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Ma Deuxieme Réflexion Lettre

Dear Anna,

In the span of two papers, in my opinion, you actually improved a great deal. In fact, you improved a whole letter grade!

For the “Interacting with Text” paper, you had to integrate your own idea with that of the author’s text, in this case, was Geeta Kothari’s “If You Are What You Eat, then What Am I?” I know this was a difficult assignment for you because this particular assignment had asked you to make a specific claim.

What is a claim? Well, first off, a claim is not a summary. A claim is “very specific, not broad or general” and is an arguable idea that “digs deeper” than that of a general summary. A claim is neither a “skimming” statement, which does not address why the author uses the idea.

When you wrote your first draft of this paper, I had noticed that the whole essay bordered around (and did not dig deeper into) your intended claim of “what it meant to assimilate and grow up in America.” Steph commented, “Your claim should answer this question of “what it means.” You had basically written a whole summary of Kothari’s essay, which was not the purpose of this assignment. Towards the very last paragraph of your essay though, you finally came across your real claim, which was “to assimilate and grow up in America is to be constantly facing the clashes of different cultures and deciding how to define oneself as a person.”

So perhaps when had realized this, (or rather, when Steph blatantly pointed it out in your draft), you re-wrote your whole paper according to that claim.

Another issue that you had in your first draft was that you injected numerous quotes attempting to support your claim. My peer editor, Stephanie E., had suggested that instead of just putting the quotes out there maybe I should have included an explanation with each quote so that the reader would not get lost trying to make the connections. I found that very helpful so I had put her suggestion into consideration and removed many unnecessary quotes from my first draft and elaborated on the remaining citations in my final draft.

On the first letter that I had written to you about your identity narrative, I had mentioned that you had a problem with making “concise connections” with your main thesis. This time around, for your second unit paper, I think you improved quite a bit in staying focused on your claim and not straying off elsewhere. I had also noticed that your structure and transition for this second unit was also a great advancement compared to your first unit.

Though you did grow a little bit as a writer in the span of these two papers so far, one thing that I think you still need to work on is your grammar and mechanics. This is still a problem. The redundancy, diction, tense, and sentences ending in prepositions (just to name a few) serves as a distraction to your paper. If you could work on that a bit more, that could greatly help your next paper in the long-run.

One last thing I wanted to comment on was the conclusion of your second unit paper. Steph had asked if you could somehow re-work your closing statement in some form other than re-phrasing your opening statement to the paper. I wonder if that could be possible as well.

That’s all of I have to say for now. Bon chance on your last paper!

Best regards,
From your counterpart:
Annerrs 13:05, 1 May 2007 (EDT)