A large part of this final revision assignment is translating your ideas to someone who doesn’t know you nor the specifics of the topics we have discussed in class. In other words, this is an exercise in communicating your ideas to an informed but objective reader (not necessarily me), which means that you need to be careful to sufficiently explain all your important concepts and connections and to lay out the logic of your analysis as precisely as possible.
Consider the following questions regarding the rhetorical and conceptual elements of your essay:
Idea/Thesis/Introduction Level:
Are you answering the question? Is your thesis clear? Does it come to a forceful enough point? Does it have enough moving parts to sustain an elaborate analysis? Does it rely on a list-like structure? Some (bad) examples:
Cassel and Barr argue for both personal and social implications to mismanaged health care.
Acupuncture, my chosen CAM, offers a critique of Western medicine that is grounded in nature, built on a more personal relationship between healer and sufferer, and harkens back to ancient tradition.
Are your operative concepts properly defined/explained? Does your thesis claim make room for your analysis to evolve over the course of your discussion? Do you have enough related yet distinct supportive claims to sustain an extended discussion? Are these supportive claims clearly organized in your opening? Does your thesis establish a necessary order of operations for your analysis?
Remember: when in doubt formulating a thesis level claim, rely on the language and logic of the prompt to help organize your answer. But seek specificity; we never want our thesis to be a mere recitation of the assignment premise.
Paragraph Level:
How are your talk-to-text (T2T) claims? Is the opening of your paragraph too general? Are your claims attributed? In other words, does the reader know who is speaking? (God voice?)
How are your warrant claims both at the T2T level and following each piece of supportive evidence? Do these claims steer your supportive point clearly towards the goals of your thesis? Are you leaving the right kind of breadcrumbs for your reader to follow?
Conceptually, is your supportive paragraph bottom-heavy? Have you buried the lede? That is, have you started the paragraph with the biggest, most thesis-friendly T2T claim (yay!). Or does the most focused, thesis-oriented statement arrived in the middle or towards the end?
Remember that evidence best employed to support your paragraph’s main claim not introduce it. Body-level supportive paragraphs in final drafts (and portfolio revisions) need to start with their ideas not arrive at them. Don’t let the paragraph become a record of your figuring out your supportive logic.
How have you integrated your quoted material? Paraphrase? Direct quote? Have your formatted it correctly? Does your analysis/warrant claim treat the entirety of the quoted material? IOW, do you have something to say about all the cited material? If not, streamline.
Have you missed any opportunities for a direct quote? Have you set the reader up to expect a direct reference to the text and then not delivered? In general, everyone should look for places to add additional intertextual support.
Surface Level:
Do your sentences suffer from vague pronouns? Too many commas? Does your sentence structure rely too heavily on apposition. Read your prose aloud to catch overly convoluted or vague formulations.
Are the transitions between your sentences built out of words or punctuation? Avoid semi-colons or hyphens.
Does your sentence have an “,-ing” transition in the middle of it? If so, is this transition functioning properly or does it result in a dangling participle? For example:
Donald Bar makes the astute claim that SES is a driving factor in health care disparities, resulting in the ongoing marginalization of those unfortunate enough to get sick while impoverished.
Finally: Anything else you can think of? What are some of your own priorities going into the revision portion of the final portfolio project?
Consider the comments on the file as well
