WRIT 199 TAs

My classes with Delanie and Estefania were pretty similar this week.  Since Delanie is working on representations of home in film, I showed her a memorable clip from Treme (here, if anyone’s interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt38De7v08k) and asked her to watch it a few times and analyze the scene in a formal paragraph, as if it were a body paragraph in a longer essay.  I pointed out a few cinematography-type things to look for that I remember neglecting when I first wrote about film.  She made really interesting observations in her paragraph and our discussion, but could have used stronger topic and concluding sentences to speak to an overall “thesis” about the scene.  She also included some unnecessary summary.  For homework, she’s choosing another scene to complete the same assignment and practice writing about film.

I had to spend a little more time in my meeting with Estefania talking about Credit/Non and finalizing her syllabus.  Then, I had her re-read an article she’d sent me, “San Antonio Rose” by Mimi Swartz, and analyze the author’s language in a response paragraph.  I tried to point to the ways language can inspire action/change since our course is (at least in part) about politics.  On her assignment sheet, I used some of the definitions of “rhetoric” on this website that Prof. Wood sent me via email (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/).  She did well but also was missing any sort of connecting theme in her observations, which we talked about, and then I asked her to do the same assignment using a chapter from Eleanor Roosevelt’s book You Learn By Living, which I think has some really powerful writing in it.

9/15/13:

Saraphin read the Alex Johnson reading and wrote a self assessment of herself as a writer for homework. She said that the reading resonated with her and that it helped her reflect on herself as a writer. The self assessment was well written and insightful. We spent the majority of the meeting discussing matters she had brought up in the assessment. Although she listed many different writing struggles, I sensed two recurring themes: she has more trouble writing when she is not excited by the topic or cannot find “her voice” or her true opinion on a topic and her perfectionism makes her writing stilted and causes her to procrastinate. I had planned to show her a paper which had won a Wellesley writing award and to discuss how the writer inserts her “voice,” but I believe that her trouble finding her voice is rooted in her perfectionism and her difficulty looking at all sides of an argument, so I gave her a free writing exercise. I asked her to write about her opinion on US intervention in Syria. She wrote her thoughts down in bullet points and tried to ignore incorrectly spelled words and unconfirmed facts (she uses fact checking as a form of procrastination). She wrote furiously for a good amount of time and seemed to enjoy the assignment. She stated that it felt freeing and that she would free write before starting all future papers. We discussed how this practice helped her see all sides of the situation and to find her own argument. I helped her find a preliminary thesis. We discussed the fact that the thesis didn’t need to be completely for or against US intervention, but could be somewhere in between. We then discussed ways in which she could organize the paper. She wrote an outline and thought about transitions and topics for each paragraph. The resulting outline would be a very solid start to a paper. Finally, Saraphin stated in the assessment that she had some trouble with grammar, concision, and repetition. Her self assessment was nearly spotless in terms of grammar and was fairly concise and not repetitious. She said that she found creative autobiographical writing came easily to her and that she only struggled with grammar and concision when she was trying to write “college-y” papers. For example, she stated that she repeats things when her argument is weak. I told her that I would keep an eye out for grammar and concision in her future papers, but we agreed that if she continues to practice free writing and finds a multi-faceted argument, she may not have as much trouble with grammar and concision. However, I had brought a Purdue OWL handout on comma use which I thought wouldn’t hurt. We looked at it and it sparked discussion about different comma, semi-colon, and hyphen rules. Due to Saraphin’s interest in finding her voice, I assigned readings from Sin Boldly and Bird by Bird which focus on finding one’s voice and on perfectionism. One reading from Sin Boldly discourages writing with sarcasm because it can confuse readers. Saraphin had stated that she wants to write with “wit and sarcasm,” so I will be interested to hear what she thinks about the reading. Saraphin will be writing a 2-page thoughtletter for next week. I gave her the option to write about her response to the readings or to write about a current political issue and practice free writing and finding her opinion and voice. She will be writing about the Boston Marathon and is very excited about the assignment.

In our conversations and in her first assignment (a letter to me), Kailin identified coming up with examples and analyzing them as her biggest strength as a writer. From her writing samples I can see that mechanically/grammatically she is a strong writer.

The primary skill she wants to work on this semester is coming up with effective theses. She explained that oftentimes she is overwhelmed by all the ideas she wants to address, but she doesn’t know how to formulate a thesis that suits them. In addition, she expressed that she doesn’t know how to handle introductions and conclusions, so that is definitely something else we’ll work on.

Today in class I introduced the syllabus (KHo_Syllabus) to Kailin, which includes going through the entire writing process (thought letter > first > second > final draft) for two papers, culminating with a final research paper at the end. Kailin and I are both very excited about the class topic, The Asian American Experience. We are starting off by taking a critical look at the “Tiger Mom” controversy that has broken out in recent years, followed by some excerpts from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Today we discussed the importance of using active reading techniques such as underlining and writing notes in the margins (Active Reading) and then looked over the articles themselves: one pro-Tiger Mom, one anti-, a critical perspective, and also a research study that was done recently about the phenomenon. Next we talked about how Kailin should approach her first thought letter (Thought Letters), which is due next week.

I had my first meetings with Estefania Lamas and Delanie Goerig this week.

My class time with Estefania is 3:00 to 4:10 on Thursdays in the reading room in the Multifaith Center, but there’s a small chance we’ll need to change it.  Estefania decided to focus the course on her hometown, San Antonio, Texas, and the social, economic, political, etc. changes going on there (some initiatives she mentioned are SA2020 and CafeCollege).  She said that ideally, she could bring her work in our class back home and work as an intern in the City’s planning and development office or someday run for mayor of the city.  She wanted her longer research paper to explore the city’s history, but also expressed interest in some less conventional types of writing like speeches and grant proposals.  I’d like to work these in wherever possible.  I’m very excited about her topic and her goal of working toward a position in city government, and my first impression is that she’d be very successful.

Some concerns we discussed are: she suffered a concussion last spring and considers herself 90-95% recovered but sometimes she makes spelling and grammar mistakes that used to be automatic for her.  She asked me to be very diligent in pointing them out and correcting them.  We also, because she’s so personally invested in her topic, discussed the need to keep the focus of the course on writing, and prevent it from becoming a sort of independent study.

My class time with Delanie is 2:50 to 4:00 in the Classics library in Founders.  She would like to focus on representations of home in film (TV shows, documentaries, movies).  I asked her to put together a list of the films she’d like to look at and email me by Sunday so I can put them on the syllabus.  She declared the course credit/non during our meeting.  She also asked about using the course to fulfill her arts/film/music distribution requirement (which I think would be great, and I’ll ask about in our meeting on Wednesday, Lynne).

I gave both students a 2-page “personal writing history” assignment for next week along with sending me info about their readings.

Haley, 5/10/13:

Haley turned in the final draft of her third paper for this week’s meeting. She had changed it drastically to improve her structure and flow and, in doing so, had added many repetitive or awkward sentences. She stated that she had been a bit short on time and had had to turn it in before she was completely satisfied with it. I told her that she could revise it as part of her final project, but made it clear that the revision would not count as the final version of Paper 3. She was relieved to be able to revise it. I had highlighted some of the awkward sentences and we spent some time going over them. She understood the problems and started to notice problematic sentences that I hadn’t highlighted. We discussed repetitiveness in general and the fact that it is a fairly easy problem to fix. I told her that I believe she is simply going through a waxing phase- I always think of my writing as waxing and waning (my sentences are too short and choppy, so I fluff them up, but then they get too repetitive and “fluffy,” so I have to cut them down again.) She just has to work to find a happy medium. We discussed her final project. She didn’t have too many questions about it and felt confident with it once she learned that her answers do not have to be as long as she thought (I showed her the handbook example on google docs- not long enough that she could read the answers, but just so that she could get a more concrete idea of what is expected of her.). Finally, she asked me for general feedback about her writing and for advice if she decides to take an English class in the future. We discussed the many ways in which she has improved and she stated that she is now more confident with her writing.

Maud, 5/10/13:

Maud turned in the final draft of Paper 3 for this week’s meeting. The paper had a solid argument and organization and contained very few grammatical errors. I was quite impressed with it and told her so. She plans to revise it for her final project and I supported her in this decision because I think that she can turn it from a good paper into a great paper. Her other papers have been edited many times and would give her less room to work. We discussed some of the improvements she can make to her third paper, the most important of which is changing the thesis to reflect the argument in the rest of the paper (it is too general at the moment). We also discussed comma use and some other sentence level issues. Maud will also revise two of her thoughtletters for the final project. We looked at both of these and discussed ways she can improve them. She pointed out most of the possible improvements herself. She stated that she was embarrassed by the amount of grammatical errors in the thoughtletters and we discussed the many ways she has improved since the beginning of the semester. We also spent some time discussing her cover letter and the appropriate format for cover letters. She had stated in the past that Professor Johnson gave her a document on cover letters. I have emailed Professor Johnson and will post the document if she sends it to me. Finally, Maud asked me for advice on writing papers for an English class she plans to take next semester.

On Monday, Qi and I reviewed her final research paper draft.  It had very few errors overall.  We reviewed comma usage to offset additional information because she was inconsistent with her punctuation (and I wanted to spend some time on this because I had just eliminated in from her final assignment thinking it was unnecessary).  One of her only remaining unclear statements was her thesis statement, but we quickly resolved the issue and made her sentence more concise.  Otherwise, she had some lingering problems with tense and word choice.  I showed her the Writer’s Diet Test (from Professor Viti) as an interesting tool to use before editing a draft.  Her writing scored well besides her nouns, which “needed toning.”  I pointed out that this may be because of her tendency to use the passive voice (which is sometimes hard to avoid in Econ) and that she could try to rework nouns, implementation, into verbs, like implement.  This was a nice, unexpected connection to previous material!  We went over her questions about the final and the model responses.  She asked what I thought of her writing by the end of the course, and I wish I had prepared a better answer beforehand, but I told her that her organization and arguments in the final paper unfolded really well, and pulled up one of her old papers, where she hadn’t given the reader enough help to fully follow the description of economic causes/effects.  Her sentences are much clearer too as a result of the draft process and proofreading, and I reiterated the value of thesis statements that put forward a strong, critical argument.

Ashley turned in the final draft of her paper for class on Tuesday as well.  Her sculpture analysis sections had definitely improved from her first draft.  Her biography sections still overwhelmed her analysis a bit, and I quickly went over the things I took away from Savage’s biography as a reader (for example, I don’t think her husbands’ names or her jobs unrelated to art contributed to my understanding of the two sculptures Ashley writes about).  I suggested that she go through the paper again and ask herself what each sentence is contributing to the paper, and eliminate those that aren’t necessary.  I had to do something similar with a paper on Emily Dickinson recently, so I told her about that and that even though it was hard to delete the products of her research, it would improve her paper in the end.  We worked on her conclusion in class, because she had ended in biography instead of concluding her overall argument.  I showed her the Writer’s Diet Test as well, (to end class on a light note) but the paragraph she entered scored pretty evenly in the second category (“fit,” I think).  She had an interesting question about using the word “that,” as in “the tools that she needed” vs. “the tools she needed.”  I asked my high school English teacher the same thing once and I think either way is accepted but to include “that” is definitely correct.  If anyone else has more/other insight on this, I thought I would include it here.  I answered some technical questions about the final assignment and look forward to getting both Ashley’s and Qi’s portfolios on Monday.

Today Chimuanya and I worked on the thought letter and three essays that she will submit for her final portfolio. I had highlighted sentences that contained confusing phrasing. I could tell the wording was poorly phrased because Chimuanya had not fully worked out her ideas and thought about what she was really trying to say. So in order to restructure the sentences, she had to develop her thinking. It was challenging for her to go past the superficiality of the words and get at the true meaning of what she wished to express to the reader. At several times I had her stop looking at the sentence and instead look at me and just talk to me about the idea she was trying to get across. Talking through it helped her get at her essential meaning. At the end of the session, I felt all four pieces of writing were stronger. Because her ideas are now more developed, her arguments are more complex and nuanced–and furthermore explained in a clear manner.

This week Sophie turned in a complete first draft of her research essay, while Cheryl turned in an annotated bibliography. These were our last meetings!

I was impressed by Sophie’s draft. She has done a lot of research, and did a good job of organizing the information in a logical way. She used almost no quotes, instead choosing to paraphrase her sources. The info was not cited well, so we spent some time during our meeting reviewing MLA. We also adjusted her introductory paragraph in order to introduce topic in broader terms.

Cheryl’s annotated bibliography was fairly thorough. Although the annotated bibliography failed to concretely connect each source to her proposed thesis, as the assignment required, I was glad to see that she had found some good literature. During our meeting we discussed her thesis and narrowed it a bit. She wanted a break from her research paper, so I had her write a final reflection about how she thinks her writing has improved throughout the semester. She reflected that she has grown more confident and sharpened many of her skills. She mentioned that the portfolio assignment was a bit overwhelming, but after reviewing its elements I decided it should be easy enough to finish, especially since I gave it to her 2.5 weeks in advance of the due date.

Both Sophie and Cheryl will be turning in final drafts of their research essay on Wednesday. Their final portfolios are due Tues., May 14.