SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Wednesday, September 8
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
(No.)
Thanks for turning them in to me; I think I’ve gotten just about all of them.
You should have gotten a “thanks” reply from me when I received yours; if you think you shared it with me but didn’t get that, try again and/or let me know.
I’ve asked you to make appointments for 20-minute Zoom meetings with me to get my feedback on your essays.
Those meetings should happen between this afternoon and Friday. The available times are such that some of you will probably need to meet this afternoon.
The easiest way to make an appointment is via Google calendar. This tutorial from CIT is old, but still pretty accurate in terms of one way to make appointments:
I typically make appointments with Google calendar as shown in this video:
If it’s convenient for you, try to schedule appointments next to each other rather than leaving gaps between them (those gaps can add up to multiple appointments’ worth of time that are individually too short for anyone to use).
In any case, make your appointments soon, since I expect times will be scheduled quickly.
You’ll notice from the handout for this essay that the “due date” for meeting with me about your draft is this Friday.
If you don’t meet with me by then I’ll record “temporary 0” grades for the relevant learning outcomes in Canvas.
But those really are temporary reminders that you need to meet with me. Once you do, I’ll replace them with actual grades, with no late penalty (per the mastery grading emphasis on grades reflecting only learning outcomes).
The goal of peer editing is to give and get feedback that helps make your essays better. To that end, here are some thoughts about what you can do during peer editing:
Start, of course, by taking some time to read each others’ essays. When you’ve all finished, turn to talking about them.
Start the talking with authors’ questions, i.e., if you, as author, have questions about your draft, or anything about it that you’d like suggestions on, get the reviewer’s feedback on those things.
Then think about thematic issues, i.e., ask yourselves as reviewers, if the other essay has a clear “big picture.” Is it making some main point (i.e., an “I say”), and is it clear what that point is? Paraphrase that main point to the author in one sentence of your own words; if that misses or distorts the point the author was trying to make, work together to find ways to communicate the point more clearly. If you are a reviewer, never let an author persuade you that it’s your fault if you missed their point — if you missed it so will other readers, and it’s the author’s job to reach even those readers. Conversely, if you are an author, never agree that a reviewer kind of got your point if that’s not what you really feel — any misunderstanding of what you tried to say is a chance to improve the work.
Beyond simply making some point, writing should also convince readers that the point matters somehow, and, ideally, should leave readers “fired up” to learn more, take some action, or otherwise engage further in the conversation the essay is part of. As a reviewer, look for places where the essay does these things, and talk about ways of doing them that would work well for you.
Once you’ve dealt with big picture views of the essays, think about organization. Does the essay have a logical structure, typically including
As you read an essay, is it always clear where you are within the structure? Are transitions between the parts clear?
Reviewers, as you read the essay, see if you can think of things that could be added to any section to make it play its role more fully. Or, perhaps you will think of things that can be removed to make a section more focused on what it truly needs to do.
Finally, if there’s time, look at mechanics, i.e., ways of improving grammar, usage, etc. Concentrate on places where mechanics genuinely make the writing hard to follow rather than on purely formal concerns.
Don’t be satisfied in peer editing with saying an essay is good and needs no improvement. That may be true, and if so it’s worth letting the author know, but pretty much every piece of writing can be improved even if it doesn’t absolutely need to be. So if faced with an essay with nothing that needs to be fixed, spend some time brainstorming with each other about how it could become even better.
Some of you are using outside sources, e.g., information looked up online, in this essay. Because this is a warm-up essay, you don’t need a formal bibliography for those things, but you should give enough of a citation that the original source of an idea gets credit for it, and that readers can find that original source if they want to read it for themselves. For things you find online, I’d suggest working the author’s name and the URL into the body of your essay, for example
Jo Jones (https://jojones.com/blogs/crypto.html) says that ….
We’ll start talking about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug.”
Please read it for Friday, either at
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2147
or
https://www.geneseo.edu/~baldwin/intd105/poe_sanitized.html
(The “sanitized” version substitutes “n****” for a few places where Poe used a racial epithet. If you can, it’s probably worth reading the story the way Poe wrote it, confronting the language he used, thinking about why he might have used it, the context in which he wrote it and the audience he was writing for, etc. But if you can’t, use the sanitized version. We’ll talk at length about these things and more issues related to the portrayal of race in this story, starting on Friday — the use of the epithet is the least of its problems.)