Section 17: Workshop

Skills Focus: Sentence Style Editing to reduce wordiness

HW, part 1: Workshop Preparation Monday in class, you’ll get together with your writing partners to discuss each other’s essays.

Before Class

Use the online peer review application on Canvas to read your writing partners’ essays and write feedback. By around 1 pm Saturday, you’ll be assigned writing partners/essays to peer review—be on the lookout for a notification from Canvas or an email from me
  1. Before commenting an essay, I recommend reading it through once
  2. Use the comment feature to provide feedback directly on the essay. For instance, you could indicate
    • Things you like (e.g. “well put,” “interesting idea”)
    • Places where you are unsure of the writer’s meaning (?)
    • Places where you think the writer should elaborate on a point (“expand,” “explain”)
    • Places where you’d like a concrete example to illustrate a general claim (“illustrate”)
  3. Use the rubric to summarize your observations or suggestions about the specified elements of the essay

During Class

  1. Before conversing with your writing partners, quickly read over their comments. Note any follow-up questions you have or remarks you’d like them to clarify
  2. Discuss one essay at a time
  3. Take as your starting point the strength of the essay—the insight the writer should build on and refine
  4. Wrap up your discussion of each essay by summing up the 3 or 4 the most important things the writer could do to improve the essay

HW, part 2 Read Mastering the Craft of Writing Chapter 10, “ & Chapter 12, “Don’t Trust Modifiers”

HW, part 3
Before turning our attention to ways in which the experience of identity has changed over the past decade with the emergence of smart phones and social media, we’ll consider a broader historical perspective and look at ways in which the experience of identity was impacted by earlier social and technological developments

Writing in 1996, psychology researchers Roy Baumeister and Mark Muraven discuss ways in which identity evolved after the Renaissance, focusing in particular on the context of the twentieth century. MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes enthusiastically about cyberspace as a playground for creative exploration of identity in the 1990s. Danah Boyd and Lydia Laurenson offer first-hand impressions of their online experience of identity as teenagers in the 1990s.   )