20 Sep Feedback

Writing Circle #1: Guidelines for Responding to Your Group Members Drafts Your assignment is to respond to each of the other papers that are in your group. Keep in mind that these are rough drafts that your classmates will be expanding and developing into longer papers. I have very specific guidelines for you to follow when you give feedback. Please make sure to answer the following questions: 1. Identify the Thesis. What seems to be the papers main idea so far? Be careful a thesis is different than a topic. A topic is simply what the paper is about. If you say, Kevins paper is about the evil inside everyone, you havent identified a thesis. Youve identified a topic. A thesis is what Kevin says about the evil inside everyone. What do the examples Kevin discusses in his paper have to say about this idea of the evil inside? Its possible that the paper doesnt yet have a thesis. After all, its only a draft. If thats the case its important to tell the writer that he doesnt have a thesis yet. But can you also see that the paper might be moving towards a thesis? What might the examples in the paper be leading to? What do all of the points seem to add up to? Give some feedback that will help the writer figure out a possible thesis. 2. Where does the paper summarize and where does it analyze? Summarizing is just re-telling bits of the story. Analyzing means explaining why these bits are important and what they have to do with the papers thesis. (So, for example, its not enough to point out that Dr. Jekyll is upper class. If this is part of your paper, then you need to talk about why thats important to the story and how it drives his need to create Hyde.) If there are places in the paper that just summarize without analyzing, point them out. If there are places in the paper that analyze specific passages or examples from the story, point them out and explain how they are connected to the papers thesis. Its really hard to analyze instead of just summarizing. So one thing that you could do thats really helpful is to try to make suggestions to the writer about points she might make or how she might analyze her material. Finally, please be specific. When you give feedback, do not simply say, Yes, you analyzed enough or Yes, I think you have a thesis, or You could use some more examples. Tell them where and what they analyzed, what their thesis seems to be, or what other examples they might use. Score: I will be looking over your feedback and giving you a score from 1-4. This score will not count towards your grade, but I want you to know if you are doing a good job. If you are giving good feedback, it probably means that you understand what want you to do in your paper. If you are not giving good feedback, its important to understand what youre doing wrong so that you dont do it wrong in your paper. What I want is for you to figure this out now so that when it comes time to get a grade, youll do a good job.