First Rough Draft Workshop

First Rough Draft Workshop

Rough Draft Workshop Instructions:

Your major assignment for this week is to perform a peer review of two of your peer's rough drafts for Project 1 (You can find the drafts of your peers' project linked from their personal pages). You can find your group assignments near the bottom of the page (you will be evaluating the people in your group that are not you). You must review your peers' essays and, at a minimum, answer the nine questions listed below (there's no need to paste or retype the questions themselves; you can simply label your answers with corresponding numbers for the questions below). Please also provide any other advice you think would be helpful in aiding your assigned peers in revising their rough drafts. You should input your answers to these questions and any other advice you have as comments on the page that hosts their rough draft.

As mentioned on our syllabus, although you will not be given a formal grade for your peer review, failure to participate in this peer review exercise will result in a 5-point reduction in your final grade for Project One.

Peer Review Questions:

1. Is there a clear argument/thesis to the paper? Identify the thesis directly in the text or paraphrase it in your own words.

2. Does the paper have a clear purpose? Do you have a solid idea of why the analysis done here is an important one and/or why it is or should be interesting to an audience made up of people such as yourself? What is the purpose? 

3. Does the paper follow a clear structure or does it read more like a disconnected series of observations? I.e., do the different paragraphs or sections of the piece seem to follow from one another? Are there appropriate transitions between different sections and ideas? Is there any part of the paper that seems unnecessary - "beside the point" or unrelated to the overall argument of the project as a whole?

4. Did any argument or analysis in this paper seem unwarranted or exaggerated (in other words, did you think the writer was "jumping to conclusions" at times or being unfairly judgmental or dismissive)?

5. What, in your opinion, is the strongest part of this paper?

6. What, in your opinion, is the weakest part of this paper?

7. Does the author of the paper convince you that they understand what a genre is (the way we have discussed in it i this course and it is defined in your textbook)? Do they make a compelling case for how they have defined their (sub)genre of Internet memes?

8. On the sentence-level, did you find the paper to be well written? Does it contain poor grammar or sentence fragments? Is it unnecessarily wordy at times?

9. Finally, what grade would you give this paper if you were evaluating it as it is now?

Rough Draft Groups

Group One:

Elton

Rasha

Emily

Group Two:

Ryan

Briona

Kelly 

Jason

Group Three:

Nader

Andrew

De'Jea

Group Four:

Brian

Rabeeh

Mustapha

Jordan

Group Five:

Alex

John

Jaspreet

Abby

Group six:

Kayla

Eric

Adam

Group seven:

Kiera

Lakshmi

Iven