PART II

Pre-Reading

The pre-reading part of the paper arc, occurring when the instructor first presents a new reading to her class, is a crucial point in the entire process. At this stage, we want students to be able engage with the concepts introduced by a new essay in the context both of readings that they have already worked with but also, equally importantly, with the text as a discrete entity. At this stage both reading comprehension and contextualizing the issues seem to be the most pressing points of engagement—a student needs to start to understand the concepts introduced by the new essay, and how they may possibly engage with other texts, but also with the world in which the students are reading.

This stage focuses students’ attention on particular parts of the new text, without the expectation that the students have read the whole text. This part requires preparation on the part of the teacher, in order to focus students’ attention, and to get them into making meaning of the new, possibly intimidating, prose, that they see before them. We ask students to read for three things:

• reading for narrative

• reading for focus on main ideas

• reading for connecting between readings, moving between old and new

The first engagement with the text, whether it be by discussion of the issues which surround the ideas in the reading, or by focusing on small quotes from the reading chosen by the teacher, or by some other means, can be directed as any of the areas above. Covering the range of them in the course of the semester—and making explicit what role the activity serves with respect to each of these kinds of reading—helps students to see the various ways in which they can dive in.

Questions to Get Students into the Reading

In order to reinforce the idea that reading and writing go hand-in-hand, as well as giving students concrete points of access to the text, instructors usually assign some “reading question(s)” for students to consider as they begin a new selection from the textbook; a question or suggested focus that will encourage students to begin “making a mark” on the text, and to begin writing a response to the text so as to make meaning of it. With such pre-writing in hand, students will be prepared to participate much more productively in the ensuing class discussion of the assigned reading. Even if you only ask students to write a list of their own questions as they read, they will come to class more ready to make sense of the text than if they were simply to read it cold.

Throughout this reading and re-reading process, students will often find that, as one question is answered or one problem resolved, another question or problem—often a more complex one—emerges. This trial-and-error or exploratory method of conducting class discussion is messier than lecturing to the students, or simply answering their questions as they arise, but it has several advantages over lecturing. Not only does the exploratory method usually cover the same textual issues that a lecture would, but it also raises important issues that you yourself might not have thought to raise. The exploratory method also models—and gives students practice in—learning as discovery, rather than as delivery of understanding from teacher to student. Finally, the exploratory method gets all students (not just those who are already comfortable talking in class) involved in the text’s understanding, especially when small-group work precedes full-class discussion.

Activities for a New Essay

Here are some specific activities you can use for initial in-class work with a new essay:

Using the Link-O-Mat

Either schedule a class in a computer classroom when beginning a new reading, or ask your students to visit the Link-O-Mat for that essay before they come to class. Use the questions in each Link-O-Mat to initiate discussion, or ask students to go beyond the material there to locate other web pages that speak to the issue of this reading.

Group Pictionary

Divide the class into groups, and ask each group to draw a picture of an idea or concept from the essay (for example, Kaldor’s “netforce”). Have someone from each group draw the group’s picture on the board and explain it to the class. Switching to the visual provides a new register that can unearth new meanings.

Locating Contexts

Divide the class into small groups and ask them to generate a list of the larger contexts for this essay, locating quotations from the piece that point to that context or larger conversation. For example, with Guinier, students may list Democracy, Voting, Equal Rights, Race, and others. Not only does this generate the themes of the essay, but it also helps students to see that these texts are not isolated writings but participate in larger conversations. It additionally gives them practice in locating these larger conversations through the written and unwritten clues in the essays.

Close Reading Activity
By Michael Goeller

• Look at the second paragraph from Kaldor’s essay. What vision of society does she suggest is characterized by the term “modernity”? How does his vision compare/contrast with Amy Chua’s vision of the modern world? Type out a brief answer to these questions, being sure to quote parts of that first paragraph.

• Identify what you think is the closest thing to a thesis statement (that is, a paragraph or short passage that you think states very briefly the overall argument) in Mary Kaldor’s essay. Type out this paragraph or passage. Then explain what you think Kaldor is saying in the passage you’ve chosen—and therefore what her overall argument is, in your own words. (You’ll have a chance to revise this at some later point—so just do your best to lay out what you think his overall thesis is, as you understand it right now—hopefully, of course, that understanding will improve as we continue to read and discuss Kaldor in the coming weeks.)

• Do the same with Chua. What’s her thesis?

Preparing the Path
By Martin Pousson

[Before I hand out the assignment for an essay, I give my 100-level students a set of pre-writing activities. Some they complete in class, others they finish at home. I keep the same exercise structure for each essay, but adapt the questions and material to match the shift in sequence.]

Directing Summary

In one sentence each, summarize what Boyarin, Gould, and Armstrong are trying to do in their respective essays.

Finding Quotations

Flipping through the three essays, mark at least two places in each essay where you see the authors discuss the importance of words or terms in making meaning.

Providing Definitions

In complete sentences, using a quotation from Armstrong, define “fundamentalism.” Using a quotation from Gould, define “evolution.”

Forming Interpretations

What do you think Armstrong sees as the cause of changes in the way people view God or religion? How does Boyarin view the cause of change in the way he or others view religious identity? What parallels can you draw between Armstrong’s description of social change and Boyarin’s description of individual change? Find at least one quotation in each essay that supports your view.

Supporting Conclusions

Which of these writers—Boyarin, Gould, or Armstrong—do you find most valuable in considering the way that religious ideology shapes the way we see the world and describe it in language? Find a quotation from that author and use it to explain what you find most compelling about his or her point of view.

At-Home Assignment

Before you begin your rough draft, write one full paragraph (no less than nine sentences) in which you make reference to Boyarin, Gould, and Armstrong as you discuss the relationship between religion and language in shaping a worldview.

Writing in Class and Presenting New Texts
By Christine A. Cerrato

I find that the best way to begin a discussion is with student writing. Whenever I introduce the third essay into a sequence, I bring to class a page of three quotations, one from each author. I have students write on the first quote for ten minutes. Then, I tell them to connect the ideas in the second quote to those in the first quote and write for ten more minutes. For the final ten minutes, I have them connect the third quote (which is relatively or completely new to them) to the ideas in the first two. Then, each student reads a portion of his or her writing to the class.

By taking the passages out of context, I encourage the students to close-read and make connections between them. Once they have made these initial connections, the larger essays do not seem as intimidating. In addition, it’s important for them to see the ways we can make connections between passages in creating their assignments.

I think that this method works best when you pick particularly difficult passages, or ones that highlight major disagreements between two or three writers. When I choose the more difficult passages, I find that students have more to discuss after they write than they do if I choose passages that offer explicit connections between them. The responses I received from my students led to an engaged discussion in which many students participated.

Introducing a New Reading
By Karen Zivi

Together we read a passage or a series of passages from the essay. . . . After we’ve read aloud, I have the students spend some time (five minutes or so) writing down what they think is going on in the reading. . . . We then spend 15–20 minutes discussing the meaning of the passage(s). I usually prepare a series of questions in case I need to direct the flow of the discussion. For example, I may push them to identity places in the text that support their interpretations or to define a term or phrase more clearly. If need be, I may direct them to other parts of the text. (I spend a total of 30–45 minutes on this exercise.)

Reading and Rereading

This stage occurs on the second day of the cycle, when the student has spent some time reading the text on his own. This is the point at which you can have expectations that the students will know something about the text, but not have the detailed knowledge that comes from focused rereading, especially that which is produced by the pressure of an assignment question. Most importantly, this is the moment where the students are making meaning from the text, sorting out their own interpretations of the text, looking at what the text says both globally and specifically. The activities in this section, like the pre-reading activities, give ways to help our students find ways into the text, and make their own paths through it.

Drawing Pictures to Aid Revision
By Michael Goeller

I have often experimented with drawing in my classes, asking students to draw Thomas Kuhn’s concept of “paradigm” for example. I have also found that “mental maps” are an effective way to get students to start thinking with the right side of their brain to get a larger “picture” of the overall argument in an essay. In teaching Michael Pollan’s “Playing God in the Garden,” for example, you might have students draw a map of all the different groups concerned about bio-engineered potatoes in order to show how these groups relate to each other. Right away, students start to recognize that there are lots of voices represented in Pollan’s essay and there are not just two sides to the issue.

Drawing pictures works best, I find, when combined with close reading so that the picture brings students back to the text rather than drawing their attention away from it. The following series of activities was very effective in combining close reading (left brain) and drawing pictures (right brain) and took up two days of class time. These activities worked very well as a way of moving into the second assignment since they helped students make connections between two essays. I had students do the Close Reading Activity in the computer classroom, using forums, but you could just as easily do it in the regular classroom. The initial close reading got them to focus on just a few short passages and made a great exercise for the first day of a new text, which was the same day that the first paper was due. Most students, of course, had not read more than the first half of the Drucker essay, but they were still able to engage with the activity since it asked them to look at passages that appeared relatively early in his essay. And the homework assignment, which asked them to draw pictures, got them to carry the class exercise a bit further and to revise their initial ideas based on their overall “picture” of the essay. In class on the second day, the pictures were especially effective in supporting public speaking, since students felt very comfortable speaking when they had a visual aid to use (and, sometimes, to hide behind).

Instructions for homework:

For next class you each must do the following:

Draw two pictures, using whatever medium you have available, to represent the visions of globalization offered by Mary Kaldor and Eric Schlosser in their respective essays. You could use crayons, collage, computer graphics, or just pencil and paper. But draw two pictures, and they should be about the size of a standard piece of paper (about eight and a half by eleven inches) or larger, so you can show people in class next time. It may help to think of your picture as a “mental map” of the forces, people, institutions, and other pieces of society that are involved in globalization as portrayed by each of the writers we have examined.

Instructions for class discussion:

1) Get into groups as directed in class.

2) Take turns presenting your drawings of Kaldor’s and Schlosser’s visions of globalization to your small group and to explain how your drawings are meant to capture their two visions. Be sure to discuss the following two questions:

3) What similarities or contrasts do your drawings suggest?

4) How do they help to clarify critical points in the comparison of these writers’ ideas?

5) Once everyone has presented his or her drawings, take a vote on which drawings you think are most effective at capturing the visions of globalization of each writer. You might find that you like one drawing by one student and another by a different student. That’s fine—just reach a consensus on two drawings.

6) Now that you have chosen the drawings, choose two group leaders to present your drawings to the class (one leader for each drawing). The presenters will receive credit toward the public speaking component of the course.

7) To help your presenters prepare, find at least one quotation from Kaldor and one from Schlosser that you think help to support the pictures that you have chosen to present. Be prepared to answer questions from the group and from me—especially about the apparent differences and similarities between these two visions of globalization.

Rethinking Assumptions
By Martin Pousson

[Author’s Note: I decided to try an apparently “reductive and mechanistic” exercise in the hope of leading students to question the assumptions that they made about specific texts. I feared that these sentences would appear verbatim in student essays, but my fears proved unfounded as—instead—some students actually experienced mini-epiphanies as they were led to acknowledge in writing that their ideas had in fact changed.]

Reading Boyarin’s essay made me rethink Gould’s idea that

I now feel that Gould is right/wrong on at least this one point because

Rereading Gould’s essay made me rethink Boyarin’s idea that

I now feel that Boyarin is right/wrong on at least this one point because

Interpreting Quotes
By Tina Crafton

Ask students to select a quotation from each essay they are working with (they do this for homework). In class, ask for volunteers to tell what passages they selected and ask them to discuss how these passages are connected; how they illustrate a common theme or idea. This gives them a head start on their first draft. The class helps the student relate the two passages together (it becomes group interpretation). This allows students to do the work of finding quotes, not the teacher.

From Reading to Writing

Working with the readings in isolation is only a small part of the process of working with the texts in the reader. In the arc of the paper we move very quickly—by the end of the second day in the cycle—to working with the texts in the context of the student’s writing. The following sections offer activities which take students from their first engagement with the assignment question through the revision process, up to handing in the final draft.

Pre-Writing

Pre-writing exercises provide an important step in preparing the student to produce the kind of paper we are asking for. Working out from The New Humanities Reader into their own written work can be intimidating for our students, especially when they are faced with an assignment question with a minimum page length requirement, a weighty reader, and a blank computer screen. Therefore, we ask the student to start small, and to get used to the idea of articulating their thoughts in a written form before they need to think about their writing as a part of the paper itself. In class, informal writing activities provide an ideal forum for an instructor to model the kind of writing and thinking that she expects in the paper itself. Working on a paragraph in isolation, or even parts of a paragraph, gives students an inventory of materials to draw from when they are on their own, faced with their reader and an assignment question.

The activities in this pre-writing section are mostly driven by the student’s first exposure to the assignment question (day two in the paper cycle given above). They ask the student to respond to that question first in isolation, but soon move to asking the student to think about the question the context of the new reading, the old reading, and the old assignments too. Once again, we draw on what the students already know in order to construct ways in to the new question, and the new reading, and into the student’s own paper.

Mapping the Assignment
By Karen Zivi

Depending on where we are in the semester, I may also spend about ten minutes working on reading the next assignment—what I call “mapping the assignment.” We’ll read the assignment together and then I’ll have them write for a few minutes on what they think the theme of the assignment is and what they would do to answer it. (I give writing time to assist those students who aren’t quick to raise their hands or need more time to think things through as well as to force each student to do some independent analysis.) During this exercise, they’re not only practicing textual interpretation (with the assignments text) but also discussing the different steps they’ll take in completing the assignment—from rereading an essay to finding and interpreting citations that support a point. This seems to help them focus their reading and writing and feel less overwhelmed by the assignment. I usually only do this mapping once; twice if I find that they’re having trouble making sense of the assignments. Later in the semester, then, I spend the extra class time on brainstorming connections between what they’ve read in class and the essays they’ve already read. That is, I’ll have them individually write down a series of connections they can make between texts, noting where in the text they can find support for these connections. Then I’ll put them in groups and they’ll choose one or two of the connections and work on paragraph development. That is, as a group, they’ll write a paragraph that includes 1) a framing sentence, 2) appropriate citations, and 3) interpretations of the citations used. I might then ask them to brainstorm about the main focus of the paper that would include this paragraph. Finally, I have them share their paragraphs with the class to see if similar connections were made using different textual support or different interpretations. We also might analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the argument presented by each group. I’ll end final draft days with a reminder that they’ll need to come to the next class prepared to discuss the new reading and assignment.

Puzzling Through the Assignment Enigma: “The Mission Impossible Scenario”
By Michael Goeller

On the day you hand out assignment questions, split the class into groups of three or four students. Give each group the mission—should they choose to accept it or not—of decoding the assignment, in effect rewriting it in their own words without altering its meanings, intentions, or goals. Again, this exercise can be made into a fun contest, with the class voting on which group has come the closest to fulfilling the mission, and saving the world. The “Mission: Impossible” scenario is especially effective at twisting their anxiety about an assignment into excitement and suspense in playing the game. Here is the assignment as I wrote it:

Mission: Impossible—Deciphering the Assignment

Here is your mission—whether you want to accept it or not!

The assignment question for Essay #3 has been posted to the class forum and handed to you in class. Your mission is to decipher the assignment and help your peers (and yourself) begin the process of gathering materials to write a response.

The fate of the free world hangs in the balance!

There are six steps. Do your best to get them done today in class—and if you don’t finish, please return to your response at home or in a campus computer lab to finish your mission. . . .

• In your own words, and to the best of your ability, tell your peers how they can ace this assignment. What is the assignment asking? What will be their mission objectives? Who is the enemy and how will he or she be defeated?

• Using the special secret agent decoding skills we have equipped you with, find an description of what Scott means by the term “public transcript,” and an example of one. Cite a page number and either briefly quote a passage or describe the example. Explain in your own words why this example shows a public transcript.

• Now find an example in Krakauer of a public transcript.

Using the brilliant problem solving skills you have honed in the secret agent academy, locate and point to a passage or an example in Scott that seems to describe a hidden transcript. How does this hidden transcript work—and how can your peers use this idea to defeat the enemy?

Now do the same for Krakauer.

If time allows, tell us what you think is the most important “art of resistance” by which ordinary citizens can help prevent world domination by the forces of power? When you hit the “Reply” button above, this message will disappear, and you will have about an hour to answer these questions. If you fail in your mission . . . well, keep trying and do your best.

This message will now self-destruct. . . . Good luck, class!

Informal In-Class Writing
By Carol Denise Bork

Sometimes, the most gratifying classes lead to the most disastrous papers. We have all had the experience of leaving the classroom thinking, “wow, what a great discussion,” only to get a set of papers a few days later than show none of the insight that was so apparent in the discussion. In order to help students make a stronger bridge between the good discussions they have in class and the solitary experience of writing a paper, I try to encourage lots of informal in-class writing. This is writing that students do “on-the-fly,” in the course of the discussion (rather than the more formal mode of in-class writing with which I often start my classes). Encouraging informal in-class writing is particularly important for struggling students, who often have not yet developed strong note-taking habits. Here are some ways to develop informal in-class writing into the class:

When small groups are reporting on their discussions, remind the rest of the class to jot down important ideas. It’s crucially important for students to leave the classroom—even after a day of discussion—with something concrete to which they can refer as they work on their papers. Some students may not have good note-taking habits, and constant reminders to write down useful ideas that come up in conversation can help them to develop in that area. (For example, “Lee just made an excellent point about . . . ; can anyone paraphrase what Lee just said? You might want to jot that idea down, and think about it more while you work on your paper this weekend. . . .”)

Take brief “writing breaks” every ten or fifteen minutes during a discussion. After a period of strong discussion, I will say, “take a few minutes to write down the most important ideas from the discussion so far.” Near the end of class, I will say, “take a few minutes to jot down the ideas from discussion that you will want to work with in your paper.” Then I will ask the class as a whole if they want anyone to repeat anything. This question helps students to reflect on the discussion immediately, so that they can add to their notes.

Ask students to write 5 substantive questions about the discussion so far. After 10 or 15 minutes of discussion, ask students to reflect back on the discussion and write down questions about issues that have been raised in the discussion. If students find this daunting, you can even provide some patterns for questions, such as “what is the relationship between ______ and ______?” or when ______ writes about ______ does she mean ______ or ______?

Tell students at the beginning of the discussion that you will call on someone to re-cap the important points later in the class. This means that everyone has to take notes and be ready to report on the high points of the discussion, including disagreements and ambiguities. (Make sure to affirm that the student chosen for this task does a good job, so that others will be willing to try in the future.)

Working with Text

The next stage in making the connection between assignment and texts, and between reading and writing, often comprises brainstorming connections between the readings, in the context of the new assignment question.

In order to bridge the gap between a student’s interpretation of an idea in one of the texts in the New Humanities Reader texts, and the act of responding to them in writing, and to help students engage responsibly with the essays in The New Humanities Reader, classroom activities are often centered around working in detail with quotations of those essays. The usual way that we ask students to incorporate the ideas from the texts is by using direct quotation; in a paper where we are asking a student to make his own voice heard, perhaps for the first time, it is essential to formally delineate when the student’s idea ends, and those in the readings begin. At this stage of the writing process we ask students not only to think about what a quote says, but what it does in the context of the essay in which it occurs, and what purpose it can serve in their own paper. We encourage students to build connections between the texts with a somewhat vague idea of the assignment question in mind, rather than setting out a thesis and seeking quotes that will help them prove it: the latter approach leads to reductive thinking makes it difficult for students to make complex connections or to develop a project which addresses the complications in the readings in the context of their own ideas. Therefore, the activities outlined below focus on building connections between the text as a starting point for the student’s own project, rather than treating the student’s project as being a complete thought before he gets to the text.

The exercises in this section help students to deal with quotes in three ways:

• quotes in context

• quotes in isolation

• quotes in conversation

These three ways of using quotation all help students to understand the text and its implications for their own project, and also, simply, to have something to write.

Working out—The Grid
By Heather Robinson

Have students take a sheet of paper, draw a grid with three columns along the top, and a row for every text that the assignment question asks for. These terms should be kept fairly general—they are supposed to facilitate connection, rather than stymieing the student by seeking specific connections between the readings that will have to be forced. Then the students choose three words or phrases from the assignment question, and write a word in each column. The student writes one of the author’s names in each of the rows. The empty boxes in the middle of the grid are then filled with quotes that the student finds, which can be connected. Importantly, the words in the top boxes of the column provide inspiration for the connection, rather than occurring in the quotes themselves.

It also works well to leave a row blank at the bottom of the grid, so the student can describe the connection that they’re seeing, so when they go home to write it up, the don’t have to reconstruct the idea.

This exercise works well as an on-the-board activity, as well as something for students to do individually, or in small groups. Some individual preparation may facilitate the whole-class activity.

Interpreting Quotes
By Tina Crafton

Give students a difficult passage from the essay and ask them to explain and then interpret the passage, paying attention to particular words and phrases and how these things indicate tone and meaning. Ask them to tie the passage to the larger theoretical issues the essay brings up.

Idea vs. Example Quotes
By Heather Robinson

I’ve found it useful to have students not just pick out quotes that they think will fit into their essays, but also to reflect on what sort of quote they are choosing. I have students choose quotes from the two different essays, and write the two quotes on the board, along with a brief description of the idea that they using to connect them. We then look at the relationship between the two quotes. Are they offering an idea, and an example that helps to show how the idea works? Are they both examples, which show the student’s connecting idea working in some way? Are they both ideas, either in contrast, or comparison, or does one offer a possible direction for development of the other? I also like to point out that the quotes that helped them to understand what was happening in an essay on their first reading are not necessarily the quotes that will work best to explore ideas: examples are only useful in the context of an idea that they are trying to demonstrate.

I then ask them to repeat the exercise—from quote choice, to discussion of what the quotes are doing in relation to each other—and thus start to build a paragraph of their own.

In The New Humanities Reader classroom we see the production of an initial draft as a beginning, rather than an end. Just as we ask students to produce text in response to essays in the reader, so we then ask them to respond to each others’ papers. The activities given earlier in this chapter set students up with the materials they need to create a project that allows them to think connectively about the texts in the reader, and the assignment question. In this section we offer activities that help students with the mechanics of making connections, and building a project, in the context of writing a five-page paper. By focusing on connective thinking, and encouraging students to visit and revisit their own, and others’ work, we are trying to bridge the gap—often a large one—between what a student can say and understand in response to the readings, and what he can actually articulate in a written form. By focusing on the steps of the process, rather than the finished product, we strive to build students’ confidence in their own abilities to build a project which responds to issues in the world—but which they can own—and to help them to generate the text that will comprise their paper.

Connecting

When we ask students write a paper that responds to an essay or essays from The New Humanities Reader, we are asking them to respond in specific ways. Particularly, we are asking them to do more than report on what an author says, and to do more than apply one author’s ideas to another’s. Rather, we are asking them to enter into a conversation with the voices in the texts with which they are working; to not only build points of connection between the texts, and the texts and the assignment, but also to have their own voice guide the discussion. In the pedagogy of The New Humanities Reader, students are asked to put forward a project, through which the conversation between the student and the texts, the assignment question and the readings, the students and the assignment question, come together. This is not a simple task—it requires the student to analyze, interpret, and go beyond an argument which they try to “win,” and a thesis that they try to “prove.” We encourage students to see that complications can make their project stronger, and that a project that recognizes nuances and complications, and grapples with them through connective thinking, will not only help them to succeed in their composition class, but will also help them in the rest of their academic writing, and beyond. The activities and handouts in this section help students to write themselves into a conversation with the ideas in the readings.

From an Argument to a Project
By Barclay Barrios

In the second essay, most everyone had a strong sense of project, but in many cases it was too strong, making it too much like an argument. What’s the difference? Well . . .

Argument
Is something you want to win	Is something you want to accomplish
Is reductive	Is complex
Is neat, all the evidence falling into place	Is messy, because evidence is
Points to the texts	Points through the texts to something more
Will help you pass a paper	Will help you do well on a paper

Another way to think of this is to say that arguments have no action horizons; they’re concerned with proving something about the texts (one author right or wrong), but they don’t use the texts to suggest any solution. Sometimes I’ll use the terms interchangeably in class and elsewhere, because I don’t want us to abandon argument. But, whenever you hear “argument” also think “project,” and whenever you hear “project” also think “argument.”

On Textual Responsibility

The problem with an argument is that because you need to prove it, in fact because you need to win it, you’ll tend to let the argument override everything else, most especially the complexity of the texts. That means you’ll “leave out” parts of the text that don’t help you win your argument, or that hurt your argument, or that (more simply) complicate your argument.

But in order to do well in this class, your argument/project must be responsible to the text. What does that mean? Better to give some examples of what it means when you’re not responsible to the text:

• Arguing that all men in Bedouin society think that women are always stupid, regardless of how much education they receive—without noting that this is Kamla’s depiction of the situation.

• Arguing that Kamla “eventually becomes successful in her profession because of the education she received” or that she married an Egyptian man—indicates that the writer didn’t read the essay enough to grasp the details.

• Arguing that Kamla’s father feared that the Bedouin girls “could have a say or opinion about their own lives” without noting that Kamla expressed many opinions.

Being responsible to the text means that as you make your point, you take into account what both essays have to say about it. Of course, if you’re just arguing, that’s tricky, because arguments are supposed to be black and white—projects aren’t, because the texts aren’t.

On Locating a Project with Textual Responsibility

Part of the problem may be the way in which you come to your argument. Basically, there are two ways to locate a project:

1. Read the essays, think about them, formulate an argument, and then go back into the essays to find the quotations you need to prove it.

2. Read the essays, think about them, look through the text for quotations, and then formulate an argument from them.

The problem with method one is that you’re more likely to skip over (unconsciously even) the very passages you need to complicate your project. In other words, if you start with an argument and try to prove it, you’re much more like to end up with an argument that is not responsible to the text. On the other hand, if you begin with the texts, with the problems you find in the passages, if you think about these problems and think about how they resonate in passages from the other text, then your argument/project will have greater textual responsibility, because it will come from the text rather than being forced or mapped onto the text.

For Paper Three

Think about:

• Action horizons. OK, so you’ve located a problem or conflict, how can you discuss the issues in a way that doesn’t reduce or simplify the complexity of the issues?

• Projects. Yes, I still need a clear statement of what your paper is going to do, yes in many ways this is still an argument. But locate an argument that is complex, that acknowledges the essays, and that isn’t concerned with proving someone right or wrong so much as it is concerned with finding a way to negotiate the problems the texts present.

• Stay responsible. Whether you start with project and move to text, or start with text and move to project, be sure to consider how all the parts of both texts impact your argument. Remember, if you find a passage that works against your argument it’s not a problem—it’s an opportunity! Modifying your position to take that passage into account will create a more nuanced and complex and sophisticated and better project/argument/paper.

Framing and Making Connections
By Carol Denise Bork

I had a class that had lots of trouble “making connections.” They all wrote paragraphs that included discussion of two writers, but they were very few substantive connections between the ideas of different writers. In desperation, I tried this exercise.

Choose one of the sentences below as a starting place. Fill in the first blank with a specific incident or idea from Baldwin’s essay, and fill in the second blank with a specific concept that is important in Bellah’s essay. Then continue writing until you have at least 200 words explaining the connection you have made.

Abu-Lughod’s description of ___________________ is a good example of Scott’s concept of ___________________ because . . .

Abu-Lughod’s description of ___________________ is a poor example of Scott’s concept of ___________________ because . . .

I was concerned that this exercise would lead to a simplistic, constraining notion of framing because it seemed so reductive and mechanistic. However, it proved extremely productive, and was the turning point for most of the students in the class. While I had worried that these sentences would appear in papers exactly as I had presented them, instead students used the exercise to develop the skill of “framing,” and quickly moved beyond the simple model provided by the exercise.

I devised this exercise as an attempt to help students make substantive connections between ideas; however, I was pleased to discover that the “fill in the blank” format was also useful for working with quotations. Most of the students in this class were already fairly skillful at the mechanics of quoting. However, this exercise helped those who had not acquired that skill to practice it, and also helped everyone to make more meaningful use of quotation.

Super-Secret Formula for Connection
By Barclay Barrios

Cl ® I ® Q1 ® E ® T ® Q2 ® Ce

Cl = Start by stating your claim, what you are trying to prove.

I = Then introduce the first quotation.

Q1 = Give the first quotation.

E = Explain it in your own words.

T = Give some sort of transition to the next quotation, providing a clue to connection.

Q2 = Give the second quote.

Ce = Explain how the second quote connects to the first one in a sentence or two. This last part is crucial. You need to explain the connection in order to really prove it.

Paragraphing
By Heather Robinson and Michelle Brazier

This worksheet is extremely formulaic, but it particularly helps weaker students in working towards a passing paper. By requiring the students to make sure their paragraphs contain each of the elements given below, they are forced to make rudimentary connections (by physical juxtaposition of quotations if nothing else), which we can help them articulate and complicate in the revision process. These are the parts of a paragraph (the essential parts—you can have more if you want):

1. Claim: what you are trying to show in the paragraph

This sentence is the one where you tell your reader how you will contribute to your answer the assignment question, or to your project, in this particular paragraph. It should express an idea, or an observation about the issues you are addressing, rather than a detached statement of fact, or a quote, or an idea directly taken from one of the readings. It should be yours.

2. Introduction to the first quotation (with proper punctuation: none, comma, colon)

This sentence should include:

• A brief “set-up,” where you highlight for your reader what you want them to look at in the quotation.

• A suggestion of how the quotation relates to your claim, either by supporting it, or offering a contrasting perspective.

3. The first quotation

This should take the form of a grammatical sentence. Make sure that you incorporate it seamlessly and sensibly into your own sentence. Use correct punctuation and [brackets], if necessary.

4. An explanation of the quotation, in your own words

This is where you explain what the important parts of the quotation are. In your explanation you could emphasize a key word (explaining why it is a key word), or you could rephrase an important idea. Indicate to your reader what they need to pay attention to.

5. A transition sentence

This is a sentence which helps you to move from the idea you were exploring using the first quotation, to the idea that you will be exploring using the second one. This is the sentence where you explain your connection, and thus the relationship between the two quotations with which you are working. Think of it as the hinge-point of your idea connection.

Your connection might be:

• A comparison (. . . and . . .)

• A contrast (. . . but . . .)

• A development (if . . . then, furthermore) [Please note: “also” is not a form of development]

• A complication (or, on the other hand, however)

• Frame-case (the first quote gives a theory, the second an example which shows the theory at work, or how the example contradicts the theory)

We are striving for one of the latter—connections which are either complications of the idea you started off with in the first part of the paragraph, or developments of that idea (not simply addition). Comparisons and contrasts are OK, but they limit the kinds of claims you can make because they constitute an “either-or” relationship that is black-and-white; grey is the bread and butter of writing. That is why “complications” are the most useful kinds of connections you can make in these papers.

6. Introductory sentence #2

This sentence sets up the next quotation. Tell your reader what to look for when they are reading. See also point 4 above.

7. Quotation

Idea or example?

8. Explanation of the quotation

This is where you explain what the important parts of the quotation are. In your explanation you could emphasize a key word (explaining why it is a key word), or you could rephrase an important idea. Indicate to your reader what they need to pay attention to.

9. Concluding sentences: highlight the connection > paragraph transition

Bring the first author/quote back into the discussion. This is the 2nd place in this paragraph where you should highlight your connection between the two authors. Explain how the two quotes have helped you to develop your claim in this paragraph. Then use your paragraph transition to move from the main idea of this paragraph to the claim you will make in the very first sentence of the next paragraph. Always be conscious of the idea that connects this paragraph to the next one.

N.B. This paragraphing sheet can also be adapted effectively into an exercise where students read each other’s work. By breaking the paragraph down in this way, we can ask other students to look for the component parts and alert the writer if they are not present.

Noun Flow Chart
By Jen Schubert

This exercise particularly helps students to make concrete the links that they are seeing between texts by having them form chains of nouns within quotations, and between quotes and the student’s own discussion. I see it having three solid realms of application

• connects student’s ideas (response to assignment question) with quotes

• connects claim and support

• connects two texts via quotes

• maps development of ideas within a single quote

The student starts by reading some part of each text that they want to make connections between or in (assignment question, quotes from text) and selects the important nouns in each. If the student is just looking at a single quote, he can choose the important nouns in that quote. He then writes on how they relate to each other—how they help the author put their own idea together. The same thing happens between assignment question and quotes, or between two quotes—the student focuses on the nouns, and then must explain the relationships between the nouns from his own perspective. The student can then refer back to these nouns—and use them—in his own discussion of the text. In addition, making the student focus on a particular noun, or a particular few nouns maintains the focus of a paragraph, connecting all the component parts coherently, and giving the reader the thread of the whole passage.

Worksheet for Connecting
By Barclay Barrios

Introduction

You probably know by now that connections are a crucial component to a passing 101 paper, but you may not know that there’s a big difference between having connections and making them. Often, you’ll have a connection in your head, and you’ll see it when you read your paper, but you’re not doing enough to explain the connection, so the person reading your paper (like your instructor) doesn’t see a connection at all. You have a connection, but you need to make it, and that means you need to make it clear by explaining it well. Here’s an exercise that can help you make connections. You may not have to do this for every connection you’re going for, but it’s extremely useful for making sure the connection is there and for making sure you’re explaining it well.

Nail that Connection Exercise:

1) Select the two quotations or concepts or ideas you think make a connection.

2) Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle, from top to bottom.

3) Write each quotation/concept on the paper, on either side of the line, so that you can actually see the two pieces of text next to one another.

4) Underline the phrases in each quotation/concept that you think actually connect, and then draw a line connecting them. If you can’t find anything to underline, then maybe this is not the best quotation to make this connection. Often, you have an idea in your head that connects the essays, but you may not be using the right piece of text to show that connection. If you’re having problems at this stage, try finding a better piece of text to work with. Also, make sure that the connection is between ideas, rather than just words on the page.

5) Rewrite the parts you underlined underneath each quotation/connection on either side of the line. This lets you visually formulate the connection you’re aiming for.

6) Write a sentence that uses the underlined parts to explain the connection. Remember that if you started with actual quotations, then you will want to enclose the phrases in quotation marks as you refer to them in this sentence.

7) Incorporate this sentence into your paragraph. It should make the connection for you, because this exercise has forced you to point directly to the place where you see the connection happening.

8) Repeat for the next connection.

Conclusion

Connection is a crucial skill and not an easy one to master. It takes a lot of thinking to make connections, because this class demands a lot of thinking. But always also check to make sure your connections are clear: remember, it’s not enough to think critically. We have to understand those thoughts as well.

Types of Connections
By Heather Robinson

We ask students to make connections between readings from the second reading in the sequence. However, it’s often difficult for them to go beyond making connections that just notice similarities between the texts. To help students remedy this, I give them a worksheet where they look at the kinds of connections that they are making between texts.

1) Draw a box around the sentence(s) in each paragraph where you see the connection between the ideas in the texts being explained.

2) Which of the following words best describes the kinds of connections that the writer of the paper is making?

a. Comparison

b. Contrast

c. Idea—Example demonstrating idea (Frame-Case)

d. Two alternative approaches to answering a question

3) Write the word next to the sentence in the box.

4) In the margin, write a sentence or two as to how the author might make the connection more interesting, or complicated. For instance, could the author change his/her choice of one of the quotes, or focus on something different in each of the quotes, to complicate his/her position?

Once a student has put together her four- or five-page rough draft, we embark on the process of revision. That is, we ask the student, and the other students in the class, to examine the conversation that they have put together in their rough draft, and to develop and complicate it. Our focus on revision reinforces the claim, central to the New Humanities Reader pedagogy, that writing is a process, and the conversation between authors—students and others—should be developed in the process of revision. Just as we encourage students to think that their first reading of the essays in the New Humanities Reader cannot be the final one, so the first writing of their paper is not the final one. Also, from a practical perspective, students usually write themselves into a viable project. While they start to answer the assignment question at the beginning of their rough draft, it is often the case that a true project which thinking connectively about the assigned readings, only emerges towards the end of the paper. Revision gives students a chance to step back and see this for themselves, to build on those moments, and potentially even discard the writing that helped them get to that emerging project in favor of new writing that develops the project which has emerged.

Peer Review

In order to focus students on the idea that it is up to them to make meaning out of the material in front of them, rather than having wisdom handed down to them from on high, instructors do not provide specific comments for revision on a student’s rough draft. Rather, we provide worksheets that guide the students to offer suggestions for revision on each other’s work. Peer review can be used to focus on new parts of the writing process which we want students to gain control over, or it can be used to reinforce lessons taught earlier in the semester. Most teachers have a sequence of peer review activities that address different concerns at different parts of the semester. Instructors often factor a student’s peer review responses into the grade on their paper—a lazy peer reviewer will have their final grade reduced. This helps motivate students who don’t take peer review seriously, as well as encouraging them to practice the skills that will ultimately help them be more successful in reviewing their own work.

It is not easy to make peer review work. Students are often resistant to accepting comments on their papers from people who they see as being “just as bad” at writing as they are. The peer review questions and sheets included below have worked not only as exercises for students to review each others’ work, but they also provide questions that students should be encouraged to ask of their own writing. This technique of specific questioning helps students give feedback that their peers see as a useful alternative to instructor comments.

Peer review sheets should provide questions that focus on both the mechanical and the conceptual parts of student writing—not only what the author wants to say, but how they might say it most effectively. Peer reviews focus on different things throughout the course of the semester; should reflect the points of emphasis that are new, or that students are not doing very well, though repeating fundamental things (analysis not summary etc.) is important. A typical sequence of peer review activities might follow the trajectory below:

Peer Review #1—Focus on identifying moments of summary vs. moments of analysis

Peer Review #2—Focus on writing connections—putting connective thinking in writing

Peer Review #3—Building a conversation between three authors

Peer Review #4—Consolidating (good time for review of points which students are still having trouble with—e.g., using quotes effectively, incorporating quotes well into paragraphs, developing a project throughout the paper)

Peer Review #5—Complicating the conversation between two authors

Peer Review #6—Keeping three authors under control, and complicating the argument

Sample Peer Review Questions

(There are lots of questions here—a typical peer review sheet will be shorter)

Writer’s Name:				Date:
Peer Editor’s Name:

Generic Instructions to the Peer Editor: Please do your best to give helpful feedback to the writer whose paper you review. Wherever possible, provide specific examples. Write as much as possible on this sheet, and be sure to write on your peer’s paper as well. [Editor’s Note: For space reasons we have left out the blank areas in this peer review sheet in which students can answer the questions].

Generic Instructions to the Writer: Please save all of the peer evaluations you receive and hand them in with the final drafts. This will help me to evaluate the effectiveness of peer revision, and it will give me a chance to engage with the comments of your peers in my own comments on your final draft.

1. Go through your partner’s paper and mark with a star all the places where you think the writer is interpreting and thinking rather than supplying information directly from the readings in the form of summary. Also mark places with a large S where you feel the writer is providing unnecessary summary that does not seem to help her or him develop an argument.

2. Which of the starred moments in the draft seem especially interesting or promising? That is, what place in the essay does the writer say something that seems most original or interesting? What is so good about this moment to you?

3. Could the idea you discussed in #2 help to unify the paper in some way? That is, do you see a moment of argument here? What would that argument be?

4. What is the writer’s argument, in your own words? That is, how does she or he respond to the main essay question? What answer does the essay suggest? Do you agree with the writer’s argument, as you see it? Why or why not?

5. Play devil’s advocate for a moment, and try to imagine the most contrary point of view that someone could take on your peer’s argument. What criticism would the devil’s advocate level against this paper?

6. How does the writer think that [Generic Author Name #1] differs from [Generic Author Name #2] in responding to the essay question?

7. Does the writer directly deal with the readings in most paragraphs of the essay? Where should the writer do more to incorporate or quote from the readings? What passages or ideas from the readings should she or he especially consider?

8. Locate at least one place where the writer can strengthen connections between essays. Explain what connection you are working with: Is the connection between the essays clear? Does this connection relate back to the main argument? How might he or she explain this connection more carefully?

9. What are some of the things that the writer should work on in revision? For example: Has the writer begun to address the basic elements of the assignment? Does she or he try to form an argument that addresses the essay question? Does the writer generally work to present interpretation rather than summary? Has he or she incorporated the other readings into the essay well enough? Does she or he use quotes or discuss these writers’ arguments directly? Does the writer use specific references to the text to illustrate points? Does the writer try to engage the texts in conversation rather than just using them to back up her or his narrow argument? Does the writer acknowledge the arguments of these writers and work to separate her or his own voice from that of the writers (not repeating things said by the writers as though it were her or his own opinion)?

10. Come up with an original title for your peer’s paper. The title should try to capture what you think the writer is saying in the essay.

11. Look at two quotations that the writer uses, and talk about how accurately and how well the writer deals with those quotes. First, pick a quote that you think the writer could definitely talk about more or talk about more accurately. Second, look at the longest quote that the writer has used. Is this quote too long? Is it being used in place of writing or in place of some sort of directed summary? If you think the quote is good—or if you think it should be shortened—what is the most important part of the quote? What part should the writer discuss most? What might the writer say about the quote?

12. Respond to a second student’s paper when you are finished with the first.

Sample Peer Review Sheets

Peer Review Sheet for Paper #1
By Heather Robinson

Writer’s Name:
Reviewer’s Name:

N.B. Read through this sheet from beginning to end before you start working!

Connective and Analytical Thinking

1. Carefully read through the paper you are looking at, and underline every sentence where you think the author is expressing his/her own idea, rather than repeating what Lisa Belkin has said.

2. Write an S in the margin next to every section where you think the author is summarizing what Lisa Belkin says.

3. Write a sentence after each paragraph which describes how you think the paragraph relates to the assignment question. If you think there is no connection, write a suggestion as to how the paragraph could be made to answer the question.

4. After you have read the whole essay, write a paragraph below describing what you think the writer’s answer to the assignment question is.

5. Put a star next to the paragraph which you think is the strongest. Write a comment next to the paragraph describing three things that you think are especially good about it.

Work with Text

6. a. Draw a box around every quotation in the paper.

b. If the quote is more than three lines long, write a B next to it. This signals ‘block quote’, something to avoid in the paper.

c. Next to each quotation, write INFO if you think that the quotation provides information (facts, figures, background), and IDEA if you think that the quotation expresses one of Belkin’s ideas (something that the writer of the paper can agree with or disagree with).

d. Within each quotation, underline the part that you think is most important for what the writer is saying in their paper. If there is no most important part, write a comment that suggests a better kind of quote to use.

e. Look at the sentence which immediately precedes the quote. Does it introduce the quote? If it does, suggest another idea that the writer could include in the introduction. If it does not, write a comment that will help the writer of the paper to introduce the quotation appropriately.

f. We use quotation to support the ideas we are putting forward. Write a comment in the space below about how the write might better use quotation in his/her paper so that it provides evidence for a point s/he is making.

Revision

Find the paragraph in this paper that you think is the weakest in the paper. On the back page of the rough draft you are looking at, identify the paragraph for the writer (e.g., p. 2, 2nd paragraph starting with “Belkin states . . .”) write at least one paragraph suggesting how this paragraph might be improved. You can suggest different ways to work with quotation, different ways to express a position, what kind of position or thesis statement could be added in to the paragraph, or ask some questions that help the writer develop the ideas started here, or to take them in a new direction.

When you are finished:

Hand the marked-up draft, and this sheet, back to the original author. Go on to the next paper, and do the same thing. When you have finished, take your drafts that have been reviewed and start on revising the weakest paragraph that one of your reviewers has identified. Your homework is to do a complete revision of this paragraph for the next class. Type it up, and hand it to me on a separate piece of paper. If your reviewers have suggested different paragraphs for you to work on, you may hand in two or three revised paragraphs. This is not necessary—I only need to see one, though I will certainly look at more if you bring them.

Peer Review Worksheet
By Lara Tupper

Writer’s Name:
Peer Reviewer’s Name:

General instructions for the Peer Reviewer: Please do your utmost to give helpful feedback to the writer. Wherever possible, provide specific examples. Write as much as possible in response to these questions, using additional paper, and be sure to write on your peer’s paper as well.

General instructions for the Writer: Please save all peer evaluations you receive and hand them in with your final draft folder. This will help me to assess the comments you received from your peers, and to incorporate these comments into my own response to your work.

1. Go through your partner’s paper and mark with a C all areas where you feel the writer is making important connections between de Waal and Guinier.

2. Mark with a star all the places where you think the writer is providing analysis, that is, where the writer is interpreting and thinking rather providing information directly from the reading in the form of summary.

3. Mark with an S all areas where you feel the writer is providing unnecessary summary, that is, summary that does not seem to help the writer develop a clear position.

4. Which of the C moments in the draft seem especially interesting or promising? That is, where in the essay does the writer make a connection that seems particularly pertinent and engaging? What is so interesting about this moment to you?

5. In your own words, state the writer’s project in this paper. How does she or he respond to the main essay question? If you feel the writer has no clear, developed position, return to the C areas and starred areas of the paper. What connection is the writer trying to make?

6. Has the writer defined and used key terms, and used terms from BOTH readings? Circle all key terms used. Are the terms defined succinctly? Are they relevant to the writer’s position?

7. Does the writer use quotations? How many are used? Mark with a Q all areas where the writer uses quotations appropriately. Has the writer interpreted the quotation and used it to support his or her position? Is every quotation relevant to the writer’s stance?

8. What are some of the things the writer should focus on for revision? For example, has the writer begun to address the basic elements of the assignment? Does the writer generally work to present interpretation rather than summary? Does the writer use specific references from BOTH texts to illustrate his or her points?

Peer Review Sheet: Introductions
By Heather Robinson

Reviewer’s Name:
Writer’s Name:

A. Introductory paragraph

1. Read through the first paragraph of your classmate’s paper. Check the boxes in the following list when you find these items in that paragraph.

a. A sentence or two which describes the general issues that the author will be addressing in the paper—general issues that engage with the assignment question, and the assigned readings.

b. Mary Kaldor’s name, and the name of her essay.

c. A thumbnail sketch of the essay, discussing the kinds of ideas or examples that the author will take from Kaldor.

d. Amy Chua’s name, and the name of her essay.

e. A thumbnail sketch of the essay, discussing the kinds of ideas or examples that the author will take from Chua.

f. Two or three sentences which give the thesis statement—a map of how the author will answer the assignment question.

If any of these items are missing from the introductory paragraph, write a note in the margins of the paper saying what is missing, and point out where you think it should go.

2. Do any of the parts of the introduction listed above need to be improved? Write a comment in the margin suggesting a change that the author could make.

B. Use of quotations

3. Go through the paper paragraph by paragraph. Stop after you have read each quote, and look at the sentence immediately before it, and complete the following tasks.

a. Draw a box around the sentence where the author introduces the quote, if there is such a sentence.

b. If there is a sentence that introduces the quote, underline the words in it that introduce the ideas in the quote, or which discuss how the author is using this quote to demonstrate an idea.

c. If you haven’t done any underlining, write a comment in the margin suggesting what the author needs to do to introduce the quote—i.e., to link the quote to the claim that s/he is making about the quote.

d. If you have done some underlining, write a comment on how the author might improve the introduction to the quote, to help you understand what the quote is doing to help the author support his/her claim.

e. Look at the sentence immediately after the quote. Does the author explain how the quote connects to the main idea in the paragraph? Underline the words that connect it to the quote itself. Make a comment on why you underlined these words—or why you didn’t underline anything—in the margins next to the sentence, and suggest how the author might improve his/her explanation.

f. Look at the sentence(s) in each paragraph where the author states the connection between the two quotes. Write two or three words in the margin which indicate what idea the author is using to make the connection, based on your reading of the connecting sentences. Draw a big star in the margin if the author hasn’t described the connecting idea.

C. Back to the Thesis

4. Write three words or phrases next to the first sentence of each paragraph which tell you what the paragraph was about.

5. When you have read through the whole paper through, look at the words that you have written for each paragraph, then complete the following task.

Write a summary, in 5–10 lines, of what you think the author’s project is in this paper. Write the summary on this sheet. In your summary, please describe what you think is the author’s answer to the assignment question, and how s/he uses the texts to explore that answer.

6. Look back at the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph of the paper. Does it look similar to the summary you just wrote? On the last page of the paper, write a comment suggesting how the author might change his/her thesis statement to reflect what you actually see in his/her paper.

You Asked For It: Student Created Peer Review
By Karen Kalteissen

To the Writer:Put your name at the top of this sheet. Look over the questions below and select four
you want your reviewer to address. Circle the numbers of those four questions. OR, circle only three and . . .

. . . On the lines immediately below, write one additional (*very specific) question you have about your paper that you would like your reviewer to answer (*you cannot ask “What should I fix?”)

Avoid choosing or writing questions that all deal with the same aspect of your paper.

To the Reviewer: Answer your author’s four questions. Spend 35 minutes on the first paper.

Write your comments directly on the draft; preferably in the margins, but if they won’t fit, use the end of the paper, or the backs of pages.

Only specifics help your writer. If you honestly don’t know what to say, or don’t know how to do something yourself, it is better (and more fair) to say “I do not know” rather than writing down something in desperation that will mislead the writer. Responding that “Everything is great” shows that you are not reading carefully. On the other hand, “I don’t know” isn’t very helpful either; it is a last resort. Please try to give the kind of help you want to receive.

Project:

1. Can you find and understand the author’s project and identify two or three main supporting ideas?

Can you restate the project in your own words? Do it here, if you can.

Can you mark the places in the paper where the project and the ideas emerge? Write ‘project’ in the margins where you see this happening.

2. Does the project really respond to the assignment? Why or why not?

3. Is the project sufficiently developed? Is there enough detailed, relevant, supporting evidence? If not, what ideas need support?

Organization:

4. Does each paragraph’s topic sentence relate directly to the project? If not, write a suggestion to help the writer make that relationship stronger.

5. Are there any places where the author needs better transitions between paragraphs? Within paragraphs?

6. Are there any places where the author seems to get off track? Is there any evidence that is not really relevant?

7. Are there any places where the essay breaks “unity”? (A different way of phrasing question 6, so don’t pick both.)

8. Are there any problems with unity within paragraphs?

9. Is the essay coherent? Can the reader follow the author’s ideas? Indicate places where the coherence breaks down.

Use of Text:

10. Look at the author’s quotations. Has the author selected “idea” quotes rather than “fact” or “summary” quotes, and used those quotes to strengthen, launch, or complicate her/his own argument?

11. Are there quotes that are not smoothly integrated or embedded? (Do not rewrite the paper for your author, but suggest what she or he might want to accomplish).

12. Are all quotations and paraphrases properly cited? If not, show specifically where and tell what the problem is.

13. Is the author using unnecessary summary? Where?

14. Are all three texts used, in reasonable balance? If not, what’s the problem?

15. Are all three texts interpreted fairly? If not, what is the author misreading?

Presentation:

Note: Normally, peer reviewers stay away from commenting on presentation. No peer reviewer should become another student’s editor, and many students are not necessarily skilled enough in grammar, mechanics and syntax to avoid giving bad advice. However, many of you requested feedback on presentation, so . . .

16. Are there one or two kinds of error that you see the author repeating over and over again? Mark the places and identify the kinds of errors the author needs to address.

Teaching Revision

Making peer review primary in a student’s revision process raises the question of how to teach revision without commenting directly on student papers. That is, how can an instructor make sure that the students in his class are recognizing points in each other’s papers, as well as their own, that need revision? Apart from the peer review sheet, we encourage the use of parts of sample student papers to focus on revision strategies. Doing this not only encourages students to see all writing as work in process, not “safe” from revision, but also helps them to be able to apply an abstract revision idea to their own paper. Making them do this is arguably more effective than commenting directly on a student’s rough draft about a particular moment, as it gives the student a template which can be applied over and over again in the production of the final draft. The student is encouraged to look for moments in their papers where a particular revision strategy applies, and by doing so hopefully moves them a little further towards being an independent writer with an inventory of writing strategies up her sleeve. Global instructor-driven revision complements the peer review described above, in that the latter gives the student practice in applying the former, but allowing them the distance that is sometimes necessary to be an effective reviewer. They are both steps in the ultimate goal to have students have an objective awareness of their own writing, and of the steps that writing a good paper requires.

Activities for Drafts and Peer Revision

Students will want to know what you think, but rather than provide detailed commentary for each draft (and so foster an unproductive student dependence upon your input), you should try any of these strategies:

• Using photocopied passages: You may photocopy representative passages from several student essays and ask the class as a whole to consider their successes and the opportunities for revision they present. (This revision work may also be done in small groups.)

• Group revision of selected passages: You may photocopy and distribute one page where a student writer has introduced but not really engaged with a quotation. Each student might redraft that paragraph, and some students might share their revisions with the class.

• Global comments: You may write a composite set of comments in response to the drafts as a group for distribution to the students, identifying (and perhaps providing brief examples of) the most common or important areas for revision. You should use these strategies and peer review sessions alike to make clear the need for re-reading as well as revision. You may be surprised to find how many students attempt to revise without re-reading the assigned texts, even when the primary need for revision is misunderstanding (or too simplistic an understanding) of the texts.

• Making peer revision count: Students often do not initially value peer comments. Two strategies can alter this perception. First, some teachers “grade” the peer comments to motivate students to write effective comments. Second, you can reference peer comments in your end comments on a graded draft. Adding briefly a comment such as “I’m glad you followed X’s comment on your draft” or “Please note that Y made the same comment on your rough draft” demonstrates to students that peer comments are an effective tool for revision.

Sampling—Parts Are Better than Wholes
By Priti Joshi

The following activity discusses how to use sample student papers most effectively in class, as a means of helping students revise their own drafts.

While I liked the pedagogical idea of using student papers in class, truth be told, I was not able to implement the theory successfully in my classroom for several years when I first started teaching. I always used student papers (usually on Final Draft day), but was never entirely happy with the results. First, there was the problem of feelings. If I were teaching only one section, there was always the touchy subject of using a paper from someone in the class with the predictable sore feelings on the part of that student—no matter that I had asked the student’s “permission,” that I removed the student’s name, that I underscored that this was a “typical” paper, that I tried to make sure that the classes’ comments were productive and not savage, that I was vigilant about whose paper we considered, etc., etc. Let’s be honest: it’s dreadful to have your paper microscopically scrutinized by 21 peers, particularly when you are 18 and haven’t been socialized into the humiliation of grad school.

But the larger problem I discovered was that I wasn’t able to keep students interested beyond the first page-and-a-half or two pages; and certainly by the third student-paper of the semester, they were totally checked out. After much frustration and gnashing of teeth, it finally dawned on me that this was because I was trying to do too much by using an entire paper. After all, any given paper has dozens of problems. While grading a paper, however, we all make strategic decisions about the two or three largest problems we want to focus the student’s attention on for revision. But by using the entire paper in class, I found that rather than focusing attention on this handful of things, I was opening up a can of worms that I could not push back in easily. When students in the class picked up on perfectly legitimate but “minor” problems, I always found myself in a difficult position: do I tell them that the problem wasn’t “relevant” just yet or do I agree to the fault being pointed out, but try to redirect students’ attention? I usually opted for the latter. One could argue that this is indeed the purpose of using student papers—that over the course of the semester students learn the value of certain types of reading and writing over others, but I found that if I lost students early in the semester, I did not have the luxury of “the course of the semester.” On evaluations, students frequently wrote that they did not see the “relevance” of reading someone else’s paper and I did indeed note a certain smugness in the class amongst students whose work was weaker, but who did not recognize their own writing in this other paper.

After many hits and misses and talking to lots of other teachers, I finally came up with the following method which allows me to retain the pedagogical purpose of using student papers and makes them a useful learning tool in actuality: I never use an entire student paper in class, but rather parts of several student papers. Here’s how it works: As I am reading their papers (for the first paper, I do this as I am skimming over their Rough Drafts), I keep a mental list of a weakness that many students in the class are experiencing. This naturally differs as the semester progresses or in different levels of comp classes, but examples of “weaknesses” would be: not using the text in papers or not integrating the material they cite into their argument; having too many ideas in one paragraph; putting two authors together, but not actually using (“framing”) them together; doing a simple compare-and-contrast rather than analysis, etc., etc. (As the list clearly demonstrates, the weaknesses are less “content related” and more “writing-task oriented” if we can make that distinction.) The important thing is that this be a difficulty that significant numbers of students are experiencing. After I have read all their papers, I quickly skim them for short examples of the problem I have decided I am going to focus on. I try to gather examples from about 4–5 different students’ papers, and I make sure that each piece is an example of a slightly different version of the problem. For instance, one student may have no quotes in a paragraph at all, another may have simply thrown a quote in, another may have a quote but it’s poorly selected for the point she’s trying to make, another may have a quote that is well selected but her reading of it may be weak.

I photocopy each of these paragraphs only. On the day we are working on student papers, I introduce the topic or idea we will be focusing on, and we begin working on each paragraph. Because the reading is short, students don’t get bored. After working on two or three of these paragraphs together as a class, I ask them to break down into small groups and fix the problem in the next example I have copied. This way, students get to practice what they have learned right away and they really get into it. Because I use several students’ writing, no one student feels isolated and picked on and because I have chosen a weakness that many are experiencing, students see the exercise as relevant to them. Thus, the strategy allows me to focus the class much more and target certain areas for improvement rather than try to cover everything. Students “get it” much better and I have always seen a marked improvement in their subsequent papers on the issue we discussed.

Using Sample Paragraphs in Class
By Carol Denise Bork

In my very first semester of teaching, I ignored advice and disobeyed policy by insisting on commenting on every draft of every student paper. I simply did not understand how my students could ever learn to revise without my feedback. I strongly caution against this well-intentioned course of action. In fact, rather than helping my students to revise, my constant interventions in their work frustrated some of them and left others highly dependent on me. Although my comments were never directive, and never suggested readings, arguments, etc., many students came to depend on my advice so heavily that they suffered a near-crisis when I told them they were ready to revise on their own at the end of the semester.

Rather than commenting on drafts, I find it much more useful and productive to ask students to work on sample paragraphs produced by writers in the class. Either through group work, in-class writing, or class discussion, I ask students to revise their way through common writing problems and issues. For example, I might divide the class into groups, hand out photocopies of a paragraph from a student’s draft, and ask each group to summarize the central idea of the paragraph. Depending on the paragraph I’ve chosen, this exercise can result in a variety of discussions, all of which can help every student in the class learn to revise effectively. The final step to this kind of classroom work is crucial: remind your students that each of them needs to do the kind of work you’ve done in class on their own as they work on their own papers.

Correcting Errors

The focus of the above sections has been on the conceptual work of reading and writing, and getting ideas down into a written form. The activities collected have focused on what the author wants to say, as part of building a project. However, working on the technical details of how a student expresses his idea is also crucial in making the final draft. In order to help students produce final drafts which demonstrate the level of control over sentence-level error that is necessary for academic writing, we need to spend time addressing grammatical and structural issues in the classroom, as well as providing students with the resources to work on these areas on their own. For detailed discussion of implementing grammar and sentence-level instruction in The New Humanities Reader classroom, please see the Part IV: Working With Grammar.

Having students participate in class is an integral part of using The New Humanities Reader in the classroom. While at first students may find it difficult to engage verbally with the ideas in the texts, encouraging them to do so early in the semester pays off. Our students verbal skills often are much more developed than their written ones, so making verbal interaction a part of classroom practice ultimately leads to stronger papers, as students can use the ideas that they articulate in speech to feed those in their writing. Furthermore, speaking up in class places a student’s ideas in the context of those held by the other students in the class, and makes real the conversational metaphor we employ for their writing.

Participation in class takes can be both formal and informal. Students in Expository Writing at Rutgers are required to complete three formal public speaking tasks. In addition, the student-centered pedagogy which accompanies The New Humanities Reader means that having students speak up in class is essential. The discussion and activities below suggest strategies for making both informal class participation and formal in-class public speaking work.

Informal Participation in Class

Getting Students Actively Involved in Class
By Carol Denise Bork

Some students don’t do well in writing classes because they are not involved enough in the processes of the class. When they go home to write their papers, they have nothing to draw on, because they have been only passive observers, rather than active participants in the class. Here are some suggestions for getting students more involved in class:

• Ask students to write on the board. If you are having a full-class discussion, ask students, several at a time, to take ten-minute shifts at the board, writing down important ideas. Tell them it’s okay if they duplicate each other’s work. The point (in terms of their responsibility) is to get as much as possible on the board; simultaneously, these students will be obliged to pay closer attention to the discussion, and will be actively contributing to the success of the class.

• Alternatively, if you are having small group discussions, you can include a step that involves writing on the board. (Incidentally, this also helps to get “slow” groups up to speed, because they see that other groups are ahead of them.) You might ask students to establish a list of important terms and write it on the board, to define a term and write the definition on the board, or to choose a significant passage from the text and write the passage on the board.

In full-class discussion, ask each student who speaks to choose the next speaker. Students often feel more comfortable participating in response to another student’s request, than answering the teacher’s question.

• When small groups report, assign several students in advance to ask questions of each group after they report. If students know in advance that they are “on call” to ask questions, they will be more engaged with the class.

• When small groups report, arrange a “panel” of chairs at the front of the room. I usually start rearranging the furniture while the groups are still working, so that they see that they will be on the panel, addressing an audience. The panel format has produced some of my best classroom moments.

• Tell students in advance that, when their small groups report, every member of the group must say something. About five minutes before you ask the groups to report, remind them that they need to make decisions about who will say what.

• Always recognize every serious effort to participate as beneficial to class discussion. Find ways to reward students when they make a clear effort to be involved in class discussion. Even if a student is “wrong,” we can find ways to make use of every student comment. (For example, “Pat has pointed to an important passage. Let’s all spend some time working with this passage to see if we can extend Pat’s idea.”)

Public Speaking

We require each English 101 student to make three, brief, oral presentations in class. The Public Speaking exercises used by most teachers can be arranged in four categories: Grammar, Reading, Writing, and Context. Any of these kinds of Public Speaking exercises can be presented by a single student within a small group, by a single student before the whole class, or by a group of students before the whole class. Teachers typically vary the format and the type of presentation so as to give students the opportunity to find the ones that work best for them, as well as to expose students to the range of ways that public speaking might function.

Grammar Presentations

Students must do at least one oral presentation on a grammatical issue, based on the handbook and examples they come up with themselves. As an instructor, you can facilitate the class working out how to identify grammatical errors, and how to understand and apply grammatical rules. To be effective, the emphasis needs to fall on the students taking responsibility for instruction in a setting of peer review. As a minimum these topics need to be covered within the semester: “MLA Citation Guidelines,” “Plagiarism and Boundaries: Your Words and the Writer’s,” “Sentence Integrity When Using a Quote,” “Subject-Verb Agreement,” “Verb Tense Shift,” “Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement,” “Vague Pronoun Reference,” “Sentence Fragments,” “Run-on or Fused Sentences,” “Comma Splices,” “Other Comma Usage,” and “Apostrophe to Show Possession.” It is up to each instructor when these presentations are made and in what order. We would recommend fitting them into the revision day when samples from the rough drafts are discussed, that is, after the peer reviews are done and before the final draft is due. You could then go over the topic again on the day the final draft is due. You might assign two students to each type of error, and have them present at different times so that the material is covered at least twice using different examples.

Reading Exercises

The reading exercises typically require students to make brief presentations on some aspect of the currently assigned reading. Some teachers find it more useful to have students present on a question asked ahead of time, while others require students themselves to pose questions for the class to explore. In either case, the point is to make students the initiators of discussion. This works especially well when several students present on the same question or topic: inevitably there are significant and interesting differences in their presentations, and the teacher then needs to do little more than point to these for good discussion to ensue.

Writing Exercises

The writing exercises tend to be less aimed at starting discussion about the assigned reading (though they often do so) than at providing occasions for students to help one another produce better drafts. For instance, some teachers ask small groups of students to identify weak and strong areas in one another’s rough drafts, and then to present these to the class along with suggested revisions that they have arrived at together. On the days when final drafts are due, some teachers have students present their “finished” arguments to the class, and then have chosen respondents evaluate these. When this works, students both make excellent defenses of their work and also discover ways in which their papers might be revised even further.

Context Exercises

Finally, the context exercises require students to present the results of research they have undertaken on some aspect of the assigned reading. But in addition to presenting such information simply as a way of explaining something in the text that had been unclear, students are also encouraged to present their research so as to “open up” the assigned reading.

In every case, although public speaking exercises always involve monologue—the single speaker making a sustained point before his or her peers—they should also, often, lead to dialogue of some sort. That is, we want students to treat speaking in public not just as the presentation of finished thought, but also as thinking in public: making one’s thought public, and so inviting (and expecting) response from others.

Classroom Practices for the Public Speaking Component
By Pat Cesarini

Ideally, students’ presentations of their own work should bring to life the conversational metaphor that describes our course. By taking part in discussions that extend textual conversations and by presenting and reshaping their drafts, our students should improve their writing through their speaking. These classroom practices are categorized according to type and audience. Choose from among them to come up with the three you will use in your class.

Rough Drafts Presented to Peer Revision Groups

For the first (and possibly second) rough draft of the semester, have students work in peer groups of three members. Students should bring three copies of their draft—two for peers, one for you. Students give their two peer readers their drafts. However, before the student-reviewers read the draft, the student writer delivers an oral account of:

• her approach to the assignment

• the issues she considers

• the textual passages she uses.

The peer review group then reads the draft, gauging the differences between her oral account and her written draft. Peers assess the paper as a draft and use the oral delivery to help in organizing their response to the draft. This practice is designed to begin the speaking in class process with a minimum of distress, but it should not be the only approach taken throughout the term.

Rough Drafts and Final Drafts as Works in Progress Presented to the Class

For papers two through six, each student can present either a rough or a final draft as a work in progress. While a rough draft offers the most room for revision and intervention, a final draft, especially one in the middle of the semester, offers revision in the subsequent papers of the sequence. Each student has five minutes to present to the class how s/he has interpreted the assignment, which parts of text s/he is using, which points s/he wants to make. Having student presenters prepare a handout for the class and identifying respondents might help to focus these presentations for the audience. In the presentations, students should test out their claims. They should offer a working thesis, a focus that is entirely under construction, and they should point out their interest in it, anticipating objections and articulating some worries. The presentation should include some discussion of the parts of the text they will discuss. The student should offer a focus and then should ask for help with that focus. You can have three students present and then have the class respond, or have all six present and have students prepare questions.

On days where you photocopy sample student papers for discussion, you might have groups work on identifying particular strengths and weaknesses or a particular pattern of error and then having group spokespersons present the group’s findings to the class.

Alternatively, on the class day after rough drafts are due for each of the essays 2 through 6, four students will present and four other students will respond, leaving about twenty minutes of class time for each essay. Their rough drafts will have been photocopied to distribute to the entire class. Students will be given a few minutes to read the rough draft; then the author will talk about the rough draft, about what argument she was trying to make, where she wants to go with the final draft, why she chose to connect the texts the way she did; then the respondent will talk about the essay’s strong and weak points, offering specific suggestions for revision; then discussion will be opened up to the class as a whole. Each student in the class does both of these tasks. Each, then, is a presenter and a respondent. These should take five minutes each. (This particular teacher used a group panel project for the third speaking activity.)

Rough Drafts, Final Drafts and Responses Done Collectively

This approach to presenting rough drafts sequences both the level of critique and the amount of time the student speaks to the class.

• In Phase One, which is to say on the day when the first final draft is due, each student addresses the class after handing in her/his first final draft. Each student speaks to the class, from his/her seat, addressing three issues: initial framing of rough draft, insight gained from peer review process, changes in framing made for final draft.

• Phase Two covers papers two through five and works by having students maintain consistent peer groups of four or five people. In the first session scheduled for peer review of drafts, all the students in the group read and discuss the draft of one of the group members. The students reviewing will collectively identify at least one, perhaps two weaknesses of the rough draft. One student will be designated as the spokesperson for the group’s review process.

In the second session scheduled for peer review on that draft, the student who drafted the paper will stand at his or her desk and report to the class on the issues he or she determined were necessary to address in that paper, and how he or she framed those issues in the draft. This student will speak for five minutes. The student designated to represent the group’s review process will then report to the class the strengths and weaknesses the process identified, and the suggestions for revision that emerged.

With ten minutes allotted to each group to address the class, the reporting process should take no more than one hour. The remaining time in that session will be used to discuss what kind of insights the class gleaned from the group reports.

These responsibilities will rotate for each paper. Each student will have the benefit of the group’s attention on a draft and the responsibility to speak to the class about that draft. Each student will also have the responsibility to serve at least once as the group’s spokesperson.

Students Presenting Readings to the Class

If you already have students work in groups to identify key passages and terms or to unpack quotations have the spokesperson of each group present their group’s findings to the class.

Group presentations, scheduled for the first class meeting after students read a new essay, may also serve as a way of starting class discussions. Group members will each be responsible for a five minute talk that addresses any aspect of the new essay which they find interesting and which can relate in some way to one or more of the essays previously read in the course. Examples might include a look at how two authors approach a similar theme differently, or an examination of how two authors use personal anecdote or textual evidence.

Group Presentations to the Class

After working on papers throughout the term, students will be organized into four groups, and each group will choose the issue and format of their presentation. Students need not present their own ideas. They could, for example, each take part of one of the authors we’ve read throughout the term and give short presentations on a single topic. They could weave together their own work with a writer we have read. The emphasis, no matter what format they imagine, is on bringing together a number of different perspectives on a single issue and exploring the ways in which those perspectives support, challenge or undermine one another. Each panel should appoint a moderator and should be prepared to field questions from the class. This exercise might work particularly well as preparation for the final exam, where any discussion of the exam reading should be student-run.

Final Reports to the Class

After having their drafts reviewed by peers and discussed before the entire class, one teacher saved two classes at the end of the term for final reports. Each student addresses the entire class from the front of the room, speaking for five minutes. The student’s presentation will be a description of their achievement in the course. The student will identify at least one issue with which he or she struggled all semester. The student will discuss the work he or she did in reading and writing to work on this problem or issue, and they will identify the methods and techniques which seemed to be helpful. Finally, students will take questions from the class.

Presentation Exercise: A Handout to Students

These will give you a chance to talk through your papers and to get more feedback and more ideas from other people than you otherwise would. You’re not trying to present a polished final product here; rather, you’re sharing work in progress with us so that we can help you with it. You need to present very specific and limited concerns.

Here’s what the presentation will involve:

• Pick one paper to be the presentation’s focus.

• Prepare to speak for a total of four minutes: the reviewers for a minute each, then the writer for two. (Then you’ll field questions and lead discussion for five minutes.)

• Emphasize a small set of concerns that your audience will be able to grasp and respond to. That is, don’t try to cover the whole paper, but instead just a few key things that might benefit from some feedback. You have very little time, so don’t waste any.

Here are some suggestions about what and how to present, but feel free to use your own ideas: Make arguments rather than summaries (about the sources and about your ideas for successful writing); analyze the difficult parts of the sources; analyze your own positions; construct a thesis that shows the active relations between different issues and leads to further arguments; complicate your arguments by trying different perspectives and different combinations of materials; identify your own specific questions that your essay responds to.

Divide tasks: e.g., first reviewer might present the thesis or the question(s) the essay answers, or some other key factor(s). Then the second reviewer might present what needs work. Then the writer might present what changes are being made and what still needs work, or ask if a change works. You might also have the different sides debate, or give competing ideas which we can help the writer to evaluate. Just make sure you present something specific to which we can respond.

Use a prop: e.g., a handout or something on the board. That way we’ll be able to see and analyze your specific concerns and help you with possible revision. (I can make copies for you if you leave what you want copied in my box by 4 P.M. the day before class.)

Tell us exactly how you want us to respond: e.g., to whether the thesis works, or a complicating possibility is left out, or difficult passages are sufficiently engaged, or whatever.

Rehearse to be on time and to see what works. I’ll give you the first five minutes of class to prep.

Each person in the class must participate in the discussion part.

Grading. The presentation is part of the workshop. Remember that failure to perform these presentations can result in failing this course.

Finally, we need to recognize that for many students, despite our work in engaging them on a conceptual level, see the grade that they will receive on each paper, and in the class as a whole as the most potent motivator in the class. The grade is what the students will look at first, despite our painstaking comments on their drafts. In this section we give some strategies for making grading a part of the classroom, and so link the students’ conceptual work explicitly to their grade on a particular paper, and to help them discover the strategies that will directly affect their grade. Making how we assign grades as transparent as possible allows students to participate more actively in attaining the grade that they want—it helps them see what they need to do in order to improve, and allows them to work on strategies for getting there in their writing. Looking at grades throughout the course of the semester also helps to give students a sense of accomplishment—they can see where they’ve been, where they can go, and how they might get there by making changes to what they are already doing. In The New Humanities Reader classroom we do not give all As, and by the end of the semester the students see why, and can assess with some degree of accuracy what grade they can expect to receive in the class. The following activities give ways to get students involved in their own grade, and their own progress throughout the course, and to help them to see how grading works with The New Humanities Reader.

Grading and Peer Review
By Heather Robinson

I like to ask students to review their peers’ rough drafts with respect to the grading criteria. Using the grading criteria as a basis for a peer review gives the students a vocabulary not only for telling their peers what they have done in their paper, but also a vocabulary with which they can suggest strategies for improvement.

I do this in two ways. If my students are all at about the same grade level, say on papers 2 and 3, I will build a peer review sheet using the grading criteria for a C-level paper and for a B-level paper. I will ask students to look for C-moments in their peer’s paper, and then write comments that make direct reference to the grading criteria for a B-level paper. In this way the students can give concrete suggestions about what their peers should change in their papers in order to improve.

If students are more scattered about the grading spectrum, as we might expect in papers 4–6, I provide the students with a checklist made out of the grading criteria, as below. The students then read each other’s papers, checking the criteria which apply in our four focus areas (project, work with text, organization, presentation). The student writer can then see where there paper is in terms of grade-level, and what they have to do to get to the next level. It also helps to have the reviewer write a summary of what the writer should do to get her paper to the next level, using the vocabulary of the grading criteria themselves.

EXPOSITORY WRITING 101 GRADE SHEET

Writer’s Name:
Reviewer’s Name:

• Please read through your peer’s paper, and place a check in the box next to every grading criteria which you think applies to your peer’s paper.

• When you are finished, please write a 5-10 line summary, explaining what your peer might do to bring his/her paper up to the next grade level.

PROJECT

NP		The paper has no clear or emerging project. It may work with the readings through reference, paraphrase, or quotation, but it provides no indication of how these moments of textual work contribute to a larger point or position in the paper.
		The paper has a project, but relies too heavily on summary and fails to engage responsibly with textual evidence.
C		There is evidence of an emerging project—something the student wants the paper to accomplish—or the beginnings of a focus or argument. Often, C papers fail to articulate their project in the paper’s introduction.
		The author takes a clear position once—perhaps at the end of the essay—even when the project is not sustained in the rest of the paper.
		The project is vague or general.
C+		The paper has a project, but it is not clearly articulated. In other words, it has thesis or position statements that does not represent the true achievement of the paper, and does not express the paper’s actual project. There may be a sense that the writer has not realized that there is a project in the paper.
		The paper moves toward an independent project or position.
B		The paper offers a sustained and meaningful structure and/or a project that is often more complex than what one finds in a C-range paper.
		The author advances more independent ideas. However, s/he repeats these ideas, rather than developing or reconsidering them.
		The project of the paper is represented in the introductory paragraph with some degree of accuracy.
B+		Independent thinking is consistently developed.
		The project is more complex because it engages with more of the complexity in the readings.
		The writer begins to, but may not fully, understand the actual complexity of their own argument. Possible moments of insight are not as fully developed as an A range paper.
A		The author understands his or her own project from the beginning and clearly represents that understanding to the reader. It moves through its own project step by step, though some of the positions of individual paragraphs may be more carefully worked out than others.
		The author develops and presents his or her independent ideas persuasively throughout the paper.
		The author develops a thoughtful and well-defined interpretive approach and an awareness of his or her own position in relation to the positions of the assigned essayists.

WORK WITH TEXT

NP		Although the paper may make reference to the issues raised by the assignment question, it does not engage with the assigned readings and does not work effectively with text. It privileges the student’s ideas without being responsible to the readings or privileges the readings without linking them to the project.
		The paper does not follow through on relations the student tries to establish between his or her own position and the readings, or between the readings themselves.
		Although the paper indicates that the student has done the reading in a general sense, it demonstrates a lack of basic reading comprehension, or a failure to grasp the outline of an assigned author’s argument.
		The paper over-generalizes about the assigned reading, or depends largely on summary of the assigned reading that is not pertinent to the assignment question.
C		The paper demonstrates the student’s ability to work with more than one source text and engage with the ideas in the readings.
		The paper lacks a clear sense that the student’s voice contributes to the conversation, with connective thinking typically restricted to relationships between ideas in the readings.
		Although the paper includes summary, the quality of the summary demonstrates significant reading comprehension and often helps the student begin to define a focus.
C+		The paper has several moments of solid work with text. However, the paper may not indicate how these moments contribute to the project.
		The paper more consistently attempts to engage with the more complicated ideas and examples from the readings.
		Moments of working with text may remain implicit: connective thinking may not be explained fully or at all.
B		The paper shows the student beginning to take interpretive risks, responding to the assignment and to the readings in thoughtful and distinctive ways.
		The paper demonstrates that the student is able to work with a variety of textual protocols. It does not rely solely on summary, reference, or paraphrase, but is able to work with quotation and think connectively to contribute to the project.
B+		The paper shows that the student is able to assume confidence and authority in working with the full range of textual protocols.
		The paper has more sophisticated work with text, including an ability to analyze text with particular insight.
		The paper demonstrates connective thinking in which student’s ideas are in control through most of the paper.
A		The paper demonstrates student-centered connective thinking that engages with the ideas in the readings. The paper presents the sustained development and effective articulation of a position that is related to ideas in the readings, while it is not reducible to relationships readily identifiable in the readings.

ORGANIZATION

NP		The paper may have too little coherence from paragraph to paragraph, or it may lack an organizational structure. Use of paragraphs may be weak.
C		The paper creates coherent relationships within or between paragraphs in places even if they have not developed a larger organizational structure. The writer has a sense of how to write paragraphs, even if the relationship between the paragraphs is not clearly presented.
C+		The paper lacks a meaningful structure. There may not be a clear relationship between the paragraphs.
B		The paper demonstrates a reasonable coherence in its overall presentation: the relationships between the paper’s parts are clear and coherent.
		The presentation and development of the project is controlled and organized.
		Topic sentences and transitions between paragraphs are smoother than in a C-level paper.
B+		The paper is particularly well organized. Each paragraph clearly functions within the paper and contributes to the project with an overall fluid movement.
A		The organization is logical, fluid, and clear.

PRESENTATION

NP		The paper has significant sentence-level error that makes it difficult to follow. Serious patterns of error might include sentence integrity, verb agreement, and number agreement. Less serious patterns, including misused apostrophe and other spelling errors, can contribute to a paper earning a NP, especially when they occur with high frequency. The author’s sentence-level errors are so numerous or severe that they impede meaning.
C		The paper has fatal sentence-level errors under control. Although errors may appear on each page, they do not significantly impede the meaning of the essay.
C+		Errors are under control. That is, there should be no patterns of error, just a few irregularities in either mechanics or citation and formatting standards.
B		Presentation errors must be minimal.
B+		Presentation errors must be minimal.
A		Presentation errors must be minimal.

Mid-Semester “Self-Report”
By Priti Joshi

The “self-report,” or evaluation, is something I have students do when I return their folders after midterm folder review. I ask them to take a few moments to re-read their first three papers along with my comments on these papers. When they are done, I ask them to write a short report evaluating their writing. I ask them to write what they have learned about writing, what they believe their strengths are, and what continue to be weaknesses that they need to attend to.

I have always found this to be an enormously useful exercise and my students always say that they get a great deal from it. The self-report allows students to re-group and recharge. It comes at that point in the semester when many students are feeling glum and resentful: they may continue to be “stuck” at a particular grade level no matter how hard they try or they may feel that they have “learned nothing” all semester. The self-report allows them to go back and see their early papers and see that they have indeed come a long way. Many students write, “My first paper was ALL summary. I can’t believe I didn’t see it at the time.” This really helps their attitude at this point in the semester.

The self-evaluation also allows them to articulate what our criteria are and position themselves within those criteria. This makes them more active learners in the process and more independent, rather than passively waiting for me to be re-iterating their writing strengths and weaknesses each time. Finally, in asking them to re-read my comments, they get a fresh sense of what I am asking them to do. Many students write, “I didn’t understand your comments on my first paper when I first read them. But now I really do see what you mean.” Every time I have done self-reports, there has been an almost magical buoyancy and renewal in the class subsequently (perhaps I exaggerate, but only mildly!).

Write Your Own End Comment
By Heather Robinson

Ask students to read and make notes about what you say in your marginal comments. Then they need to write a comment—two things they did well, two things they need to work on, and how to work on them. This requires nice detailed marginal comments, but pays off because students not only have to read them, but we also teach them how to use the comments for the next paper that they will write.

Presenting Grades
By Carol Denise Bork

[Editor’s Note: The following discussion gives strategies on presenting grades that is specific to the way we grade in Rutgers composition classes. However, the means that the author uses to show students how to interpret their grades, and how to ascertain whether they are making progress can be applied to other grading systems.]

Before I hand back the first graded paper in my composition class, I spend 15 or 20 minutes explaining the Writing Program’s grading paradigm. I begin by asking the class what they know or assume about my grading criteria. Often, the most common responses are “I’ve heard it’s the policy to fail everyone on the first paper,” and “I’ve heard that you grade on improvement.” Then I explain that these are misunderstandings or “misreadings” of the grading policies, and I start drawing a diagram on the board, explaining as I draw.

In the Rutgers Writing Program, we use a grading system that is probably different from the grading systems you’re familiar with.

In most classes, your first assignment is this big:

If you do everything in the assignment, , you get an A.

Then, the next assignment is this big:

Again, if you do everything in the assignment, , you get an A.

By the time you get to your last assignment, it’s this big:

And if you do everything in the assignment, you get an A.

Your progress in the class, then, could be represented like this:

A A A A A A

In the Writing Program, assignments and grading work differently. In the writing program, every assignment asks you to do the same kinds of work. Your six assignments in 101 could be represented by this diagram:

That means that, in this class, your first assignment is this big:

But we expect you to have the knowledge to do about this much of the assignment:

_{This system allows you to start where you are. For
example:}

_{Lee might be very good at this part of the assignment,
while Pat is very good at this part:}

Because you’ve only done this much of an assignment that’s much bigger, your grade on this assignment will probably be NP. But what’s important is that you have made a start. As you revise one paper and begin on the next paper, you can add to your repertoire of writing skills, and accomplish more of the assignment each time.

By the end of your 101 class, your papers could be represented by this diagram:

NP C C+

B B+ B+

You can see that, in our system, you were able to build from your own starting place, rather than from a starting place that might have been less productive for you, and go on from there to do your best work.

Before we finish talking about grades, I want to emphasize two important elements of our grading paradigm: we don’t grade “on improvement, “and we don’t “average” grades. Instead, in the writing program your final grade will reflect your best work in the class. Regardless of where you start or how much you improve, if you achieve and maintain “A” work toward the end of the semester, you will earn an A in the class. Let’s look at some examples to think through the differences between grading “on improvement,” grading by “averaging grades,” and grading based on your best work.

If we graded “on improvement,” you would get a higher grade for more improvement. For example, let’s imagine that Lee’s grades are NP, NP, C, C+, B, and B, and Pat’s grades are C, C, C+, C+, B, and B; Lee has “improved” from NP to B, and Pat has “improved” from C to B. In this diagram, you can see the full range of grades (from “NP” to “A”), with Lee’s and Pat’s grades represented by two arrows.

Lee:

NP C C+ B B+ A

Pat:

NP C C+ B B+ A

As you can see, Lee’s grades improved from “NP” to “B,” while Pat’s improved from “C” to “B.” Clearly, the longer arrow representing Lee’s work shows “more improvement” than the shorter arrow representing Pat’s work, but each of these students will get a B in English 101, because in the writing program your grade in the course reflects your best work, NOT the degree of improvement.

Similarly, if we averaged grades, Lee’s final grade would be a D, and Pat’s final grade would be a C+. But each of these students will get a B in English 101, because in the writing program your grade in the course reflects your best work—the level of skill you have achieved and maintained toward the end of the semester.

Here’s a common grade trajectory for English 101: NP, NP, C, C+, B, B. You can see that a student with these grades will get a B, even though this student’s first paper received an NP. So if you’re not happy with your grade on this first paper, try to keep this discussion in mind, and realize that you can begin with an NP and do very good work in this class.

At this point I start giving back papers, reminding students that my comments and suggestions are far more important than their grades at the beginning of the semester. Talking through this material, answering students’ questions, and drawing all these diagrams on the board takes some time, but I find it’s worthwhile, so that students don’t leave the classroom too dispirited over their first grade to do their best work on their next papers. Also, when students start asking about grades later in the semester (or later in the week), I just start drawing circles on the board, and they are generally reassured that they are doing “okay” and can still do well in the course.

Clarifying Goals and Grades
By Ann Dean

Some struggling students are trying hard to do the wrong thing. They cannot really believe that what they did in high school will not work in college. They think you’ll come around at the end and stop giving them these NPs.

My response to this problem is to teach them to tell me the difference between a passing and a failing paper in Expos. I do this with a sample paper, one that has some passing moments and some failing moments. Photocopy 22 copies of the sample paper and bring it to class.

Ask the class what kinds of things I write good comments about in the margins, and get a list on the board of things papers have to do to pass:

• Use quotations

• Explain the student’s idea about what is important about each quotation

• Use an idea from one quotation to say something about the other writer

• Be mostly free of meaning-impeding grammar errors

• Have an introduction and conclusion that help me understand the student’s ideas

• Use paragraphs to organize the ideas

Ask them to read the paper and find places where it does do these things and places where it does not do these things. They can usually see what I mean about the paragraphs that do these things—they are more interesting, they spark discussion, they have ideas in them. Many students have told me that they are intentionally avoiding putting ideas in their papers, because they are afraid of being wrong. So this is a good moment to ask them what they think about having ideas in their papers. I tell them at this point that they need to come up with an idea, any idea, to pass. In order to get a B or an A it has to be an interesting, complex idea that is supported by the texts. For a C, they just have to have an idea. This will be news to many of them.

If there is still time in the class, you can ask them to look at their own rough drafts, or at a homework assignment or a final draft you have handed back, and do the same thing. Find places that are passing and failing, according to the rubric on the board.

With a student whose difficulties include passivity or not listening in class, you can do this whole thing in your office. Have the student bring a rough draft and read the whole thing in front of you. Ask her to pick out the passing moments and the failing moments. If she can’t find any passing moments, ask her what grade the paper will get. That should break through the denial, and then the student will be more ready to try new strategies, such as analyzing quotes, revision, rereading, etc.