Bookkeeping: As soon as all this draft and peer review stuff gets sorted out, like Wednesday afternoon, I will be reposting the grade spreadsheet so everyone knows where they stand going into the final research paper deadline.
More Bookkeeping: The English department is asking 302 students to take this survey.
Ideas
1. Mark the thesis statement, or whatever seems most like a thesis statement, in green highlight. Then write a logical reversal. (E.g. I say we should leave no child behind.. ---> I say we should leave all the children behind.)
2. Imagine for the moment that you are David Simon, and also that you just got a parking ticket. This has put you in a bad mood and reminded you how tired you are of people misinterpreting and misapplying your ideas, or just using you as their general purpose guru or strawman for arguments that don't even really relate to The Wire. Explain why you simply aren't interested to read the essay.
3. Mark the method statement, or whatever seems most like a method statement, in italicized green typeface. Now, remember when we used the "I don't mean X, but rather Y" template? You want to complete a template like that for the writer here, in the rough form of, "Although method X would be a good way to explore/prove this thesis, method Y is better/more practical." If I'm not being clear, method Y is the one they are actually already using and method X is one they have (implicitly) opted against.
4. Play devil's advocate and disagree with at least one of the sub-arguments introduced after the introduction. Explain why.
Argument
5. Mark the best paragraph transition in light blue. Write these words next to it: "You earnt dat bump like a mahfucka."
6. Mark the paragraph transition that needs the most work, probably the one that is currently the weakest but perhaps just the one that is the most important, in dark blue. Rewrite the sentence, or try to indicate what the appropriate logic might be.
7. What is one area of minor focus in the essay that could expand into an area of major focus?
8. What is one area of major focus in the essay that could contract into an area of minor focus?
Language
9. Mark the best written sentence in the essay in yellow. Write these words next to it: "Natural po-lice!"
10. Mark at least one sentence in orange (or gold) that isn't clear to you or doesn't express its meaning as well as it could.
11. Mark at least one sentence in red that seems to carry a tone inappropriate to the audience, perhaps overly formal or overly casual.
12. Mark at least one sentence in gray that does not grammatically incorporate a quotation as well as it could. If you can't find one suitable for this, find a sentence that doesn't grammatically incorporate a fact/statistic/idea from a research source as well as it could.
Research
13. Mark each sentence in violet that appears to need a resource citation, but does not currently have one.
14. Mark each sentence in purple that relies too heavily on a weaker source without providing adequate disclaimer/context.
15. Provide at least two database search strings that might help find a couple of "icing on the cake" sources. It would help if you could target this to an area you identified in question #7 or question #13.
16. Not specifically a research question, but I'm sticking it here at the end. Formulate one specific question you would ask Aaron about this essay if you were the writer. See Reminder below for guidelines.
Reminder: Once you are able to absorb the advice from your classmates and get a chance to incorporate some of it, you then have the opportunity to ask me up to three questions about your draft. I will answer these in the order received, so regardless of whether you sent me a draft document Sunday night / Monday morning, please share or send a new document by Wednesday night at 9pm with your three questions at the top (even if it's just the same one over again). Please make the questions as specific as possible. I am not likely to give substantive answers to questions like, "What do you think about this essay?" or "How is my organization," etc. It helps to give me forced distributions, like, "Which needs more of my attention, X or Y?" Or, "I am looking for a solution to this particular dilemma, do you think A, B, or C would be best?" It also helps you to be more specific like that because it allows you to reflect more.
An Important Clarification: Your research essay needs to have a bibliography, or works cited, or endnotes, or footnotes, or in more basic terms a list of the books/articles/sources that it refers to. My statement that you do not need to include an annotated bibliography has led to some confusion. I meant that for your final draft, you don't need to include the annotations, meaning the paragraph of notes after each bibliographic entry. You do need to include the bibliographic citations themselves. Moreover, it is standard practice (and required practice within both MLA and APA styles) to include parenthetical citations within the body of your text that guide your reader to figure out what part of your list of sources you're actually referring to at any given time. In other words, if Jones did a study of laser guns, and you talk about it on page two of your essay, it's not enough to just put this study in your list of sources at the end. You also want to refer to it on page two so that your reader knows that's where that specific information came from.
Demonstration Thereof:
Sorry, the laser gun thing is an inside joke from last semester. We were brainstorming topics and one kid said (possibly serious about it) that he wanted to write about laser guns, so I used that for the model.
This is my paper about laser guns. Laser guns are awesome and totally not made up and everyone should have one and shoot it, like, all the time. Because of the previous mentioned awesomeness. Of course some skeptics say that this would be dangerous, but I think if they had laser guns they would stop drinking that haterade.
The laser gun was invented by Martha Laser, as detailed in her autobiography (Laser 245-47). But it was not commercialized until several years later (Jones 111) and, as Chen notes, "it would take another decade before every man, woman, and child had one" (Chen 57). The awesomeness of the laser gun was immediately evident to everyone who bought one, because you could use it to shoot all kinds of different stuff and, like, totally vaporize it all to s***. There have even been some cases in which laser guns were used to vaporize other laser guns (Von Schmelberg and Neumann 437). Don't bend your mind into a pretzel trying to figure out how awesome that is, just accept it, OK?
On the other hand, the laser gun has always had its critics. Ironically, it was Laser herself who became the most outspoken of these. "I never thought when I invented the laser gun," she writes, "that people would use them to settle petty disputes like the tip on a restaurant bill, or being cut off in traffic, or a grievance against grades given in college writing courses" (Laser 398). Some of the most noteworthy critical voices of the 30s were mysteriously vaporized (Chen 63). Which could happen to anyone, really, when you think about it.
In conclusion, this has been the greatest essay ever. Ahem.
Bibliography:
Chen, Norbert. A Brief History of Laser Guns and Their Use in the Corn Wars. Polyface Press:
Swoope, 2072.
Jones, Janelle-Monae. "It Took Several Years to Commercialize The Laser Gun." Laser Gun Theory 25.3
(2071): 111-24.
Laser, Martha. My Bad, Y'all. New York: Random House, 2046.
Nehemiah Von Schmelberg and Vustagus Neumann. "Don't Think We Didn't Try It. It's Not Easy to Decide
Who Is the Lead Author for These Studies." Advanced Studies in Trucknuts and Related Post-Industrial Semiotics
8.1 (2071): 6-23.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. Where are you with your research paper?
ReplyDelete-I am in just the editing and tweaking stage of my paper. I feel I just need to clean it up and organize it better. Maybe add some more concrete details if needed after I take a look at it again. I am in a good place with my paper...no more stressing about it!
2. Something you learned...
-I definitely feel the They Say I Say material was very helpful. Transitions have always been an issue for me and I feel that it helped. Also when we went over outlines and organization helped as well. Overall the class has been helpful in fixing my writing skills.
1) I'm pretty pleased about where I am with my paper right now. The draft is not perfect, however, all my sources I have found have been very relevant and I'm glad I chose the topic that I did. On the other hand, I still need to do some major editing and expanding in some places to make the paper flow better.
ReplyDelete2) The They say/I say method we learned was very helpful for me and I learned a lot from that. The scene analysis is also something I learned from because I've learned in other English classes how to analyze a piece of literature but I've never looked that way into a movie or TV show. It's helped me to think more critically and analytically about the world around me.
1. I have not had the amount of time I had hoped for to devote to this research paper in the last week or two. I feel I am in decent shape to further my paper now that I can devote the bulk of my attention to organizing my thoughts and information. I am fairly confident that I will be able to produce decent paper by the 8th.
ReplyDelete2. I think the biggest thing I've learned this semester is to go easy on myself. I tend to lean toward research topics that are maybe a little more obscure than others with relatively little information to be found. This tends to leave me struggling, frustrated, lost and generally dissatisfied with the final result. I started this paper with just such a topic and, 2 days into researching, switched to an entirely different topic. In the first day of researching this new topic, I felt far more confident with the potential outcome of my research than I normally do. Moral of the story, it doesn't always pay to be different.
1. Where are you with your research paper? - I'm rereading and editing my paper, trying to look for better sources to have better argument.
ReplyDelete2. Something you learned - I learned that I am able to use "I" in papers. I think the entire "They say/I say" helped me and learning how to do transitions espeically in our introduction paragraph.
1. I am still in the process of organizing my paper, and finding alternative sources that offer a rebuttal to my thesis.
ReplyDelete2. I learned that a confident writer that does not use emphasis words :)
1. So far, I’ve established a general idea on the content of my research paper and how the topics I’ve addressed contribute to my thesis. I’m still working on transitioning many of these ideas to one another as well as touching up on the format of my paper, e.g. MLA or APA format within the body.
ReplyDelete2. I would say that the essays we’ve worked on earlier in the semester have improved my strengths as a writer as well as weaknesses. Prior to taking the course, I had a difficult time forming a proper thesis and properly citing my sources in certain formats. I will say that The Wire’s hidden references, such as the Wiretap and it’s relation towards our writing assignments have also made a big impact.