Race Essay Peer Editing

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(No.)

Misc

Don’t forget to share your draft of essay 2 with me, and to schedule a meeting to talk about it.

Peer Editing Race Essays

Guidelines

Some things to particularly think about in these essays:

• Thesis. Does the essay have a clear thesis statement? Is the thesis appropriately focused, does it make an arguable claim? Do readers understand the thesis the way authors intend?
• Argument. Do essays lay out logical reasons why the author believes their thesis, and why readers should? Are there additional parts of the argument that could be added, or extraneous parts that could be removed? Do the points in the argument flow logically from one to the next? (Note that this essay doesn’t ask authors to do outside research, but if they have, are sources cited sufficiently that a reader can find them?)
• Background. Does the introduction to the essay provide enough background on the particular piece of entertainment being discussed that readers can follow the thesis and argument?

Questions and Comments

I welcome feedback on how well these peer editing sessions work via Zoom — I found that Zoom seemed to work better than face-to-face for similar activities in an upper-level class last semester, and believe that working in break-out rooms is easier than everyone working face-to-face at the same time in a physical classroom, but would like to know if that’s true for you. So feel free to let me know in some future meeting, via email, etc.

What I heard as I visited break-out rooms seemed to be good advice, specific to the essays you were reading, but it also seemed to be fairly short. You can use peer editing for longer, more concrete, conversations, for instance about specific ideas for a thesis or how to make an argument. If someone gets an idea from someone else that they then incorporate into an essay that’s fine; if it’s a significant idea in the finished essay they can put in an acknowledgement of the person they got it from.

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Substitution ciphers (the kind of cipher in “The Gold Bug”).

Please read the “Substitution” and “Codes, Ciphers, and Keys” sections of Simon Singh’s “Black Chamber” web site at http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/chamberguide.html. Note that the “Substitution” section includes subsections “Caesar Cipher,” “Kama-sutra Cipher,” “Pigpen Cipher,” and “Mono-alphabetic Cipher.”

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