SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Friday, November 19
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
(No.)
As in past peer editing, work in pairs or (if necessary), a few triples.
Try to concentrate feedback on such issues as theses, arguments, etc., rather than mechanics. See if you can suggest ways to apply our recent class conversations about argumentation, or places where they seem to be used particularly well.
If you finish with specific feedback to each other, try to talk more generally about points you find most interesting in each other’s essays, places you see potential to go in new directions, etc. These might, but don’t have to, become revisions. Or they might be ideas for future essays, just interesting conversations sparked by the writing, etc.
You can start changing your draft based on peer feedback right away, you don’t have to wait until you meet with me.
The assignment for this essay is very open-ended, there are lots of different topics you can write about. To some extent I expect this to be true in other courses too. Papers you’re assigned for them probably have a certain leeway to write about something you’re interested in. It varies from professor to professor, of course, but you’ll probably find that more professors are happy to see creative approaches to papers than not.
A few of you are trying to read some of Turing’s papers in connection with this essay. I’m impressed; some (e.g., “On Computable Numbers…”) are challenging even to professional mathematicians. It’s great if you want to try reading some of what he wrote, and a lot of it is available on the Web, but don’t feel that you have to.
An interesting phrase that came up in one of your thesis statements: Turing was “betrayed” by his government. This phrase seems to echo some of Whitemore’s view in “Breaking the Code,” where Turing clearly feels betrayed by how John Smith, the government man, treats him. It also connects to research another one of you is pursuing, regarding gay British soldiers returning from World War 2 being arrested for their homosexuality. These soldiers seem to have been tolerated while they were fighting for Britain, but then subjected to increased persecution afterwards — much as Turing’s homosexuality was tacitly tolerated at Bletchley Park, but then not in civilian life. And all this resonates with the recent “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to gays in the US military.
Writing conclusions.