UIUC Pare and Smart in Their Text Observing Genres in Action Discussion

Your role will be to

• Very carefully read your partner’s text, taking notes on what you take to be the main points and/or trajectory of their paper – their controlling purpose(s). Be sure to actively record what you take up to be your colleague’s controlling purpose(s), line(s) of inquiry (in numbers, or bullets – whatever works for you). I ask that you do this because often, writers have difficulty seeing the trajectory of their arguments when they are so immersed in writing a text. Then, write for your colleague a 100-200 word “annotation” of their work. For our purposes, this is a summary of what you see going on in their text. Think of this like an “abstract” for your colleague’s paper. You want to shed light for your colleague on what you see as most at stake in their text, what’s most important, what’s most prominent. Again, it might be best to go in order of the points you see them making in the text.
• I also want you to take the time to point out, as we do when we read anonymous samples of texts, what you see your colleague as doing well with regards to their writing with the course materials. How are they engaging with the authors we’ve read? You can make these using the comment feature in Microsoft Word.

This takes a little bit of time, please give your peer’s work the respect, care, and time it deserves.

Use this space to write your summary:

Then, you will read their text again. While doing so, make comments in the margins that ask questions, offer advice (try to give comments to are similar to the style of the comments I tend to give you all). However, what’s most important is that you pay close attention to the ways their text might satisfy (or satisfy more) our evaluative components. The evaluative components are listed below. Using the comment feature, please document particular places in the text where you see particular skills at play – you can do this by putting the appropriate reference number of a given evaluative component (i.e., “#1” when you see your colleague situating their ideas in relation to sources). But, be sure to point your colleague to places where your colleague might better satisfy particular components – and be sure to explain how.

Below, you do not have to list every single place your colleague demonstrated the use of an evaluative component; rather, you should make not of places where they might more fully meet the evaluative components.

1.Are the writer’s ideas adequately situated in relation to sources? Where, in particular (with page and paragraph references with short documentation via quotes)? Where could they do this more, in your opinion (give examples)?

2.Are important names and terms adequately defined?

3.Are controlling purposes apparent?

4.Are lines of inquiry adequately revealed and followed by such strategies as pursuing lines of reasoning, substantiating arguments, extending examples, paraphrasing, synthesizing, and summarizing? How do what you take to be the line(s) of inquiry help your colleague reveal their controlling purpose(s)?

5.Are documentable claims supporting these inquiries adequately and consistently cited in text and accompanied by appropriate reference pages?