I really enjoyed our individual conferences on Tuesday and Wednesday. At this point, all of you have a solid thesis statement (or at least a draft of one), and you should be working on the assignment I gave you in the conference: write, write, write! For the past month, we have been discussing the six articles that are the basis for this research paper, so you should have no trouble writing about this topic at length. Your first draft won’t be pretty, but that’s OK—just keep writing. By the time you come to class on Monday, you should have several (translation: not just one or two) pages of written text. It’s fine if your first draft is hand-written, stream-of-consciousness, unformatted prose. Just bring what you have written to class on Monday.
All three days this week, we will be analyzing the short articles on pages 83–96 of the Norton Field Guide, then applying the techniques used in those articles to your research papers. I assigned these articles for Week 7, but we didn’t have enough time to discuss them. Please reread these articles, bring your book with you to class each day, and be ready to critique (or defend) the positions taken by these three authors. You should also bring the latest draft of your research paper to class each day.
One last note: The end of Week 8 marks the midpoint of the semester, and I will be submitting individual progress reports for each of you this weekend. If you have any questions about your midterm grade, you can login to Blackboard to see your scores on each component of your grade. The annotated bibliography is NOT part of your midterm grade, but I will have those graded and returned to you within the next few days.