident with her new construction. She was slightly concerned that her argument was similar to that of the documentary, but she feels that her argument takes the message in the documentary slightly further. I told her that she cannot always be completely original and that she should be true to what she feels, but that if she feels that she is simply spitting back the facts in the documentary, we should discuss adjusting her paper. However, she did not feel this way. We also discussed different ways to cite the documentary. She will be sharing her second draft with Kailin.

Delanie turned in the first draft of her second paper this week.  She had better topic and concluding sentences than in her last first draft, and she had a strong conclusion, but could use more specific analysis in each paragraph.  She also, anticipating a second draft, didn’t have any “hook” opening statement and used a very simple working thesis.  She also had many grammatical/proofreading errors.  In my comments, I copied and pasted some explanations from Grammar Girl for repeated issues, and I also copied and pasted Delanie’s sentences into a worksheet to edit in class.  We compared her revisions to mine and they were often very close, so she just needs to spend more time recognizing problems in future drafts.  For her next first draft, I’ll emphasize that it’s a “first best effort.”  For the rest of class, we went over some questions about how to insert dialogue and conversations from the film, and watched a scene together to discuss a stronger analysis in one paragraph of her paper.  Her second draft is due Saturday at 8pm.

Estefania turned in the first draft of her speech writing assignment this week.  She took the role of Ted Cruz, attacked the Affordable Care Act, and hinted at a bid for the presidency in 2016.  I was happy with how she approached the assignment, using his real interviews and speeches as a reference and incorporating much of the advice from the reading I gave her.  The speech was well written (I pointed out some awkward word choices and imagery) but her tone was very aggressive and I felt that she wasn’t making a very strong argument or providing a solution to the problem she presented.  As we talked at the beginning of class, I felt my feedback wasn’t very constructive to go into a second draft and she felt she had nowhere else to go in the speech either, so we decided that she would write two drafts of a different speech in the next two weeks.  On Tuesday, she’ll turn in a draft of a speech written as if she were invited by the mayor of San Antonio to speak about the downtown revitalization going on in her city.  I’m glad Estefania was flexible about this and willing to start a new assignment.  In class, I had her respond (much like last week) to Queen Elizabeth I’s 1588 Speech at Tilbury to continue forming thesis statements and practicing incorporating textual evidence in academic writing.  The speech is short, so good for in-class writing, and I thought it would be fun to look at a different time period and pick out similarities in rhetoric.  She’ll continue this next week in class.

Today Kailin and I reviewed the outline of her second essay. Kailin had a lot of midterms and papers due this week, and wasn’t sure where she wanted to go with this essay, so I told her doing an outline would be acceptable. It actually ended up being great because I was able to help her develop her argument and ideas further before she actually went to the trouble of writing the essay through. And it was good because it required her to map out and structure her ideas in advance, so I predict rambling will not be an issue for this paper.

I was in fact quite impressed with the outline because Kailin had constructed an argument of her own, rather than just piggy-backing off the ideas of the readings. Furthermore, she took it upon herself to find some other sources to incorporate in and back up the argument she wanted to make.

We worked on fine-tuning her thesis statement from something that was initially very broad and general, to something more specific and refined. I had also noticed the end of each proposed paragraph lacked concluding ideas to deepen her argument, so we talked about how she can explicitly bridge the specific ideas presented in the paragraphs to her overall point. This was a feature Kailin’s first essay initially lacked too, but I think the draft next week will show improvement in this regard.