Thursday, September 23

Today we talked through revisions - with a special focus on revising response essays.

Common issues were:

1. Clarifying the focus (making sure you made a point in response to one point by R&Z)
2. Writing a stronger introduction + conclusion
3. Strengthening your focus (making sure each paragraph developed your focus in a different way)
4. Development - making sure you included new material -examples/illustration/discussion to support/open up YOUR points => the response to R&Z
5. Organization - checking that you state the authors' point (what you are responding to) before developing your response; checking that you set up the overall point before developing the supporting points

After talking about strategies for working on each of these issues, you worked in pairs to conduct coaching sessions on your draft essays. I will look through the emails you wrote about your experiences as coach + writer - and if you don't hear back from me - that means you are on track.

For Tuesday:

1. Write an analysis that compares the strengths & weaknesses of your two drafts, and states how you chose which essay to revise. We listed points for analysis on the board. These included:

• strength + clarity of the focus
• lots of material for development
• stronger overall organization
• better intro + conclusion
• will learn more from revising (be sure to state what you will learn)
• like the topic better (still need to include analysis of the strengths + weaknesses)

2. Write a plan for revising your draft. This plan should identify what you need to work on - and include some of the prewriting/revising activities you will use to work on your revision.

This writing does not need to be a polished essay. I am looking for logical in-depth reasoning that will set you up to write a strong essay. This writing should be turned in as an attachment to the course email before class Tuesday.

In class on Tuesday you will conduct coaching sessions where you work on revising your essays. If you know you will not have much time to work on your writing between Tuesday and Thursday - you should probably come to class with a draft - but you are not required to turn in a revised draft until Thursday.

Have a good weekend!