Finish line!

Just a couple of last-minute notes:

• Your final paper, blog 5 (and 6, if desired), and “extra credit” coupons are due Tuesday.
• If you’re revising an essay for a higher grade, it is also due Tuesday.
• Please review your grades, so we can trouble-shoot any issues before class ends on Tuesday.
• Last, instead of e-mailing grades for your presentation, I have used the “Add Comment” feature within the gradebook.  Please let me know which version you prefer.

As always, I’m available to answer any questions via e-mail.

Happy Writing!

Prof Mooty

Presentations to evaluate

In order to understand how we’ll be graded on our presentation, we’ll evaluate some prior presentations. We’ll student Student A and B together, student groups will review the rest.  Please post your grade for each category as a response.

• Rhetorical Situation
• Content
• Organization
• Expression

Student A

Student B

Student C

Student D

Student E

Student F

 

Blog 4: Responders are taught, not born

Blog 4: Responders are taught, not born

 

Peer review is one of the most critical skills that a writer can develop. It enables the writer to improve others’ work as well as his own. However, this is a skill which is being emphasized less and less in today’s writing classes. Too often do students produce small sentence fixes and general praise when asked to review and critique another’s work. In his article, “Responders are taught, not born,” Jay Simmons discusses the characteristics of good review and reports the results of a study of peer review skills among students that he worked on. This article is one that is incredibly effective at illustrating its point. It does so through skilled demonstration of original research carried out on the part of the author and his excellent writing structure and style.

 

The primary piece of this article that stands out the most is the quality of the research conducted. The author participated in a study that examined and compared the peer review and writing skills of high school and college students of different areas. One important step that was taken in the study was the classification of the different types of peer response that students could provide to other students. This enables a specific breakdown of how each student performed in providing a certain type of response, rather than a general subjective view of the response produced. These categories were defined as global praise, personal response, text playback, sentence edits, word edits, reader’s needs, and writer’s strategies. Simmons uses the data collected in these categories to form the basis for his argument, as when he writes, “finally, the Adams students, who had had the most exposure to workshop classrooms in previous years, offered global praise only 10% of the time—the least of all four groups. These experienced readers and writers devoted 54% (cols. 3 & 4) of their comments to strategies of readers and writers. It is interesting that they also noticed ideas, sentence problems, and wording weaknesses more often (cols. 5, 6, & 7) than did the students at Holly” (Simmons 689). These results are used to support the idea that the writing workshops that have been implemented at the K-12 level in Adams High School and its district are better at producing students who can adequately produce writing criticism, and reinforces Simmons’ point that they should be widely implemented in school districts. The type of research that Simmons provides is a staple of persuasive writing and is a perfect example of using quantitative evidence to support a claim. This essay can be used to demonstrate to students how they can accomplish this successfully. Consequently, it should be made a course reading in future ENG 1510 classes.

 

Another admirable trait of Simmons’ writing is his impressive organization. His intent is clear: he is presenting the results and implications of a study that he helped conduct and his opinions on how student response can be improved. With this in mind, the structure he adopts in this presentation of results is very effective. He begins by outlining the project that was carried out and their selection process for students to examine. Simmons then explains the methodology that was carried out and reports both quantitative and qualitative results. He then moves into the conclusions he draws from these results and plans for the future. He organizes these topics with several main headers to guide the essay, shown below.

 

• The project
• Differences in peer response
• Clear patterns of development
• More experience, less editing
• More focus on readers and writers
• Classroom response
• Change over time

This is a fairly standard method of reporting one’s findings in a scientific and professional manner when research has been conducted; there is nothing shocking about the style used by Simmons to present this report. However, his writing perfectly accomplishes this structure and is a very useful model for students to learn how to professionally write a report based around individual research. This is also a good reason to make Simmons’ article a course reading in the future.

 

“Responders are taught, not born” has much to teach us as writers. For one, the content of the piece can help us grow and understand how to properly and significantly respond to and critique other students’ work with the goal of improvement. But in the structure and research that went into the article itself, there are other lessons to be learned. This article is a very good model of how to present research findings and write a professional research paper. For this reason, I believe that it should be used in further ENG 1510 classes to introduce students to these concepts.

Blog 3: How to E-mail a Professor

As Michael Leddy states on his blog, ““Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. It is, to my mind, one of the great American songs.” His blog of the same name reflects many of his other interests as well as his career as an English professor. In his post on 10 January 2005, Leddy discusses proper email etiquette for contacting a college professor. This post should definitely be kept as a class reading for this course in upcoming semesters.

Leddy’s post is intended to be instructive, and as such there is little pretense or extraneous information. He goes straight into the guidelines that he feels are important for writing an e-mail. He suggests that the student use his or her own university e-mail account for legitimacy. He says that the subject line should be descriptive and reference the course number for the class. He stresses that students should think seriously before writing and start off with a friendly professional greeting. He mentions that they should “avoid rote apologies for missing class” and politely get to the point. The body of the e-mail should be proofread and the e-mail should be concluded with the student’s full name and course section. He discourages students from sending attached assignments and suggests that they hand in work in person. Finally, he asks that students send a small message of thanks after receiving the professor’s reply. He then provides an example of a satisfactory e-mail that follows such guidelines.

Leddy is concise and to the point in his writing, which is one quality which makes this an excellent course reading. This post is meant to be a helpful and informative reminder proper e-mail etiquette, not a long discussion of courtesy and professionalism. Given this purpose, Leddy’s post is remarkably well done. His structure employs brief bolded statements that provide basic guidelines and follows with discussion and rationale for this guideline. For example, one guideline he provides is “Ask politely,” which he follows up with “Direct requests tend to sound more like orders in e-mail.” This allows for a casual reader to skim the text and understand the basic simple guidelines, while also providing the detail for students who seriously desire to improve e-mail correspondence with their professors. Leddy also avoids a contrived or complex paragraph structure, simply because it is unnecessary for the advice he is trying to impart. He needs to get the guideline points across in as efficient a manner as possible, and he is successful in doing so. Leddy’s extremely effective structure is a primary reason why this post should be used as a class reading in the future.

In addition, the reading itself holds great relevance to students taking this course. As ENG 1510 is a Composition I class, it is meant to introduce students to college-level writing. Students taking this class are likely starting out in their academic careers at this level and might be very unfamiliar with how to communicate with a professor. It is very possible that their only previous experience with e-mail was personal usage among friends and family, very different from professional level e-mail. One piece of advice he offers which is very useful is “Sign with your full name, course number, and meeting time.” This is a guideline that might not be immediately apparent to students, but it is critical: it enables the professor to quickly understand exactly which class the student is in and determine exactly what issue he or she is talking about. This is invaluable, and extensions of this idea are commonplace throughout the professional sector. This blog post is very relevant to college students’ everyday lives and should be of great interest to them. Consequently, I feel that it should be kept as a mandatory class reading in future semesters of this class.

Considering the rise of e-mail messages as the primary form of out-of-class communication between a professor and a student, the modern student cannot afford to be ignorant of proper e-mail etiquette or write e-mails in a haphazard manner. Use of proper email convention by a student helps to show his or her respect for the professor and makes the professor feel that the student is taking the class seriously. Proper student-professor communication is vital to student academic success. It is for this reason that I recommend that all students in ENG 1510 be required to read this blog post.

Works Cited

Leddy, Michael. “How to E-mail a Professor.” Web log post. Orange Crate Art. Blogspot, 10 Jan. 2005. Web. 11 June 2013.