WRIT 199 TAs

This week Sophie turned in the final draft of her first essay, while Cheryl turned in her third draft.

Sophie’s final draft showed a huge improvement over the first draft and demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of both the prompt and the reading it was based on. It was well-organized and engaging, with nearly no mistakes. I submitted a letter to her in which I reviewed her improvement from the first through final drafts and her overall effort on this essay, in which I was very positive. During our meeting I asked her to write a brief thoughtletter in which she identified some major strengths and weaknesses of the essay, and she identified every area of improvement that I would have. These included less long-winded introductions with better-placed thesis statements, more fully developing points later in her essay, and writing more engaging and less repetitive conclusions. It was great to see that she’s very aware of what she needs to work on. She didn’t identify many of the strengths, so I was sure to go over these with her. Next week she’ll be turning in a detailed outline of her second essay—she wasn’t sure how to write an outline, so I went over this with her in our meeting and then sent her a couple resources for producing an essay outline.

Cheryl cancelled our meeting less than 15 minutes before it began because she woke up without a voice. Although we always reschedule, such cancellations are starting to really concern me. This is her third or fourth cancelled meeting—none of which I’ve been given more than 45 minutes for—but every time she cancels because of sickness or injury, so I have no way of calling her out on this or even knowing if she legitimately is unable to come to class each time. Her first essay has already been delayed because of a previous cancellation, and I’m unable to meet with her again until Wednesday of next week, so I told her to review my edits carefully and produce another draft before her final draft for Monday. I dislike not being able to go over edits and comments with her in person—especially since she struggles with restructuring awkward sentences without guidance—but unfortunately this was our only option. Cheryl has responded to my criticisms about parts of her essay being unrelated to her essay and changed many of them, but some of her arguments still don’t connect to her thesis. I highlighted these parts again in the last draft she handed in, and commented on them in an email to her, so hopefully they’ll be revised soon.

Today was my first meeting with Becky! First we reviewed the course syllabus and I explained the demands of the course.

We discussed for a bit which direction she may want to go for her second research paper. Her ideas were vague, so I posed a series of questions for her to think about, and she will get back to me next week.

Lastly, I got to know about her personal writing process, habits, and goals for the semester. She expressed difficulty with getting her ideas onto paper. She explained how she starts a paper as soon as it is assigned, but does not finish it until right before the deadline. She is in the habit of going through multiple drafts. Overall, she would like to work this semester on feeling more comfortable and confident about her writing. I am looking forward to working with her!

Prior to today’s class period Chimuanya had submitted her second thought letter. I was really impressed with the amount of time and effort she had put into the assignment. It was less of a thought letter and more of the first draft of an essay, and so that is what it will be.

At the beginning of class today we discussed the two articles we had read over Spring Break, one about the reform efforts of Geoffrey Canada and the other about Michelle Rhee. Chimuanya was enthusiastic about both of them. I was pleased when she drew historical connections between the Baldwin and Woodson pieces we had read earlier in the semester, and the modern day circumstances presented by these articles. She was able to independently evaluate the articles and articulate her opinions, which were clear both in her verbal comments and in the text of her essay.

One skill I am really trying to work with Chimuanya this semester is her ability to proofread her own writing. This week I underlined the location of grammatical errors in the essay, and then had her try to correct them herself. This enabled me to find out which she was able to spot on her own, and which flew under her radar. I am going to continue working with her on identifying dependent versus independent clauses to prevent run-on/incomplete sentences and confusion between semi-colons, colons, and commas.

Today was my last class meeting with Shruthi!

We reviewed over her outline for the second essay. She has found five sources to use for her research topic, but her outline was very unfocused, jumping between topics and/or rambling. So I had her verbally describe to me what she had discovered in her research thus far, which came to be three main topics. We talked about how these three topics could each be a supporting detail that would support her overall thesis. We refined her thesis, formulating it in accordance with the three-story model. I reminded her of paragraph structure as we had done it in her first essay, and talked about how those same principles applied to this one. Shruthi seemed to be on board with all of this, and we determined a specific schedule of draft deadlines over Spring Break that would allow for multiple revisions.

I asked Qi to spend some time at the beginning of the class looking over my comments on her editorial and her final draft.  We talked about the format of an editorial as an opinion piece because she had failed to adopt a strong point of view in her writing.  I said that analytical papers for Econ should similarly make an argument and show her professors that she is thinking critically about the material.  She understood all of the edits to her final paper and agreed that it had improved quite a bit from the first draft.  Next, I had taken an article from The Economist and removed all the articles, and asked her to fill them in with a, an, the, or an “x” if no article is required.  She went through the article on her own and then we reviewed it together.  Qi said that although we have been referencing the chapter on articles in the ESL book, she was working mostly from intuition.  She did really well with the assignment, and as I read it out loud with her answers, she heard errors and corrected them.  We talked about common words in Econ, like “inflation” and “government spending” that are conceptual and therefore require no article, but do when they are made specific, as in “the rate of inflation.”  She said it was helpful to note these words as it was something she’d struggled with, even in writing during her Econ exams.  For homework, she is researching the American mortgage bubble burst, narrowing her thinking to an appropriate paper topic, and writing a 2 page thought letter.  I explained the mid-semester feedback that I’ll be writing and asked her to do the same for me, letting me know what has been helpful and unhelpful, how she’d like to use class time, and topics she’d like to spend more time on.

Ashley and I are running about one week behind in our syllabus because of her problems with the very first draft, so we used Friday’s class to make up some of that time.  I began by describing three chapters from Ann Petry’s The Street that I thought could stand alone as serve as the reading for the next essay.  She chose the one with themes that most interested her.  Next, we went over my corrections to her intermediate draft.  This draft had taken a long time for me to edit; I deleted some strings of two or three sentences of summary at a time, and suggested in two cases that Ashley combine two paragraphs into one.  She understood all of my changes, but was concerned that she was leaning too much on me by simply adopting my corrections.  I understand this and answered that it isn’t a matter of borrowing my personal writing style, but being involved in an editing process with the goal of correcting mistakes, not altering her voice.  I told her to read over the new, concise version of her paper when she was finished editing and make sure that she was still happy with it as something she’d written.  She asked for more exercises in writing concisely, so I want to focus on that in class next week.  She spent the majority of class editing and asking questions about her paper.  I reread the chapter she selected from The Street and put together a thought letter assignment with questions to prompt analysis.  She agreed that to get back in line with the syllabus, she would hand in her final draft on Sunday at the beginning of break, and complete the thought letter by the Sunday at the end of break.

Haley, 3/15/13:

Haley submitted the final draft of her first paper this week. She had sent me two or three drafts during the weekend and had met with a writing tutor. The first draft she sent me during the weekend was a great improvement over her previous draft. It contained a clearer argument, additional relevant sources, and a smooth organization. After that draft, she was really just polishing things off. I wrote her a formal letter detailing things she had done well and places where she could improve. I started the meeting by asking her how she felt about the paper. She said that she had had particular trouble finding a good concluding sentence, ultimately giving up, but also said that she didn’t feel the need to go over the paper any more. She still seemed to be somewhat worried that she hadn’t done very well on the final draft, but she felt better about her effort when I told her that another TA, after hearing her topic, had said, “This is a first year?!” (I decided to tell her about this because she needs the confidence.). We both discussed the fact that this article was hard to write about. I decided we should spend some time looking for her next articles together (she was supposed to write about the article she wrote about for the first paper, but switched the readings by mistake). We found some possible articles and topics and discussed things to look for in potential articles. She seems to be very interested in her next topic. I did not want to dwell on her first paper too much longer, but she had expressed concern over her conclusion so we discussed ways to improve it. We read the conclusions of one of the possible articles for her next paper and of the sample biology paper in the Wellesley Hacker guide and discussed the ways the authors did or did not write successful conclusions. She found looking at the sample biology paper very helpful, so we looked at the entire paper, particularly the thesis, discussing ways in which the author stated and supported her thesis. The thesis, although it contained an argument, was not arguing against anything in particular, a type of thesis we had already discussed. For our next meeting, Haley will be compiling an annotated bibliography for paper three and writing a thoughtletter about her chosen articles for paper two.

Maud, 3/15/13:

Maud submitted the final draft of her first paper this week. I wrote her a letter discussing the strengths and weaknesses of her paper. The final draft had improved organization, clarity, and sentence-level problems. I noticed that her paragraphs were organized well, but the sentences within the paragraphs were somewhat jumbled. I plan to discuss this issue when she writes her next paper. I started the meeting by asking her how she felt about her paper. She said that she felt ready for the next paper and that she learned a lot from the first paper, although she knew it wasn’t perfect. I decided that we had discussed the paper enough and brought some sentence clarity quizzes and handouts. She does need to improve her sentence clarity and the quizzes gave us a nice little vacation from complicated paper discussions. I used three handouts from Purdue OWL:

Sentence clarity handout:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/600/01/

Eliminating wordiness exercises (the first is a paragraph, the second is sentences):

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/exercises/6/9/57

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/exercises/6/9/24

She completed them first, and then we went over them together. She asked many questions and said that she found these exercises very helpful. For our next meeting, Maud will be compiling an annotated bibliography for paper three and writing a thoughtletter about her chosen articles for paper two.

This week Sophie turned in the third draft of her essay and Cheryl turned in the second draft of hers.

Sophie’s essay is coming together very nicely, and I think we will both be happy with the final draft she’ll turn in the week after spring break. She still had a few awkward sentences that we worked at strengthening during our meeting this week, but these were fixed quickly and easily. She chose to use two pseudo case studies to explore and defend her arguments, and one is much better supported than the other, so we worked at evening out the emphasis she places on each one. We discussed her tendency to use informal phrases or wording in her essay, and why it’s important to avoid such informalities; she seems pretty comfortable with the concept and was able to easily change her writing where I pointed out she needed to be more formal. She expressed excitement about having produced a piece of writing that she feels is well-structured and clearly communicates what she wants to say (this made me happy!).

Cheryl’s second draft still had several paragraphs that were largely unrelated to her thesis, so I had her write a reverse outline, which I think helped a lot. She was able to line up her thesis with the one-sentence summaries of her body paragraphs, and she finally seemed to understand how some of them fit much better with her essay than others. We discussed specific strategies for rewriting these problem paragraphs, and I stressed that she should delete portions of her essay if at any point she feels they don’t strongly support her thesis. I emphasized that I often end up deleting large chunks from early drafts of my writing, which she seemed comforted by. We also spent some time working on her conclusion, which was essentially a two-sentence restatement of her thesis. I found a helpful handout online (http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html) that I had her read. She rewrote parts of the conclusion with a focus on synthesizing rather than summarizing, and we agreed to revisit the conclusion next week when all of her arguments are in place.

Yesterday before class Chimuanya emailed me to ask if we might be able to go over an essay she had written for her Sociology class. I’m glad we did because it was very helpful for me to see her writing from another perspective. With more material to work with, I was able to see with greater clarity the trends in her writing.

But the first thing we did in class was review over her Writing 199 Baldwin essay. Although the essay was riddled with grammatical errors, I had her just focus on fixing unclear diction and syntax (incomplete and run-on sentences), which assisted in putting the flow of her ideas in logical order. She will continue work on this essay and resubmit it to me on Wednesday.

Then we reviewed over her Sociology essay. Overall, structure was lacking, and the introduction and conclusion needed work. She told me that she really struggles with writing introductions and conclusions, so that is something we can focus on from here on out. Additionally, she makes the same grammar mistakes over and over again. Because we were running out of time, I reviewed over them with her rather quickly, but plan to spend more time going over them next session so the mistakes do not continue.

This week Cheryl and Sophie worked on the second drafts of their first essay. Sophie handed in a second draft, and we continued to discuss many of the elements of organization and structure that we talked about last week. Because Cheryl and I weren’t able to meet last week to discuss her first draft, we instead spent two class meetings this week working on her first draft; she’ll turn in a second draft next week.

Cheryl has been a little difficult to work with in terms of reorganizing her essay. Several chunks of the body of her essay don’t strictly relate to or support her thesis, even though she’s adamant that they do. I’ve tried walking her through her argument several times, asking her to look at her essay from an outsider’s perspective, and telling her to test every paragraph against her thesis to see if what she’s writing truly coheres with her principal argument. She’s ceded a bit, and her essay is better focused than it was a week ago, but I still think parts of her essay should be either deleted or entirely reworded. Is there a way to get this across to her without outright saying that much of the body of her essay has very little to do with what she claims to be arguing? Besides this, she continues to make strides in terms of clarity of her sentence structure, and she seems to be communicating her ideas better than she did at the beginning of the semester. I’m also seeing a much lower frequency of article misuse and other minor but previously prevalent grammatical errors.

Sophie’s essay continues to be very promising. She decided to make her arguments by giving examples drawn from two case studies, which we both agree has strengthened the essay. Her second draft included a thesis paragraph, where her argument was broadly laid out over several sentences at the beginning of the essay, so this week we did another exercise on thesis statement writing. I had her read Indiana University’s “How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One” and measure her thesis against each of the handout’s four points. We were able to determine exactly where her thesis is strong and correct weaker elements of her thesis. Her essay is still short—two and a half pages—so for next week she’s working on expanding her arguments and incorporating some finer edits into her writing.