First of all, when you turn in your paper on Thursday, please bring: your rough draft, your final draft, all of the invention work you’ve done, your writing process log, and the responses your peers write to you today. Put all of this material into a cheap two-pocket folder. Remember I want to see changes between the two drafts.
Second: help your peers make these changes by answering the following questions about their drafts. Write the answers out on a separate sheet of paper; don’t write on the draft itself, with the exception of number 3 below (this will help you avoid the temptation to “mark up” the draft with things about grammar, spelling, etc. – remember, we’re dealing with global issues here, not local ones).
1) What in the story do you want to know more about? Are there any crucial facts that seem to be missing (like “Where were your parents anyway?” in Sample Paper 5)? Also: Are there any facts included that seem like they’re important, but it’s hard for you to tell why?
2) Remember that the story is supposed to be interesting – that means it has a) high stakes, b) sense details that our emotions can key into, and c) twists and turns over the course of the story. How can it be clearer that the stakes are high for the main character of the paper (the writer’s younger self)? Where can the writer work in more sense details? (Also note if there are places where the writer goes into too much details about things that aren’t crucial to the story – that is, where the writer can condense).
3) The story is supposed to establish a positive ethos, but do it in a subtle way. If there are any places where the writer is saying things straight out like “I learned to be a very helpful person that day,” circle them so the writer knows to be a little more subtle at that point.
4) Look back at the paper and do, paragraph by paragraph, a rhetorical outline of it – summarizing not what the paper says, but what it does. If the story is just one long paragraph, where does that long chunk of text change what it does? That’s where the paragraph breaks should be.
5) Now, write down one more thing that the paper can possibly do to add more interest or to make the ethos stronger.
First of all, when you turn in your paper on Thursday, please bring: your rough draft, your final draft, all of the invention work you’ve done, your writing process log, and the responses your peers write to you today. Put all of this material into a cheap two-pocket folder. Remember I want to see changes between the two drafts.
Second: help your peers make these changes by answering the following questions about their drafts. Write the answers out on a separate sheet of paper; don’t write on the draft itself, with the exception of number 3 below (this will help you avoid the temptation to “mark up” the draft with things about grammar, spelling, etc. – remember, we’re dealing with global issues here, not local ones).
1) What in the story do you want to know more about? Are there any crucial facts that seem to be missing (like “Where were your parents anyway?” in Sample Paper 5)? Also: Are there any facts included that seem like they’re important, but it’s hard for you to tell why?
2) Remember that the story is supposed to be interesting – that means it has a) high stakes, b) sense details that our emotions can key into, and c) twists and turns over the course of the story. How can it be clearer that the stakes are high for the main character of the paper (the writer’s younger self)? Where can the writer work in more sense details? (Also note if there are places where the writer goes into too much details about things that aren’t crucial to the story – that is, where the writer can condense).
3) The story is supposed to establish a positive ethos, but do it in a subtle way. If there are any places where the writer is saying things straight out like “I learned to be a very helpful person that day,” circle them so the writer knows to be a little more subtle at that point.
4) Look back at the paper and do, paragraph by paragraph, a rhetorical outline of it – summarizing not what the paper says, but what it does. If the story is just one long paragraph, where does that long chunk of text change what it does? That’s where the paragraph breaks should be.
5) Now, write down one more thing that the paper can possibly do to add more interest or to make the ethos stronger.