Exit Conference

May 1st Wed   10:00-12:00 PM    RB396

Reflection paper

Reflection pape

Reflect your own progress over this semester, how they became through the semester, things that helped you and didn’t help, identify your weakness /strengths in writing.

ex) You can choose one piece of paper and then explain/analyze the strategies for writing and revising and how those strategies affect your essay. It's opportunity to think about yourself and look back at on your past work. 

Save it as PDF file and send it to jhlee8023@hotmail.com

THIS I BELIEVE

·    Explain the origins of their principle or idea

·    Using reasons and source-based experience (field research source)

·    Include a clear statement of their own belief

·    Use an organization approach that is appropriate and engaging for the audience

Enlarging the student’s repertoire of devices

Revising and refining your research paper

Revising: Begin by strengthening global issues in your first draft- the quality and clarity of your ideas and your support for those ideas: the organization or line of reasoning in your draft; and the overall tone or voice. At this stage, you cut, condense, expand, and add material. By addressing these whole-paper issues first, you can edit and proofread more efficiently later. After all, what’s the point of carefully editing a passage for style and grammar when in the end, you cut the passage?

Editing: Once you are fairly confident about the global traits of ideas, organization, and voice, begin strengthening sentence style and word choice. At this stage, your aim is to make your writing clear, concise, energetic, and varied, Because your attention is focused more locally or microscopically on your writing, you can also fix obvious errors, though that task is really the focus of the next phase, proofreading.

Proofreading: This phase focuses on correctness-accuracy of information and research references; and correct grammar, punctuation, mechanics, usage, and spelling. At this stage, your goal is to make your already edited writing clean.

Global issues --- ideas, paper’s organization, and voice of the paper

Local issues—title, transitions, spelling, grammar, punctuation, mechanics errors

Test the strength of your essential thinking

To get a sense of how well your overall thinking works, highlight your initial thesis statement and your restatement of the thesis in your conclusion, Then also highlight the main points along the way from thesis statement A to thesis statement B: these points are likely featured in your paragraphs’ topic sentences. Do the thesis statements relate to each other? Is the line of reasoning from A to B solid, or are there weak links that need repair?

Test the balance of reasoning and support

Examine the big picture of how you have used source material in relation to your own discussion of the issue. Highlight all source material in your draft and weigh that material against your own thinking. If your draft includes claim that lack needed support you need to either scale back the claims or add information and evidence.

Conversely, your draft may be dominated by source material, not your own thinking. If your paper reads like a series of source summaries or loosely stitched together quotations, if it contains big patches of copy-and paste material, if your paragraphs all seem to start and end with source material, or if your is dense with detailed but almost incomprehensible data, deepen your own contribution to the paper by trying the following

1. Expand your discussion.

2. Elaborate the evidence.

3. Clarify the significance

Selecting and integraitng evidence

Types of evidence 

• Observations and anecdotes --- share what people have seen, and experienced 
• Primary-text quotations --- word-to- word quotation 
• Statistics --- interpreted and compared properly not slanted or taken out of context 
• Test or experiment results ---interpret the data carefully and prove that it is carefully studied and properly interpreted
• Visuals -- 
• Analogies --compare two things, creating clarity by drawing parallels 
• Expert testimony --  build authority, credibility 
• Illustrations, examples, and demonstrations
• Predictions - offer insights into possible outcomes or consequences by forecasting what might happen under certain conditions 

    1. Look what happened in Southeast Asia with the Tsunami: 150,000 lives lost to the misnomer of all misnomers, “mother nature.” Well, in Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month, a tsunami every month. And it’s a completely avoidable catastrophe. – Bono

2. According to the two scientists, the rats with unlimited access to the functional running wheel ran each day and gradually increased the amount of running; in addition, they started to eat less (Mcgovern 1-2) 
3.  Most of us have closets full of clothes: jeans, sweaters, khakis, T-shirts, and shoes for every occasion.

    4.  Pennsylvania spends $30 million annually in deer-related costs. Wisconsin has an estimated annual loss of $37 million for crop damage alone (Blumig).

    5. Hulga blames this affliction for keeping her on the Hopewell farm, making it plain that ‘if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people” (O’connor 1994).

Arrange an Argument by Clustering

Clustering can help you explore the relationships among your thesis statement, reasons, and evidence. To create a cluster:

1.      In the middle of a sheet of paper, or in the center of an electronic document (word processing file or graphics file), list your thesis statement.

2.      Place your reasons around your thesis statement.

3.      List the evidence you’ll present to support your reasons next to each reason.

4.      Think about the relationships among your main point, reasons, and evidence, and draw lines and circles to show those relationships.

5.      Annotate your cluster to indicate the nature of the relationships you’ve identified.