Workshop of Mallory's 2nd Rough Draft

Workshop of Mallory's 2nd Rough Draft

Rough Draft #2 Workshop Questions

(Questions are the same as for Draft #1)

Overall
1. What do you like best about the paper? The topic. Coral Reefs are a fascinating topic to talk about.
2. Email the author and ask for one particular concern that s/he had about the draft. Examine that area and see if you can offer the author helpful suggestions.

Mallory is concerned that her essay skips around and doesn’t follow the thesis logically. After reading the essay, I would have to disagree. I thought the essay followed the thesis very well. One suggestion I would make would be to just add in some transitional sentences that link one paragraph to the next and that should help with any choppiness you feel is there.

Thesis
3. Does the author clearly express his/her opinion of the topic in the thesis? What argument does the thesis make? Yes, the author is against commercial fishing because it destroys coral reefs
4. What group of people agrees with the author? What group disagrees with the author? Conservationists will agree with the author and the commercial fisheries will disagree
5. Does the paper have an argumentative thesis statement using ALTHOUGH and BECAUSE? Yes it does

Content
6. On a scale of 1 to 10, how interesting did you find this paper to read? Be brutally honest! (Friends don’t let friend turn in boring essays!) the paper was a 6…I had a little bit of a hard time reading it because there were grammatical errors throughout the paper
7.Where can the author more fully develop ideas, either by providing examples or explaining/clarifying concepts for the reader? Be specific (e.g. “the 3rd is dullsville”; “the conclusion is really vague”).I actually thought that everything was clear and the ideas were developed nicely.
8.What kinds of objections might someone who disagrees with the author’s point of view raise? Commercial fishing is not the only thing destroying the reefs….What about natural phenomenons such as El Ninos?
9.Has the author dealt with these objections? Not that I could see
10.Is the relationship between each paragraph and the thesis clear? If not, what suggestions do you have for the author to improve the connection? I thought that it flowed well from one paragraph to the next and I could see the relation between the paragraphs and the thesis statement.

Style
11. Are there easy transitions from one paragraph to the next, or does the author jump from topic to topic? There were good transitions and no jumping around.
12. Does the opening of the essay capture the reader’s attention? How so? If not, what suggestions can you make that might strengthen the opening? Yes, AIDS is definitely a word that will capture the reader’ attention
13. Does the concluding paragraph serve to bring the discussion to an end that logically follows from the thesis and its direction? The concluding paragraph summed up what her opinion was on the subject. I thought that it ended the essay nicely.

Research
14. How many different sources are cited in the paper (don’t look at Works Cited or References (depending if it's MLA or APA); look at the parenthetical citations. The medium does not matter.) I counted 15
15. Does the author rely heavily on just 1 or 2 sources, or does the author equally use all of the sources to support the paper’s thesis? A couple of sources were used 2-3 times but overall I think that it was equal.
16. Does the author have more quotes in his/her paper than personal opinion? No I don’t think so. I wasn’t sure about the paraphrased with the quote behind it though. I saw that several times.
17. Are there any sources listed on the Works Cited or References that are not cited within the body of the essay? (This is a no-no) no, but Kirkwood and Weiner were not on the work cited list
18. Is all the information retrieved from research, including opinion, ideas, paraphrases, quotes, and statistics, cited with in-text (parenthetical) citations? If not, list specifics of what needs to be cited (friends don’t let friends turn in plagiarized papers). It looked like everything was cited to me.
19. All quotes in research papers should be commented upon. Does the author comment after every quote? If not, help the author decide what the underlying reason behind putting the quote in the paper was. There was more paraphrasing than quotes in the paper. I would take a look at the quotes and make sure that they were not already paraphrased.