Essay Feedback

Just a few quick notes for you regarding the latest essays:

Some outstanding efforts! Most of you chose very insightful and interesting topics. Many of you found your own authentic voice and wrote with confidence and fluency.

With respect to marks:

• Students who had excellent, almost error-free writing received an A.
• Keep in mind the ideas of "sparkle and polish". Papers with a little extra pizzazz, a unique level of quality writing and thought, will earn the highest grades.
• A few of you still have run-ons, fragments, and multiple errors that impede reading of your essay. Please address this by reading about these errors online, and doing some practice exercises to remediate your skills. These kinds of errors did limit the grade on the paper to a B or lower.
• Many of you lost marks for an incomplete rough draft or peer-edit. By the same token, these were easy marks for those of you who included all the required rough and peer-edited versions of your essay. Typically your full participation in this process paid off with a better essay and a better grade.
• Do you know that you need a comma before a coordinate conjunction in a compound sentence? If this makes total sense to you, do nothing. If it does not, please look up compound sentences and coordinate conjunctions, and find out what I am talking about, so you can get it right!
• Finally, I was really pleased so many of you brought your rough drafts to me or saw me at tutorial to ask about your essays. Those of you who planned ahead and had the rough ready on the day of peer-editing generally had the best marks. When you have the luxury of a take-home essay, as opposed to an in-class essay, make the most of the time and plan well ahead. Good advice would suggest that you let your completed essay sit for several days before creating your final copy - that way you have time to ruminate and apply the final masterful strokes of genius needed to earn those high marks. If you are rushing to finish, the fine-tuning is neglected (as may be noticed in this blog from time to time).

Remember, only 24 classes until Spring Break - not that I'm counting or anything!