Week 13: Sentence-Level Revisions and the 1.2 Draft

1. Week 13: Sentence-Level Revisions and the 1.2 Draft

2. Class Overview Class Reminders and Deadlines 1.2 Rhetorical Analysis: Expectations, Criteria, and Reminders Brief Assignment 9: Sentence-Level Revision Starting Points for Paragraph Revision: Clarity, Structure, Specificity, and Accuracy/Focus Reviewing Checklists Participation Assignment Instructor Evaluations

3. Reminders We do not meet next week, Nov. 27: Thanksgiving Break! Our final class meeting will be held Wednesday December 4th: attendance is mandatory, as we have an assignment that will be due the following week. Draft 1.2’s are due Monday December 2nd before midnight: don’t be late! Please do not include your name at the top: we have this information in our grading systems. The computer knows all (kind of). Refer back to previous weeks’ lessons and readings as you revise: go over the most recent checklists, and pay particular attention to Part 8 of your St. Martin’s Handbook as you revise body paragraphs.

4. Draft 1.2 Objective: To complete a final, polished draft of your analysis paper Purpose: In the first half of the course, you honed your writing skills so as to prepare you for college level writing. You used all of these skills, (summarizing, paraphrasing, critical reading, constructing thesis statements, and using supporting material via quotations) throughout the writing of the initial draft of this assignment. Since completing Draft 1.1, you have written peer critiques and practiced revising various sections of the draft. This assignment asks you to put everything you’ve learned this semester together in writing a final draft of your rhetorical analysis. Description: To complete this assignment, first evaluate your initial draft (Draft 1.1) by answering the following questions. · Did you select a text to analyze? Recall that you may either select an essay from Ch. 11 of your textbook, or another piece of writing from a scholarly journal, reputable newspaper or website. Your classroom instructor may also have suggestions for you as to appropriate texts to analyze. · Did you select your text and critically read it to determine the writer’s purpose and intended audience for the text? Do you have a good understanding of those elements? · Have you analyzed the text so as to determine the specific strategies the writer uses to achieve his or her purpose and to meet the needs of the audience. For example, you might have chosen to look at such elements as the types of evidence a writer puts forward and how he or she does so. Remember that you should have examined several strategies, including tone, word choice, and sentence structure. · After you determined what these strategies were used, you were to have considered how well these strategies actually worked. If you have not completed any or all of the above, your revisions should start by addressing these concerns. If you did, your revisions might begin with adding additional discussion of the text, or they may begin with a close analysis of your own evidence, sentence structure, word choice, and tone. How could you improve the communication of your own points to your intended readers? Your revised draft should be 1200-1500 words. Given that this is a final draft, it should be proofread carefully to ensure that it is grammatically and mechanically correct. Please use MLA format for your works cited and your in-text citations.

5. Draft 1.2 Reminders The draft 1.2 can be 1200-1500 words in length: you have room to breathe, but don’t forget about concision. Use the space effectively (i. e., don’t make your intro or conclusion longer than your body paragraphs for the sake of doing so). Drafts should be significantly revised, meaning, each paragraph should have undergone considerable revision. Changing wording here and there will not suffice, nor will “tacking on” new paragraphs to the old, unrevised ones: take appropriate measures to revise this draft using the skills you are learning. Grading is tougher, so put forth your best writing: we are looking for qualitative improvement. Your draft needs to be thoroughly proofread and error-free. After any major revision, check over your work sentence by sentence. After you have finished your draft, repeat the process. Make sure you have included a Work Cited entry like we’ve discussed for the entirety of the course: this must be on your draft.

6. 1.2 Grading Criteria Issue Identification and Focus The student’s understanding of what a rhetorical analysis is should be the basis for this evaluation. The degree to which the student exhibits that understanding will determine what score is assigned. Context and Assumptions The student should demonstrate an understanding of the context in which the artifact being analyzed was written. That is, if the student doesn’t understand the purpose of the text in the first place, it will be difficult to write an analysis of it. Sources and Evidence Critical criterion here—consider the choice of quotations, balance of quotations used to identify v. quotations to analyze original author’s choices. Most of the time, this and communication will determine whether the analysis is an A, B, or C piece. Own Perspective The thesis will be the primary point of focus for determining this score. Specificity, accuracy, and overall understanding will be primary. Also, does the remainder of the draft indicate that the writer understood what he/she said in the thesis? Conclusion What conclusions does the writer draw about the effectiveness of the writer’s choices and of the resulting text overall? How specific and accurate are these? Communication Organization is the first thing I’d look at here—if the organization is poor, even if sentence level matters are adequate to good, the score should reflect that.

7. Brief Assignment Nine Brief Assignment 9: Sentence-Level Revision The Prompt Objective: To demonstrate your ability to revise paragraphs at the sentence level Purpose: When you revise papers, you begin by reexamining content and organization of the paper overall before moving to more specific concerns such as the thesis, introduction, and conclusion. Usually, one of the final steps involves revising the body paragraphs to ensure that they reflect your intended purpose and reach your intended audience. This final brief assignment will help you accomplish that. Description: First, review your Draft 1.1. Consider the following: •Does the initial focus of your draft as expressed in your thesis statement need revision? •Are your purpose for writing and target audience easily identified after reading your draft? If you need to revise your thesis (and thus, a substantial portion of your paper), or if you need to better focus your purpose and identify your audience, your revisions of your body paragraph might start with those areas. You may need to make sure that your main point(s) are restated clearly, and that your readers understand the implications of your analysis. For this assignment, use the guidelines from Chapters 4, 5, 40, and 43 in the St. Martin’s Handbook to revise a substantial body paragraph (i.e. at least 4 sentences in length) from your Draft 1.1. Paste the original paragraph from your 1.1 draft into the assignment so that your instructor will be able to compare the original with your revision. Finally, write a short summary and evaluation of your revisions. Identify and explain which new strategy you used from the textbook and explain how changing the strategies used in this paragraph will influence your readers’ response to your analysis. Also let readers know here which paragraph, your original or the revision, is the strongest and why you believe that to be so. The total length of the analysis should be 350-500 words, NOT including the original and revised body paragraphs.

8. Sentence-Level Revision: Accuracy and Focus CHECK: Is my reading and analysis of the text accurate and consistent throughout the paragraph? Do I focus on analysis as opposed to summary throughout? (Body paragraph’s should be ¾ analysis, at least.) Am I analyzing the rhetorical choice in terms of persuasion (i. e., do I show “why” the audience would be influenced or persuaded by the choice and how that language pushes them to enact the author’s purpose?) Is my evidence clearly exemplifying the rhetorical choice? Do I present the evidence in an accurate manner? How is it embedded or framed in my own work? What context is needed for the evidence to make sense to the reader?

9. Clarity Read each sentence in your paragraph individually, as if it were the only thing on the page: what does it need to make sense? From what information or context does its meaning derive? Do you make implicit claims or explicit claims about rhetorical choices? An explicit claim would state exactly why a choice would be persuasive for an audience whereas an implicit claim would leave this implied by surrounding statements (Hint: aim for explicit, clear statements in analysis). Check your word-choice: are you using terms appropriately? Are you consistent in your voice (any switching of perspective or references to the author that “stick out”?) Do you explain “why” a rhetorical choice would be effective? Do you phrase this explanation explicitly, as in “Metaphor would effectively influence an audience of writers because they value associative thinking: most poetry is based on figurative language like metaphor.”

10. Structure and Organization Where do your topic sentences appear? Do they connect with each statement in the paragraph? Read each sentence against your topic sentence OR choose a sentence at random (within a paragraph) and compare it to its topic sentence: do they cohere? Do you have too many simple sentences? What about compound and complex sentences? Try varying your sentence structure to combine ideas. Do you use transitions, repeated terms, or parallel structures to progress logically from thought to thought? EXAMPLES: Transition phrases: “However,” “Therefore,” “For example,” “Because of this…,” “Indeed,” “Finally,” “Moreover,” Parallel structures: “While A occurs, B also occurs,” “Because A has … effects, B has … effects,” “If the audience believes…, they will also likely believe that A is true.”

11. Specificity Mark “vague” subjects and verbs like: reader, “the subject,” emotions, audience, effect (undefined), impact, people, deals with, and so forth. Mark colloquial phrases and clichés like: “bottom line,” “hook [someone/something], “grabs the reader/attention,” “tugs on heartstrings,” “gets a rise out of someone,” Replace these with text-specific descriptors: Impact/effect: positive or negative? How so? People/reader/audience: specific audience? Part of layered audience? “Grabs or hooks the reader”: what is being called to attention by the author and how? Is evocative language used to provoke a particular emotion? Which one? Anger? Sorrow? Empathy? Consider words like “builds,” “invokes/evokes” “generates,” etc.

12. Practice Examples Birkerts’s sarcasm would have a strong impact on his audience and would persuade them in that way. Sarcasm is stating something while meaning the exact opposite. Sarcasm is often used to criticize or deride others. Birkerts’s sarcasm is used persuasively to provoke his readers’ emotions on the subject. Budiansky pulls the chain of MT developers to get a rise out of them, which would make them believe his purpose.

13. Participation Assignment READ: WRITE: Due next class, you will write sentences that exemplify each of the Top Twenty Common Errors listed in your St. Martin’s Handbook, meaning: commit the error in a sentence of your own devising. Following each example, write a corrected version of the sentence. Your sentences can pertain to anything (appropriate for academic writing) so long as they exemplify the error in question. Feel free to be creative. Please number these examples 1-20, and label the corrected version below each corresponding error. (Hint: to complete this assignment, you will need to read over the guide in your St. Martin’s Handbook.) Finally, in a separate paragraph, please indicate which four errors are most frequent in your writing and write a sentence or two about where they most often appear in your work and why (i. e. do you need to learn more about sentence structure? Quote mechanics? Punctuation usage? Proofreading?)