10.21 Workshop on Persuasive essays

How your essays are going. We started class by checking with how you are doing on your drafts. The collective list of "issues to work on we put up on the board was as follows:

• find references for support
• how to set up/refer to the essay that will be replied to
• decided to change topic (back to brainstorming)
• development
• coherence => relating points to focus. making the essay work together
• writing in academic forms
• writing to the assignment

The purpose of today's class is to give you experience working with classmates on addressing these (and related issues) in your writing.

Reviewing the assignment sheet:  In addition to reflecting on what you had trouble with, we took a minute to review the assignment sheet.  I strongly suggest that you keep a copy of the assignment open, and that you check back to it throughout your composing process.  In our brief review of it, we noted that the argument needed to be a reply to/conversation with one of the three assigned readings, and that you needed at least 3 references in your discussion that would work as "development" for your points.

Protocol for discussing drafts:
We listed the points you want to "check out" to make sure your essay meeting expectations.

1. Does the essay write to the assignment?
2. Focus: Is the focus set up in the introduction?  Does the writer make both a general statement of the focus and a list of the specific points s/he will argue?  Is the focus appropriate to the length of the assignment?  Is there more than one focus?  Is there extra/irrelevant material?
3. Organization:
overall organization: setup (Introduce the reading in a way that sets up your reply, transition to a statement of what you will argue=> include the series of points you will make to "prove" your position); argue your points in the order you set up in the introduction (this should be a logical order, include counterarguments if appropriate), present your conclusions.
paragraph structure: topic sentence, material to develop a point related to your focus, transition to next point.
presentation of quotations/evidence: introduce/set up your point, present the quote/evidence, discuss how the quot/evidence relates to your point.
4. Development: 
Check to see that each point has some kind of support to illustrate or show why/how your argument is correct.  Development can take the form of discussions of research, statistics, facts, reports; of personal experiences; of writing by experts; of examples from other colleges/institutions which have tried out the ideas you discuss, and so on.
5. Genre issues/academic forms for writing
Does the essay use academic language (forms from TS/IS)?
Does the essay use acacemic organization (set up the TS then present the IS)?

After you provided feedback to each of the writers in your group, you wrote up a plan for revising your essay and posted it to your Persuasive Essay page.

You spent the rest of class working on your essays, making the changes suggested by review of your essay.

For next class:

Read: any additional references you need for your project; take a look at the fast fold essays
Write:  Revised Project 1
Post: plan for revising your draft; revised Project 1

We will start class by choosing the fast food essays for the analysis essay.  The rest of class will be devoted to in-class conferences on your persuasive essay.