WRIT 199 TAs

Chimuanya and I met twice this week–once during our regular time, and a second additional time to make up for the class we had missed on Marathon Monday.

For our first session, we edited and revised her last essay, a research paper on the relationships between the US educational system, economic conditions, and social hierarchies. Chimuanya is adept at incorporating multiple sources. However she struggles with grammatical issues and the clarity of her phrasing, either due to wordiness or redundancy, so that’s mainly what we worked on. Then for the sake of her final portfolio, we reviewed over the very first essay she had written. Both of us were struck by the clearly evident progress she’s made over the course of the semester. At many points I didn’t have to point out grammatical issues or unclear phrases, she was able to identify them herself and fix them independently. That was very satisfying for me, and I think it was for her as well.

During our second session, Chimuanya asked if we could review two essays that she had due for other classes: one on the early Chinese immigrant experience, and the second was a reflection paper on a sociology study she had conducted. This was helpful for me to have more samples of Chimuanya’s writing in which I could address the problems she struggles with. It was also helpful for her, because she had further opportunity to work on them. It was also good because the two assignments were different in style and had different requirements. The first was literary analysis of a book, supported by historical background. The second was intended to have the tone of a sociological journal article, and discussed various aspects of her research method.

In the final week of class, Chimuanya and I will be finishing up her final portfolio, which will include three essays, one thought letter, and a final reflection.

Maud, 5/4/13:

Maud wrote the first draft of her third paper for this week’s meeting. She had changed her thesis slightly after realizing that she did not have enough evidence to support the original thesis. The new thesis was well supported. The paper was clear and well organized, but she continues to struggle with topic sentences, specificity and clarity, and referring back to the thesis. I commented on the paper extensively and we spent the majority of the meeting discussing my comments. She understood my points and seems to know what to do to fix these problems in the future. I think that she was primarily working on the clarity of her argument in the first draft and was simply not as focused on the more ‘surface’ problems. We briefly discussed her final assignment. She is comfortable with the assignment, but had a few questions about the cover letter. She has not yet decided which paper to revise, but will decide after she has worked on paper three a bit more. Finally, I brought some examples of transition and topic sentences from my own papers because Maud struggled with transitions in this draft. We discussed how they did or did not work and I think that she found the exercise helpful. Maud will turn in the final draft of her third paper for next week’s meeting.

Haley, 5/4/13:

Haley wrote the second draft of her third paper for this week’s meeting. I commented upon it very lightly because I had made extensive comments on a weekend draft. I have been scaling back my comments on Haley’s later drafts because I want her to become more confident doing her own final edits and to become more trusting of her own reactions to her writing. She stated that she thought it was fine but that she was worried there were problems with it that she could not see (She was surprised by some of Lynne’s comments on a draft of an earlier paper.). I emphasized that I thought that it was a very solid paper, that she had improved in many areas, and that it could be a final draft. She will let it rest for a few days and turn in the final draft on Monday. We briefly discussed the final assignment; she feels comfortable with it and plans to finish it earlier than the due date. Because she felt comfortable with her third paper, we spent the rest of the meeting discussing a writing assignment for another class and a paper I had written for WRIT 125. The prompt for the writing assignment for the other class was written rather poorly; we spent some time discussing the prompt and ways it could be written more clearly. Haley read my WRIT 125 paper and suggested changes and revisions. Looking at another person’s writing helped her practice final-draft editing without emotional attachment or anxiety. It was also helpful for her to see that I made some of the same mistakes she makes and to see how they can confuse a reader (long, convoluted sentences; confusing thesis; too many transitional phrases and colons). Next week is our last meeting. I plan on discussing the progress she has made and possibly bringing some final, more “fun” writing activities. We may also briefly discuss the final assignment, as she will have started it by then and may have some questions.

A note on final assignments –

I adapted the “Writer’s Manual” Assignment for both Ashley and Qi.  I eliminated the sections on personal voice (I haven’t talked about this much with either student), commas and punctuation (these are not major problems for them and could be covered in the grammar section) and unsupported statements (I think there’s some overlap with the sections on analysis and logical sentence sequence).  I added a section about the outlining process to each assignment.  For Qi, I also added a section on word choice and deleted the analytic passage section because her writing (about economics) leans mostly on the analysis of others.  For Ashley, I added a section on flowery language.

We reviewed Qi’s first draft in class on Monday.  It was very good overall, but she hadn’t seemed to have proofread very carefully, so I corrected small grammar errors once and asked that she find the others.  She had sent me some emails throughout the week about integrating her thesis statement into her introduction (something she’s had trouble with in the past) and I thought she was successful in the draft.  We spent some time on specific questions about my comments and some word choices.  I had her make a reverse outline, and then compare her intentions for each paragraph with what she wrote in her topic sentences.  I wanted her to focus on the last section of her paper, about Germany’s current role in the crisis, because it seemed somewhat arbitrarily divided into paragraphs, and she agreed that it could be better organized.  I gave her our final assignment and asked that she bring any questions about it to our last meeting on Monday, and she’s already turned in her final research paper draft early.

Ashley wasn’t feeling well at the beginning of the week so I agreed that we could postpone our meeting until Thursday.  She wrote a good first draft of her research paper, and had handwritten a very detailed outline to organize her outside resources.  She was concerned that the bulk of her paper was biography, overwhelming her analysis of the sculptures she outlined.  I had made a similar note in my comments, but also assured her that it was a research paper on Savage’s life as a whole and made suggestions to create a better balance.  I suggested that she might eliminate the biographical summary in her introduction that she explains in more depth later, and that she could add a paragraph specifically comparing the two sculptures.  We talked about reorganization and she brought up some points that she hadn’t written about but would work well in a comparison.  I highlighted some sentences that could be condensed or were repetitive but asked her to look for some places to condense on her own as well.  I gave her the final assignment and asked her to look it over for next class as well.  Her final research paper draft is due on Monday night.

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

1. 2 polished essays
2. 2 polished short writing assignments
3. 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

On Sunday, Qi turned in a thought letter meant to mirror the organization of her research paper.  She chose powerful quotes from her sources and interacted with them well in her own voice, as we practiced last week.  I pointed out places where she would need more explanation behind certain concepts.  Her introduction was interesting – she had set the scene of the Eurozone crisis dramatically, using the present tense.  I admired her creativity but wasn’t sure what to make of this in an academic paper, so I asked Professor Viti, who confirmed that it was a fine line and said the opening would have been appropriate for a non-fiction narrative, but not for a research paper.  Qi will revise to the past tense.  For the more technical errors in her thought letter, I made a worksheet in which I copied her sentences and pasted them into three categories: tense, articles, and word choice.  She did well correcting her mixed tenses (temporal and singular vs. plural) and article usage.  Word choice was a bit more difficult, both for her to correct and for me to explain her errors, but I think we had a productive conversation.  We talked about, for example, the difference between “rise” and “arise” and the need for an actor to “exacerbate” something.  She emailed me on Thursday with another question about introducing her thesis, and I suggested the few pieces of information a reader would need to make sense of her thesis statement.  Qi’s first draft of her research paper is due this Sunday.

 Ashley brought the outline of her research paper and her final pieces of research to class on Tuesday.  I checked over her sources, which seem complete now, and have a good variety of text, photographs, and an interview.  Ashley’s outline also showed solid organization.  She is writing about Augusta Savage, a sculptor who lived in Harlem.  She broke down her biography into two major periods and will be analyzing one sculpture from each period of her life (1920s and 1930s).  In class, I had Ashley organize her sources into her outline and write her topic sentences.  We revised some for wordiness or vagueness (specifying in place of the word “values”).  She also wrote topic sentences for the paragraphs of biography that mentioned the sculpture she planned to discuss in the following paragraph.  I explained that these might be misleading to a reader, but that they would serve as great transitions at the end of the paragraph to connect her life events to her work.  Ashley seems very passionate about her topic and I’m looking forward to reading this paper and her analysis of the artwork.  Her first draft is due on Sunday night as well.  For both students, I plan to modify the “Writer’s Handbook” final assignment with some of the common issues I see in each of their writing.

This week Cheryl handed in a complete draft for her second essay, and Sophie turned in the final draft of her second essay.

Cheryl’s second essay was much better than her first. It was well-organized and drew on some good sources, and she made a convincing, comprehensive argument. Some sentences were poorly phrased and she used a lot of informal language, but overall the essay was a good one. I thought it was a bit strange that her essay, which had two main points, only had four paragraphs. It seemed like she was reverting to the high school formula, but she wasn’t able to give a clear reason for why she ended up with just four paragraphs. We spent our meeting working on paraphrasing quotes (a lot of her quotes could’ve been better integrated), reviewing comments and edits to her draft, and discussing how to build her analysis of her subject for her final draft. As per a suggestion from Lynne, we also talked about using active vs passive verbs to produce more engaging writing.

Sophie and I planned to spend our meeting briefly reviewing her final draft before moving onto a discussion of how to approach a research essay. However, she emailed me shortly before our meeting to say she was in health services and likely wouldn’t be able to make our meeting. We rescheduled for Monday morning.

Maud, 4/20/13:

Maud wrote the final draft of her second paper for this week’s meeting. The paper had a nice flow and a solid argument. It contained many sentence level issues, mostly concerning sentence structure and comma use. I sent her a formal letter in response to her final draft as well as a copy of the paper with all of the awkward sentences highlighted. We spent a good part of the meeting time going over the problematic sentences. I also gave her a handout and short quiz on misplaced and dangling modifiers from Purdue OWL. As always, she asked many clarifying questions about my highlights and the handouts. I think that she has a solid understanding of these issues now and I encouraged her to look out for them in her next draft. We discussed the portfolio assignment. I decided to give both of my students a choice between writing a handbook and editing a couple of papers because I think that they are both rather aware of their strengths/weaknesses and writing styles. Maud has not yet decided what she would like to do for the portfolio, as she will base this decision on how well the research paper goes. She said that she is worried about writing a handbook because she is not sure that she can identify a “good” thesis, etc. I believe that she knows more than she thinks she does, so I plan on bringing the handbook questions to our next meeting so that we can discuss them together. I may also bring some examples of “good” vs. “bad” theses, etc., so that I can make sure she is clear on these concepts and, hopefully, so that she can realize she knows more than she thinks she does. Finally, we discussed paper three. She has a solid annotated bibliography and will be planning the paper for next week. She plans to hand in an outline and some preliminary writing.

Haley, 4/20/13:

Haley wrote the final draft of paper two for this week’s meeting. She had worked hard on this paper and the organization, flow, and argument were much improved. After Lynne commented on one of her drafts, her sentence clarity and flow improved greatly. Her final draft still contained some awkward sentences, so I sent her a copy of the paper with all of the awkward sentences highlighted as well as a formal letter in response to the final draft. We discussed the highlighted sentences briefly. As I mentioned in my formal letter, I think that she can reduce the number of awkward phrases by looking out for tell-tale words and phrases such as “there is” and “it is important.” I think that she understands why these sentences are awkward and is able to fix them, but has been focusing primarily on argument clarity and organization. Stepping back and discussing these more mechanical issues was helpful to her. I gave her a handout on misplaced and dangling modifiers from Purdue OWL. She simply needed reminding, so we skimmed the handout and discussed it very briefly. We discussed Haley’s mid semester grade and her general feelings about the class. She was feeling a little discouraged, but I emphasized that a B+ is not bad at all and that what matters is her progress, etc. I think that she heard me and was feeling better about the class and her writing by the end of the meeting. She admitted that it was hard getting used to Wellesley’s standards (both grading and otherwise) after doing well in high school, and I agreed with her. We discussed the final portfolio assignment. After some discussion, she decided that she would like to do the handbook assignment. After revising her papers so many times, she felt that it would be very difficult to rework them. I agreed that they would start to become “plastic” if she worked on them any more. Finally, we discussed paper three. Haley had planned to write another very academic paper, but had learned about Obama’s neuroscience funding initiative right before our meeting and decided to write about it. She has already written two (unintended) research-based papers, so I think that this paper will be a nice style change for her. We looked for sources together, including Obama’s original proposal. This paper will be more of an opinion piece. Haley will plan the paper and do some preliminary writing for next week’s meeting.