Enigma Essay Peer Editing

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(No.)

Enigma Essay Peer Editing

Form groups of 2, share drafts, and then discuss suggestions.

Since this essay introduces research and outside evidence to the writing process, things to discuss might particularly include

• Does the essay base its argument on evidence beyond the Enigma novel and common knowledge?
• Is the evidence interpreted and/or explained in ways that help readers see how it fits into the argument?
• Do conclusions follow logically or at least plausibly from the evidence?
• Are the sources for the evidence clear? Is it obvious as you read which statements come from outside sources and which from the essay’s author? Are the sources well enough described in a “works cited” page or similar that you feel you could find and read them yourself if you wanted to?

Other things you’ve worked on in previous peer editing sessions are still relevant too, of course: clarity of theses, organization and flow of the essay, etc.

If you finish talking about specific suggestions for each others’ essays, lots of useful feedback can come from finding a part of your partner’s essay that you think is particularly interesting, cool, etc., and talking about it: what’s interesting, what you can see doing with it, questions about it, etc.

Discussion

How to do citations? There are two answers, one dealing with the principle, and one with the notation:

• The principle is to let readers know which ideas come from someone else, and who that is, plus letting readers find the source for themselves if they want it. Typically this is done by having complete bibliographic information (e.g., author, title, publisher, date, etc.) for each source somewhere outside of the main text, and short markers or links (called “in-text citations”) to the appropriate bibliography entry at the points in the text where you use information from that source.
• Each publisher or style guide has their own standards for how to write these things. Most commonly, complete bibliographic information is on a separate “Works Cited” or “Bibliography” page, although sometimes it’s in footnotes. In-text citations are usually set off in some sort of parentheses or brackets, and often consist of the author’s name and publication date, although other options include numbers if the bibliography itself is a numbered list, footnote symbols (*, †, etc.) if the bibliography is in footnotes, etc. Any citation style you choose to follow (e.g., Turabian, APA, MLA, etc.) will dictate these conventions in excruciating detail. I don’t particularly care how you do it, as long as you are consistent and clear.

Don’t forget to schedule meetings with me to talk about the drafts. These will ideally happen between now and Friday, although if you slip by a day or so that’s OK.

Any preferences between in-person and Zoom-based peer editing?

• People generally seemed to find the conversations more natural in person.
• From my perspective, there are conflicting considerations: on the one hand it’s easier to move between groups and see which groups might have questions or interesting conversations going in person; on the other hand I’m a little less of an awkward lurker listening to groups when I overtly join a breakout room to see how things are going.
• Some things that I worry about, such as noise from other groups interfering with conversations, apparently aren’t problems for you (and have solutions if they are problems for one or two people).

All in all, it seems likely that we’ll do our next peer editing in person, although I’ll save the final decision until closer to the actual date (Nov. 19).

Next

Practice using the Enigma cipher.

Bring computers to class, you’ll try using an online Enigma simulator to encrypt and decrypt messages to each other.

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