WRIT 199 TAs

Maud, 3/8/13:

Maud wrote a second draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. She had clearly worked hard on her introduction, thesis, and topic and transition sentences. She had decided not to bring herself and her experiences into the paper (we had discussed her anxiety about talking in the first person and I had suggested that she try it out), but she thought she needed a push and approved of my insisting that she include herself explicitly in the next paper. Maud had read my comments before our meeting and came prepared with relevant questions and rewritten or additional sentences and phrases. She had clearly spent a good amount of time writing this paper and preparing for the meeting (She stated that she had spent 3 hours trying to track down a source for one her facts. I commended her effort, but gave her some alternate options and told her that she should not feel the need to spend that much time on research.). After reading this week’s draft, I noticed that Maud struggles with proper comma use. I brought a quiz/handout on 8 comma rules (http://www.englishforeveryone.org/PDFs/Commas%20Practice%20Quiz.pdf) and we discussed the rules with which she struggles most and then completed the quiz together. I may bring little quizzes like this in the future (about grammar or not), as she found the quiz very helpful. She was somewhat wary about writing her final draft for next week because she has a busy week and wants this paper to be its best. I discussed many of the things I do at this point in the paper writing process, including a series of “final checks” for sentence-level issues, argument, etc. She liked many of these ideas and asked for my list of final checks at the end of our meeting. I also strongly suggested she take the thesis and topic sentences out in order to check them for organization and clarity. I expect that Maud will work hard on this final draft, but I am glad that we will be moving onto a new paper soon; with any more drafts, this paper will begin to get stale.

Haley, 3/8/13:

Haley wrote her third draft for this week’s meeting. She submitted the draft slightly late due to a search for a source. [The past few drafts have been late, although all with somewhat legitimate excuses. I emphasized that her final draft must be submitted on time and I think that she got the message.] We discussed her search for a source because much of her information is from a NEUR 100 class and is currently lacking citations. She will be searching for the NEUR 100 textbook this week but will let me know if she runs into difficulty. She is somewhat anxious about finishing this paper and stated that she feels it will never be finished. We discussed the fact that papers can always improve and I tried to reassure her regarding how far she has come and how she has a solid base on which to work. I sometimes feel as if she is not actually reassured or aided by my advice. I am hopeful that completing this first paper will give her confidence which she can rely upon for future papers. [She is also particularly worried about Lynne reading and grading her paper. I tried to reassure her on this front, but I think that receiving a mid-semester grade, whether it is good or bad in her eyes, will best assuage her anxieties (or at least give her something solid to be anxious about).] We started to go through my comments, working especially on restructuring the introductory paragraphs. She continues to be worried about writing so that her audience understands her argument. We discussed some places where she can be clearer and, at her request, signed her up to meet with a writing tutor, with the plan being that the writing tutor will tell her what they do not understand. I emphasized the importance of keeping the argument in the forefront of the paper and suggested cutting down some of her many introductory paragraphs. I think that, in an effort to explain things clearly, she spent too much time explaining complex processes before getting to the meat of her argument. We then went through the grading rubric line by line. She had highlighted aspects she felt she needed to work on. There were a few points which she had highlighted which I felt were not problems for her, but there were some points (particularly “analysis” and “clarity”) which we discussed in great detail. I empathized with Haley; this paper is particularly difficult to write because the material is very complex and the article lacks concrete evidence. She revealed to me that she actually no longer completely agrees with her argument. While she could adjust it, this would require an entire rewrite and I agreed with her that she should continue to write this paper with the current argument. Although I think that she will learn a lot from this paper, both she and I will be happy to see it finished. Next week’s meeting will take place at a different time, Tuesday at 5:45, due to a schedule conflict we had prepared for in one of our first meetings, but she will submit the final paper at her normal time.

Today in class Shruthi and I first reviewed over her Essay 1 draft. It’s almost done, we just talked about polishing up some diction and syntax, and putting together a satisfying conclusion paragraph.

Second, we went over the outline she had prepared for Essay 2, her research paper. Her original idea was to argue that the British empire’s environmental exploitation led to its downfall, and compare it to modern day US environmental exploitation. She was overwhelmed with this broad topic and had found sources about various places and aspects: the Caribbean sugar trade and plantation system, deforestation in India and Egypt, etc. She had consulted with a research librarian and found it helpful, but was still struggling to put a coherent argument together. So I suggested that she narrow her topic to focus on India exclusively, as this was where many of her sources were focused, and where I sensed her research interest lied. She is now planning to write an essay that sheds light on the environmentally-centered reasons for why Britain lost control of India.

Lastly, we discussed some exercises about using the active versus passive voice that Shruthi had requested, as it is a problem she struggles with in her writing–see attachment. Active PassiveVoice

My two tutees provide interesting points of comparison–while Shruthi embraces essay changes wholeheartedly, Chimuanya is more resistant. I always try to explain the reasons for making certain changes. It was great today when after a bout of particularly difficult editing, she re-read the paragraph and exclaimed for herself, “Wow this really is better.” I’m trying to get her ideas to be more organized, rather than jumping about from idea to idea. Her comment made me optimistic that some of what I’m saying is starting to sink in.

I realized today, however, that improving her ability to proofread her own writing might prove more difficult. Normally reading sentences aloud help people to notice their mistakes, but when Chimuanya reads aloud, she just fills in whatever is missing or ignores what shouldn’t be there. While I can point out grammar mistakes to her either by correcting the mistake or telling her the location of the mistake and then having her identify it, I want her to be better able to recognize them on her own as she’s writing. Any ideas about what strategies I might implement next session to facilitate effective proofreading?

Cheryl and Sophie wrote the first drafts of their first essays this week. They were each given short quotes from articles they selected for their reading lists; the quotes presented an opinion of the author, which Cheryl and Sophie were asked to either agree or disagree with. For their first drafts, I asked them to focus on organizing their arguments, and my comments on their writing were directed towards fine-tuning the structures of theirs essays.

Cheryl’s draft, which claims that it’s impossible for a person to not have style, was organized well but poorly argued. She decided to write the essay as an editorial, and her draft was structured according to an editorial writing guide I found for her to use. I emphasized that while an editorial is structured a bit differently than an essay, both have the same purpose of providing a strong argument supported with ample and relevant evidence. Her first draft had a well-written introduction, but lacked a clear thesis statement. Although she laid out her argument nicely in the intro, the body of the essay seemed a bit scattered, and several of her points and examples didn’t relate to her argument. She cancelled our Thursday meeting, so I can’t discuss the draft with her in person until next week, when we’ve scheduled a makeup session. Due to this delay I’m considering adding an extra week to this round of essays so we can have more face-to-face time together to review comments and strengthen her essay.

Sophie’s essay argues that co-production of films between China and America is more harmful than beneficial to the Chinese film industry. Her problems are the opposite of Cheryl’s: her draft included a lot of good arguments but was very disorganized. Like Cheryl, her essay lacked a thesis, so I gave her the Harvard thesis handout to read and then reviewed how to write strong theses. I had her tell me in one sentence what she wanted to argue in her essay, and with some tweaking she had a strong thesis fairly quickly. By the end of this exercise she seemed comfortable with the concept and purpose of thesis statements. When she explained her arguments to me aloud, she constantly referred to Kung Fu Panda, so I suggested that she use the film as a case study. She understood the reasoning behind this suggestion—that specific examples make for good evidence and stronger arguments—without prompting, which was great.

Next week Cheryl and Sophie will submit their second drafts, which will be complete products (and not just half-finished essay shell outlines).

Haley, 3/2/13:

Haley wrote the second draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. She had emailed me a draft on the day the paper was due and stated that she needed to do more work on it, but had been very busy. I gave her a slight extension because I wanted her to feel that the draft was her best effort, but I reminded her that future deadlines are firm. Her draft was better, in my opinion, than she thought it was. However, she continues to struggle with keeping her argument in the forefront of the paper, as well as with topic and transition sentences. (We had not yet had a chance to discuss these more fundamental skills in previous meetings because I had decided to focus first on developing a solid argument.) We discussed my comments, focusing particularly on one paragraph and the ways in which she can introduce detailed scientific material so that the reader understands its link to her argument. I suggested that she use the “In order to understand xyz, we must first…” tactic and she wrote multiple possible sentences. Her first attempts were very literal and did not quite reflect what she wanted to argue. I reminded her to keep both her reader’s knowledge as well as the paragraph’s larger purpose in mind. Although her ideal reader is familiar with general neuroscience terms, I decided to encourage her to write for the “lay reader” in order to encourage her to spell out her thinking and to think of the larger picture. Once she has done this more successfully, I plan on showing her that clearer writing is also necessary if one is writing for an informed audience. After we had discussed most of my comments, I printed out the rubric and we discussed how her paper fills the requirements. I asked her what her main concerns were and she stated that she is worried that her paper doesn’t contain much analysis. She is working with material which is fairly sparse, making concrete analysis difficult. We looked at some examples in her paper and I discussed ways in which she can include more analysis, which were, essentially, the same as bringing her reader back to her argument, which I had already been encouraging her to do. I also pointed out that she includes an unspecified “this” rather often. We discussed the importance of specifying “this” and ways in which she can fix this problem. Finally, she asked whether she should have somebody without a neuroscience background read the paper. I thought this was a good idea, as I am losing my status as an uninformed reader as I read her many drafts. Haley will submit a third draft for next week’s meeting. She was relieved that she has one more draft before the final one, but also liked my idea that I bring different writing exercises for her to do during our next meeting so that she can work on paper-related skills without getting “papered-out.”

Maud, 3/2/13:

Maud wrote the first draft of her first paper for this week’s meeting. Maud’s paper was nearly clear of sentence level issues, a great improvement over her first thoughtletter (leading me to believe that she is a fast learner and has been working hard on sentence-level problems). I could not find her thesis when I commented on the paper, so was prepared to work on theses with her, but in the meeting she pointed the thesis out to me: it was buried deep within the introduction. Therefore, we discussed the importance of thesis-placement and worked on restructuring the introduction so that the thesis was more obvious. She asked where and how she should introduce the authors and we discussed ways in which she could smoothly incorporate their introductions with her argument. She had disagreed with one of the authors, but she did not include this disagreement in the paper. We discussed how this disagreement could help her argument and she decided to incorporate it into her introduction of the two authors. She chose the order: author she agreed with, author she didn’t agree with, her argument. I illustrated how it would be smoother to introduce the author she didn’t agree with first (I used the sandwich analogy- in this case ABA would be more confusing than BAA), and she found this explanation very helpful. We then went through every one of my comments, most of which were asking for clarification, specification or argument-driven analysis. One of her introductory paragraphs was very broad and included no sources. She stated that the facts in the paragraph were taken from her own experiences and we discussed whether it would be clearer and stronger if she bring herself and her experiences into the paper more explicitly. She stated that she has often wondered whether she should include herself in a paper and was unsure of how to make it work. She will try to include herself in next week’s draft, I will give her feedback, and she will decide whether it helps or impedes her paper. I also noticed that there were a few things she had written about in her thoughtletter but had left out of her paper. She stated that she planned to add some of these things and we discussed where she could put them. I also emphasized the importance of subject sentences and transitions, but we will only be able to work on these problems once she has solidified her structure and argument. Finally, she said something which made me think that she was going to simply address my comments and leave the paper at that, so I told her that my comments do not necessarily address everything and that she should still be reading the paper to herself. I wrote very many comments this week, which, on reflection, could have been overwhelming and could have served as a crutch. I will, therefore, reign in my comments on her next draft. Maud will be writing her second draft for next week.

I had a very busy and productive session with Shruthi today.

First, we reviewed her Essay 1 draft. We talked about three things: how she can clarify some poorly worded phrases, how she needs to pay more attention to her comma usage, and how she can employ more sophisticated language in place of colloquialism. On the last point, I identified some passages where her tone was conversational or she used cliche statements, and then asked her how she might reword them using academic language. Shruthi was very enthusiastic about the exercise because she identified having more elegant writing as one of her goals at the beginning of the semester.

Secondly, we discussed Jared Diamond’s article, “The Last Americans.” Shruthi had written a two-page thought letter before class. It showed much improvement over her first one in that she successfully summarized the article and then went on to give her own opinions and formulate her own argument. Because she is very interested in the topic, she will be using the article’s premise as the foundation for her second essay. We briefly reviewed some of the grammatical errors she had made in the thought letter as well.

Lastly, we began talking about Essay 2. Her topic proposal is due this weekend, in which she states the questions guiding her research. She is planning to consult with a research librarian. She will submit an outline next week.

Today in class with Chimuanya we reviewed the first draft of her essay.

First I asked her how she felt about her first draft. She responded that she felt her beginning was strong, but by the end had “run out of ideas.” My impressions mirrored her sentiment, and we talked about merging the last two paragraphs together to make one coherent paragraph, to make for a stronger finish. 

This week Sophie and Cheryl were given short writing exercises (2-3 pages) to identify an argument in an assigned reading and explain whether they agreed or disagreed with the author.

Cheryl’s assignment was well-organized, which was a huge improvement over her first assignment, which was extremely disorganized. A few of her sentences were awkwardly phrased, but she was able to fix them fairly quickly when we looked at them together during our meeting. We had a second meeting this week because she missed our meeting last week, during which we discussed how she could structure her first essay as an editorial. I had her do a writing exercise to create an outline for an editorial about a randomly chosen topic (whether there should be a dress code at the Grammies); while she initially struggled with editorial structure, she seemed to grasp it by the end of the meeting.

Sophie’s assignment was an improvement over previous weeks in terms of grammar—especially tense—but was very poorly organized. We spent a good part of our meeting going over the basics of essay structure, which she seemed to have very little background on. I had her do a writing exercise to write a pseudo-essay on whether she liked dining hall food, including an introduction and providing evidence for her argument. She seemed more comfortable with organization by the end of the meeting, but we planned to continue to work on this in the future.

Their first essay drafts are due next week. For their first drafts, I requested that they focus on organization, formulating a clear thesis statement and arranging their arguments and evidence into sequential body paragraphs.

Because Chimuanya had three other essays to write for her other classes, I extended the deadline for her first draft. Today in class we reviewed her outline thus far, refined her thesis statement, looked for examples in the articles that she could use to support her points, and structured the progression of her argument. This allowed me to observe how Chimuanya works while writing. She is a perfectionist-type writer, wanting to get wordings exactly right before moving forward. Sometimes I had us jump ahead to continue making progress, and then go back over hang-ups later. It was easier this way, because her ideas were more developed so she had a better idea of what she wanted to say. Overall her outline looked strong; I am optimistic about the first draft.