Par 1 Draft
Collect your "college writing" thoughts into a 200-word, well-ordered paragraph. Have an electronic copy available.
Par 2 Draft
Reflect on your pre-test results. Work on developing a single idea, rather than making a list of interesting but loosely related observations.
Par 1 Revision
Online at Turnitin.com, submit a thorough revision of your Par 1 draft. Due 15 min before class is scheduled to start.
Criteria:
- Form: Is it a single paragraph of about 200 words, developing a single idea that presents what you think of when you hear the term "college writing"? (4pts)
- Voice: Do I get a sense of who you are as a person, as a writer, and as a student in this class? (4pts)
Revision: Does the revision make use of the comments I made on your rough draft, and does it demonstrate your careful efforts to apply those comments to prevent similar problems from appearing in this draft? (4pts)
Focus: Is the writing concise and focused, with no excess words or sentences, and no digressions or unnecessary details? (4pts)
Par 2 Revision
For your revision, empahsize the actions you will take now that you have received the printed feedback on your pretest performance, consulted the areas of Keys for Writers that correspond to your areas of most need, and visited the writing center.
The online diagnostic test you took at the end of last week asked you to complete questions that tested your knowledge in certain areas. Your performance in each area is on shown on the prinout I showed you on our first day back from the holiday. The following list shows which sections in your textbook Keys for Writers correspond to the subject matter covered by the test. Thus, if you had trouble with pronoun-antecedent agreement, look in sections 44 and 44d in Keys for Writers.
After you have cut all the wordiness from your draft of paragraph 2, make your paragraph more specific by including concrete steps that you will take to improve your wriitng. Remember, a paragraph is designed to develop a single idea, so don't just include a list of what you plan to work on.
Test Area, Keys for Writers
Pronoun-antecedent agr. 44, 44d
Semicolon 50a
Case of who/whom 44, 44i
Pronoun reference 44, 44c
Misplaced, dangling modifiers 40b
Parallelism 40j
Verb forms 41
Apostrophe 48
Pronoun case 44, 44a
Colon 50b
Shifts 41h
Run-on sentences 39
Comma 47
Unnecessary commas 47i
Adjectives and adverbs 45
Fragments 38
Subject-verb agreement 43
Mixed construction 40
Verb tense 41h
Par 3 Draft
Why is our textbook, Keys for Writers, organized the way it is?
Note that this exercise does not ask you to list the contents chapter-by-chapter, to compare it to some other textbook, to offer your opinion on the cost of the book, or to evaluate the usefulness of its contents.
However, if in order to answer the question, you feel it is necessary to mention some of the contents, to compare it to some other textbook, to note the cost or critique the usefulness, then by all means, please do!
By the way, there is no secret "right" answer against which your paragraph will be judged. You should instead demonstate your ability to write a 200-word paragraph that addresses a single topic, applying the first two "Cs of Style" (sections 29 and 30), as well as demonstrating your ongoing work in other issues that I have mentioned when I reviewed your previous drafts.
Essay 1 Prewriting
What's due at this stage for Essay 1 is just the thesis statement.
Essay 1 Draft
For most college papers, you can estimate about 250 words per page. So, this is a 2-3 page paper, which means I'm looking for 500-750 words. That should be several paragraphs. They don't all have to be exactly 200 words, but they should be tight and well-organized.
Since you have already studied Keys for Writers in some detail, you probably already know where you should look for help on this draft. All of Section 1 (pages 1-76) is worth consulting, but I'll draw your attention specifically to section 4d (on developing a thesis), 4e (on supporting a claim with reasons and evidence), and 2e (on introductions and conclusions).
Submission Details
Follow MLA style, which is described in detail in Keys for Writers.
You are not required to use outside research, but if you do, please note that MLA style includes a specific format for how to cite that outside source.
When submitting your rough draft to Turnitin.com, you are free to leave your name off of the paper if you'd rather have your work peer-reviewed privately. (I'll still know who you are, so don't worry about that.)
I've been revising an older handout on Thesis Statements. It was written for a class that mostly asked students to read a common text and then write about that text, so the examples all focus on writing a thesis statement about a book. For Essay 1, most of you have chosen to use details from your own lives to support a claim that explains your idea of the relationship between independence and responsibility. A few of you have chosen to use American history and culture. (Either is fine, but remember to be as specific as possible.)
MLA Style: Step-By-Step Instructions for Formatting MLA Papers
Par 4 Draft
Your individual learning plan -- a contract that describes your college writing goals, and the methods you will take to achieve them.
Paragraph 4 asks you to reflect on changes you have noticed in your own writing process thus far, and to answer the question:
How will your writing process need to change in order for you demonstrate your ability to write at the college level?You will use the answer to this question to create your own Individual Learning Plan. (I plan to send out an e-mail on Monday the 25th, explaining this in more detail.)
Essay 1 Revision (delayed from previous week)
The online syllabus mistakenly had this assignment due too early. This is its proper due date.
Par 5 Draft
Write a 200-word paragraph that explains one specific way that helps you deal with stress productively. Please chose a topic that differs from the one you plan to choose for Essay 2.
For Paragraph 5, rather than a list of helpful, general advice that I could find in a brochure somewhere ("Get enough rest and eat a healthy diet"), I'm looking for something very specific that helps you. Please don't feel that my solution for dealing with stress is the solution that everyone should offer, but I've provided an example taken from my own life.
In order to get all my work done and also stay sane, I have had to discipline myself to bring less work home with me, and get more of it done during regular office hours. I used to be able to put the kids to bed, watch a movie, fiddle with my weblog, and mark some papers until 2am. I could still get 7 hours of sleep before strolling onto campus just before my 11am class. But this semester, I have to drop my daughter off at pre-school at 8:30, which means I have to be up by 7:30 to get us both dressed and fed, andafter getting up hours earlier,I’m more tired after putting the kids to bed. If I take caffeine to keep myself from falling asleep at midnight, I end up wide awake at 4am.That means I’ll be even more tired the next day.If I train myself to go to bed knowing I'm not ready for class the next day, and discipline myself to finish preparing as soon as I get on campus in the morning, I'll save myself a lot of stress. I have also found that if I plan to go to bed at 11 once or twice a week, I have the energy to stay up much later when I really need to.
I’ve used strikeout to mark cuts that I made in order to get the word count down. Note also that this paragraph isn't a list of things that I should or could do; rather, it shows the result of making a particular change. It begins with a simple explanation of both the problem and the solution, then it explains the problem in more detail, and explains the solution in more detail, and concludes with an assessment of the results.
While my paragraph is about time-management, you might instead choose to talk about how you blow off steam, or how you deal with stress in some other productive manner. (As I said in class, the key here is "productive". Sometimes when we are stressed, we do things that are not productive.)
Essay 2 Draft
Length: 2-3 pages, following MLA style.
(Note -- a revision of your ILP is also due at the same time.)
I described Essay 2 Draft in detail on the Essay 2 Prewriting page. In order to help you focus your energies in areas that I'll be evaluating, here is a breakdown of how I plan to mark this assignment.
Criteria for Essay 2 Draft (10 points)
Thesis Statement (2pts max)
2 - clear and relevant thesis statement, with limited topic, precise opinion, and reasoning blueprint.
1 - thesis is weak or only loosely related to topic; thesis statement does not include clear reasoning blueprint
0 - no thesis, thesis does not address assigned topic, or thesis merely asks a question or points out a relationship ("There are two different ways of looking at X") without trying to make a claim about the chosen topic ("It makes more sense to think of X as a special kind of Y than as a failed version of Z").
Examples (3pts max)
3 - clear, vivid examples that SHOW, without excessive TELLING.
2 - a few good examples, but their effect is muted by the presence of too much TELLING.
1 - examples are too general; too much like a list of interesting things or important details.
0 - examples are too vague, unrelated to the stated thesis, or undeveloped.
Conclusion (2pts max)
2 - does not simply restate the thesis; flows naturally from a chain of ideas that support your thesis; presents a new insight that the reader can understand only after working through all the examples.
1 - does attempt to bring the paper to closure, but does not seem to follow from the examples; it may introduce a lofty new idea rather than a new development of the existing thesis.
0 - no conclusion, or a mechanical conclusion that does not attempt to build on previous paragraphs.
Form (3pts max -- the polished final form will carry greater weight in the revision)
3 - structure of paper follows the reasoning blueprint given by the paper; sentences are concise and well-connected; verbs are strong and active; no careless punctuation or word-level errors.
2 - structure of paper makes clear attempt to follow the blueprint given by the paper; sentences are clear; occasional wordiness or awkward word choice does not affect the reader's ability to understand the writer's message.
1 - structure of paper does not follow the reasoning blueprint (perhaps because there was no blueprint in the thesis statement); sentence-level and word-level errors affect the reader's ability to understand the point of the paper; too many careless proofreading mistakes.
0 - structure is weak or ineffective; excessive wordiness; garbled sentences; undeveloped or unconnected ideas.
Par 7 Draft
What is the most important thing that you have learned about college writing so far?
- Please start your paragraph with something other than "The most important thing that I learned about college writing is..." There is no need to repeat or rephrase the question. (And remember to come up with a thesis statement and reasoning blueprint.)I am specifically interested in what you have learned about college writing. A general answer -- such as time management or dealing with homesickness -- would be fine if the question were asking you to write about college life in general; but this question asks you to focus on basic comp.To answer this question, include brief quotes from your earlier work and your more recent work, to SHOW evidence that supports your claim about what you have learned.
Par 8 Draft
This assignment asks you to write an informative hypertext. We went over the details in the hypertext workshop last week.
Essay 2 Markup
Everyone will resubmit a copy of their Essay 2 Revision, marked up to identify how it differs from the Essay 2 Draft. Later, students will be able to revise Essay 2 again, and resubmit it for additional credit.
In order to emphasize the value of global revision (making big changes to the organization and focus of a paper) as opposed to local revision (correcting the spelling mistakes and other small errors that I point out to you), I am introducing this markup and reflection assignment, which will lead up to an optional second revision of Essay 2.
Everyone should submit the revision activity that I describe on this page. It will be worth 8 points. If you like, you may also revise Essay 2 again -- but I want to see the results of this revision activity before I finalize the details for resubmission opportunity.
The Importance of Revising for Organization and Focus
Which would be more persuasive: a well-organized 500-word essay with a few spelling mistakes, or 500 properly-spelled words chosen at random from a dictionary?
When you revise, fix the global problems first, and leave the local changes until later.
A writing course expects students to put at least as much effort into revising each draft as they put into creating their first draft. Writers who fix the obvious grammar and spelling mistakes that their instructor pointed out are certainly improving their documents, but your goal should be to develop your ability to edit and revise your own work, thus reducing your dependence on an outside reader to catch your careless mistakes. Out in the real world, if your documents are full of errors, or heaps of general lists of the kinds of things that "some people" think are important, your ideas will be hard to notice alongside the equally valid ideas of people who organize and refine their papers so that readers have less trouble following along.
Markup and Reflection Activity
Part I: Preparation
1) Review your first draft of Essay 2, and look closely at the comments I made.
Some of those comments simply identify a proofreading error or other problem area (wordiness, POV shift, etc.). You can handle those easily, by making a specific change right there. (But note also that I don't try to point out every such mistake for you. I am looking for evidence that you can catch and fix such errors yourself.)
Some comments offer specific suggestions, such as, "Can you bring this point up earlier?" or "Is this the same friend you were talking about before?" Usually it is not sufficient to handle that kind of question by typing a few words at that specific point in the paper where I asked the question. Instead, the solution will require making larger, more significant changes earlier in the paper, in order to remove the confusion that caused me to ask the question in the first place. (And again, I won't try to predict every change that you need to make in order to solve the problem that I've pointed out. Part of the revision task involves seeing where a change that you make to one part of the paper affects the rest of the paper. So, if I ask for a stronger word in a paragraph, and you reuse a word that I've marked as "good" in the next sentence, the end result may be that both sentences look redundant.)
The most important comment is usually the one that I make in the upper left corner, where I try to state what your paper has accomplished, and give a big-picture observation.
2) Print out a copy of Essay 2 Draft, and keep it for reference.
3) Now look at the comments I made on Essay 2 Revision, and note the difference between comments that call for local changes, and comments that call for global changes.
4) Make a new copy of your word processor file for Essay 2 Revision. I will call this "Paper 2 Markup."
5) Looking closely at your printout of Essay 2 Draft, mark all the changes that you made with the highlight button (on my copy of Word, you select the text and click an icon that looks like a yellow highlighter pen). Use one color to mark local changes (fixing spelling mistakes, adding missing words, changing a punctuation mark, adding a few clarifying words, etc.). Use a different color to mark global changes (a new thesis statement, new sentences or examples, a significant reorganization of content). If you cut out a whole sentence or more, just add a little note like "Cut unnecessary introduction," and highlight the note as you would a global change.
Part II
1) At the top of your Essay 2 Markup, estimate what percentage of your Essay 2 Markup contained only local changes, and what percentage demonstrates your abiilty to make global changes.
2) What mark did I report for your Essay 2 Draft, and what mark did I report for Essay 2 Revision? Referring specifically to these scores, write a few lines that reflect on the relationship between the amount of global revision that you did, and the difference between those two grades.
3) When you are finished, upload your Essay 2 Markup into the proper slot on Turnitin.com.
Par 10 Prewriting.
Topic: A message about being a college student at SHU, that you wish someone had told you during your first few weeks of this term. Your intended reader is a future SHU freshman who is likely to face the same kinds of issues that most SHU freshmen face. You may be a commuter, but not all SHU fresmen commute. You may be on a sports team, but not all SHU freshmen will be athletes. Tips about the specific things that you have learned may not be useful to someone else.I am giving you a very broad topic, but for the first time I am asking you to think of a more specific audience.
Par 11 Draft
Advice to a youngster.
As with all paragraph assignments, rather than offering a list of interesting observations, stick to a single topic, and develop it.
Essay 3 Revision 1 (Optional)
Note -- Also revise ILP.
Update:
I am adding another revision -- Essay 3 Revision 2 (Required) -- after the break.That means this revision is optional.
I will be happy to give you feedback on this revision, and you will be able to turn your Essay 3 Revision 2 shortly after the break.
Final Self-Assessment Draft
You could think of this as a major overhaul of your ISP, but written after the fact. No more promises and plans, but rather use your ISP to help you look back on your semester and assess your progress.
