Rough Draft of the Final Paper
Due: Friday, November 30, 5pm to dropbox and emailed to your peer readers
Given my firm belief that attention to process improves everyone’s writing, you are required to turn in a rough draft of your final paper. You will turn it in to dropbox for me to read (and return comments to you), and email it to members of your peer review group. These groups will be shared with you by email earlier in the week.
Rough drafts can be hard to describe. To get credit for this assignment you need to make a solid effort at a rough draft. Every time I assign one, at least one student wants to clarify what I mean by “a solid effort.” By this, I don’t mean that you need to turn in a perfect paper, or even a completely finished paper. But you DO need to write enough that it is a real attempt -- you need to attempt to write out / write through an idea that you’re thinking might work. You need to write long enough to give yourself either a firm sense that your plan is working or that it isn’t working at all. You need to have enough of a beginning that you can begin to see the difference between what you thought you’d write and what you’re actually writing.
For this paper that would be at least 1700 words. You ABSOLUTELY need to have a thesis statement. As we will discuss, the thesis is the most important part of a paper, so any rough draft has to include one.
In class, I’ll describe how the process of peer review will work. When you give me this rough draft, you’ll also email the same draft to two or three fellow students. You’ll get comments and suggestions from all of us, which you can use to revise the paper before its due date.
