Tuesday, April 19

PWR 497

We have five writing days left after today.

We write:

• What has your progress been on your project since last Tuesday?
• What are your writing goals for today?

> and at the end of class, we return to this page and write about our accomplishments<

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Rubrics help us know we're on track.  Here is a rubric for the final project.  Hope you find it useful:

What readers want:

·      A sense of direction and development toward greater complexity.

·      A sense of investment: characters that are not “flat” or clichés, plots that surprise, images that are fresh

·      A distinct style to the piece

·      A sense of voice, of the author’s sensibility

·      A clean page, free of distracting errors (what’s “distracting” may depend on the reader, of course)

·      Length.  Readers should not want it to quit.

·      Challenge.  Though some readers are interested in reading the same thing over, most readers want to see something that challenges them to think differently.

·      A sense of quality: the parts fit together and the work is revised

     Humor, wit, insight – the mind at work helps give the work freshness

Thursday, April 14 and Scholars' Day

Wow, you guys did great, both as revisers Thursday and in the reading Friday.  Nice way to support each other.

Tuesday, April 12

Class: Early on in Senior Seminar we made a list was just a list of what would go in the portfolio.  This time it's the actual documents themselves that are to be brought to class: the entire portfolio, printed out, in the flesh, for us to read and share.  Today is workshop, giving feedback on how to improve your peers' portfolios.

Major Projects Revealed!

Today was a fast day in Senior Sem.  Folks brought their major project drafts, and we read them.  Sounds simple enough.  Fascinating stuff, all of it unfinished and in-progress.  Authors asked for specific kinds of feedback on their papers (something other than the vague "do you like it," which means very little).  We read, annotated, and gave comments.

For Thursday, authors are to write two more pages (500 words at least) and somehow (how this will be done is a mystery to me), draw from the handout, below.  It has to look natural, too!


Print this for class.  I'll print it if you send it on before class.  

Looking forward to it.

DRF

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• Malcolm Gladwell writes “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.  Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig” Outliers, 150.
• “Working really hard is what successful people do….[it gives] a way to find meaning the midst of great uncertainly and poverty” (239)
• “Intelligence has a threshold” (80).
• “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing you do that makes you good” (42).
• “We all live inside our own private version of the adjacent possible” Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, 40.
• “Darwin’s ideas evolve because on some basic leel the notebook platform creates a cultivaten space for his hunches; it is not that th notebook is a mere transcription of the ideas, which are happening offstage in Darwin’s mind” (83).