Friday, April 28, 2006

Draft of essay due!

Notes

We’ll spend a few minutes wrapping up our discussion of The Winter’s Tale (focusing especially on the conclusion and the role of Paulina). Then we’ll have a kind of “writing workshop” that focuses on peer editing. Make sure to bring two copies of your essay to class.

Writing workshop

The purpose of a peer editing session is to help you gauge your ability to communicate with an audience, in this case an audience of your peers. Sharing one’s ideas with others and having them evaluated is a critical stage in the writing process: without feedback, one has no concrete way of evaluating one’s evidence or the logic of an argument. (A good peer reviewer may even help point you in a more productive direction.)

During class, you will work in pairs, each of you reading the other’s essay. After you have read each other’s essay, you should discuss the essays with each other. In addition, you should provide written feedback, either on the essay itself or on a separate sheet. As you read, do not correct for grammar! Instead, note confusing sentences, but spend most of your time in answering the following questions:

• What is the author’s thesis statement? (Follow-up: Does the author actually make a claim that requires the evidence?)
• What is the topic sentence of each paragraph? (Follow-up: Do any paragraphs seem to address more than one topic?)
• Do the paragraphs follow a logical order? (That is, does one paragraph’s topic make sense in light of the previous paragraph?)
• Do these paragraphs — and the evidence the author uses — support the thesis statement?
• Does the conclusion remind you of the author’s initial argument?

There are probably other issues that you want to address, but you should take care to deal with the above questions before getting to your own.