Due Session 21
Marked-up essays and individual response letters. Email to instructor before class and writers after class discussion.
In the case of revisions, you are reviewing essays, which you have commented on in earlier versions. It’s natural to reflect on how much writers followed your previous advice. However, it’s also important to view these pieces on their own terms. Authors sometimes take essays in new and unexpected directions as they revise. Although a second revision is not a course requirement, writers may choose to revise their pieces again (e.g., for possible publication, for writing competitions). So it is important to provide formative assessments that give advice on improvement, rather than summative assessments that assume that the current essays are currently in final form.
Of course, if any essays in your group are completely new, review them as you would a first version.
Review each essay and type a letter of one to one and a half pages (double-spaced) to each writer. Also make marginal comments on the essays.
Some questions to consider in your letters:
- What are the greatest strengths of this new version?
- How well has the writer employed the tools of creative nonfiction: time, setting, character, dialogue, interior monologue?
- Has the writer experimented with any new writing styles/formats (e.g., epistolary narrative, stream-of-consciousness)? How successful has the writer been in experimenting with new form(s)?
- What aspects of the essay are problematic or still need development? What questions do you have as a reader? What else do you want to know?
- Read the introduction (1–3 paragraphs) and conclusion (1–2 paragraphs) together. How well do you see the movement of thought in the essay embodied in the similarities and differences between the intro and conclusion?
- Comment on the title and any other introductory strategies (such as epigraph quotations). Suggestions for improvement?
- Would this piece be improved by including more hybridity of form?
- How “final” does this piece feel to you as a reader?
- Other comments or suggestions?
