For Tuesday

Hello all,

Today, we went to the "metaphoric" candy shop and explored our dependence on others. This exercise helped to get us prepped to talk about the process of peer reviewing and being engaged contributors.

We first explored the importance of reading to writing. We discussed how reading and writing are connected. Sarah, Brenna, Alex, and Dean helped to initiate the conversation about reading things we "like" and reading things "we don't like" differs. We then moved onto thinking about how reading for learning differs from reading for other purposes. Blaze, Bret, Monica, and Baalika helped to distinguish between these ideas in reading and in writing. Lastly, we discussed the ways reading and writing are in concert. Amanda, Mia, and Jessica helped to explore ways of interrelationship between the two ways.

The goal of this conversation was to discuss what makes writing interesting and effective and how when we read other's works we need to think about being engaged with both the reading and with the writing that created the reading. In addition, we are beginning to develop the class's own rhetorical terminology for the writing process, so this discussion is contributing to that discourse.

We then held the first Informal peer workshop for students to read each other's essays. This exercise is meant to prompt the writer to come up with questions for the writers as well as ideas for their own essays. We had a three-prong method:

1. First we read as a "peer"-this means that we read the text looking for concerns of audience, expectations, and effective textual elements.

2. Then we read the paper as a "prof"-this means that we read the text looking for concerns of diction, syntax, and coherence. We looked for elements of unity and "fit" or "flow" in this manner. We also looked for word choice and sentence variety.

3. The we read as "the evil one"-this means that we read the text looking for the big connections i.e. between word, ideas, sentences, and the evidence of telling i.e. observations and showing i.e. evidence and support.

We are not making comments on grammar for this first peer review.

We then talked about crafting a revision plan. Your revision plan should use the feedback that you received from your peers. You will craft a short (250 word max) response following this structure.

I agree with: (list a few ideas that your peer contributed that you agree with)
I plan to (describe the changes that you will make to your texts)
my schedule for revisions is (list the a time frame for your work)
and I believe statement (forecast the success of your revision and polished documents)

I didn't have the chance to "check" your Elbow/Bartholomae exercises (i.e. cubing and questioning). Can you please post those on your blog or email them to me.

For Tuesday:

Read “The Persistence of Reading” Burkdall on moodle
Post a short summary and two questions of the reading on your blog
Craft a revision plan for your writing (post on blog)
Post your Elbow/Bartholomae writing exercise on your blog.

Thanks so much and have a great weekend,

Kat