Wednesday, April 15 2009

Today’s Agenda:

Last time, we spent went over a few issues that were cropping up in the first draft:

Topic/Argument

Length of the introduction

Sources

Your homework for today was to re-draft your paper and come to class with three copies of that paper.

1) On the back of one draft, let’s explain how this draft is better than the last draft, and why — exactly. Use specific details.

Group Discussion

Class Discussion

Last time, our biggest concerns was to move from a topic to and argument. How did we do that, if we did that. Let’s discuss.

Okay, we are going to workshop our papers today. I’ll break you into groups, and then we can begin.

Our workshop is going to take three rounds, each will last about 10-12 minutes.

1) Round one. At this point, it is presumed that you are writing in correctly organized paragraphs. So we will not be spending time looking for that today, though you can mark errors if you come across any.

Identify the thesis statement and underline it. Next, identify exactly when and where the author ties the evidence from their body paragraphs back to that thesis. The location of this “tie-back” should be fairly standard in each body paragraph. Finding it should be easy, and the challenge with the part of the review is to point out when it is missing, and to explain why it needs to be there. This is what you must do.

2) Round Two. Now that you have identified both the thesis statement and the author’s efforts to relate their evidence to that thesis, I want you to check for whether or not they have followed the three step rule for using quotes and citation. This will involve scanning the paper for quotes and citations, and checking to see if they have been introduced, presented, and explained.

3)Round Three. Okay, now we need to return our attention to the first two paragraphs of the paper. In the first paragraph, are they introducing you to a subject,  and in the second paragraph, do they follow their thesis by briefly examining the major points they will be addressing in their paper.  Once this has been completed, we can focus on sentence clarify and specificity.

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