Face to Face on my Horrible Draft

English: South facade of the Temple of Artemis seen from the South Theatre in Jerash, Jordan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of days after the peer review on my critical analysis draft, I read it again.  Suddenly, it was horrible.  I don't know how this happened.  So, I went to my conference with Dr. Toffee last week under a cloud of angst.  It wasn't too bad.  She suggested a few tweaks for my thesis statement, and -- for once -- I saw what was wasn't working in the way I had put it.  She liked my explanation of my critical model, especially the parts about Artemis and Atalanta; I was kind of nervous about that, so it was a relief for me.  The analysis has to be reorganized some.  I need to put in a few references to other scenes from The Hunger Games to show that it's not just in the scene I'm focusing on that Katniss is following the archetypes.

All in all, it went okay.  I guess the draft wasn't as horrible as I thought.

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Peer Reviews

Peer Review opening illo for UA/AU - Canada (Photo credit: albyantoniazzi)

Yesterday we had the peer review workshop for the critical analysis paper, and my reaction was mixed.  My reviewer (who said he had seen The Hunger Games) seemed to be in a big hurry to finish, and the comments he made weren't all that helpful, at least not from what I can see.  Along with answering the questions on the sheet we were given, we also had to answer three questions from the author of the paper.  My questions were 1.  do you understand the thesis?  2.  Is there enough stuff about the myth crit model or did I forget something?  3.  Does the analysis make sense?  I think that part of the problem is the way I wrote the questions.  He gave yes-and-no answers, and I don't think he gave them any thought.  Oh well.

On the other hand, the paper I reviewed taught me a lot.  It was not by the guy who was reviewing mine, which was a good thing, since if I had gotten his review after working so hard on mine, I'd be really pissed at him.  Anyway, I think I learned as much from the things in the paper that were bad as I did from the good stuff, mostly because I did some of the bad things, too, but I didn't notice them in my paper until I saw someone else do it. 

Next week is the conference about revising my paper.

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Write, Rewrite, Repeat as Necessary

Peer Review (Photo credit: AJC1)

My memoir is finally finished, unless I come up with something to add to it before class today.  After the peer review last week, I decided to do a fresh draft; the story just wasn't cooperating with the point I was trying to make.  It seems to me that the problem was that I really wanted to say something about sisters.  I have two, Rebecca and she who shall remain nameless.  The nameless one is the focus of the story, but I came to the conclusion that I should put Reb in as a contrast to her.  The new draft was better, but it was over the maximum length, so that had to be fixed, and so on.

I never spent so much time on so short a paper in my life.

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Another Thought about Another Writer

Image via WikipediaI've spent the last few minutes trying to decompress from finishing my paper, and I can tell that I'm probably not going to get to sleep just yet (only one class today, at 12:30PM, so I may get a nap before then).  I was thinking about the peer review I got on my draft (a bunch of useless, single-word answers to analytic questions), which made me think about the paper I reviewed.  The guy who wrote it (and who reviewed my draft) always shows up to class, but he doesn't take any notes, and his draft was only around 5 pages long.  It made mine look like a masterpiece -- his thesis made no sense (the topic was sustainability) and wasn't arguable, as far as I could see.  After that was introduced, if you can call what he had an introduction, he had a bunch of random quotations (from people he didn't introduce), and he didn't discuss them at all, just went on to making some points-- or trying to. 
It made me crazy:  after 8 weeks of researching and thinking and writing, this was the best he could do?  It was supposed to be a second or third draft, but it barely qualified as prewriting.  How does he think he's going to pass the course.  From now on, every time I think that I'm getting obsessive about school, I am going to remember him as the perfect example of how not to succeed.

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Summertime, and the writing is just as hard as ever

Image by Enokson via Flickr

My first assignment this term is to write two profiles of the same person, who is one of my classmates. I interviewed Mary during our first class session (incidentally, I have to take a moment to whine.  The summer term is only eight weeks, the class meets twice a week, which means that each class is 2 hours and forty-five minutes long -- yeah, it's a week's work every day.  Even with a break in the middle, it's too long for me.).  Anyway, we went through the questions Dr. Toffee gave us, and I couldn't think of anything else to ask.  This is my problem:  I had no idea what kind of "angle" to take on either profile, and according to the assignment sheet, I have to have an angle.  Things got worse, too, since Mary couldn't handle the long class periods.  (this is funny--my Zemanta feed is giving me all kinds of pictures of the Virgin Mary; none of them look much like her, since she's kind of goth.)  She dropped after the first class.  So now I've written my profiles (I focused on how she wanted to work with children; yeah, I couldn't see it either), and I don't really know if they're anything like she really is.  I wanted to email her to ask a few more questions, but she said she doesn't believe in email -- as if it's some kind of supernatural concept or something.
We did a peer review workshop on the profiles, and my reviewer didn't give me much help, but in a way,  that made me realize that I wasn't sticking to a point the way I should.  I'm afraid my essays came out sort of negative.  But, she'll never know, so I guess it's okay.
My point here is that if I'd just been more alert during the first class I would have gotten more out of her, and I'd definitely have better profiles.  Why is it that these things never occur to you when they could do you some good?

Well, the article below is an interesting profile, even if mine aren't.

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Why I'm Losing My Mind

Well, it's not because I don't have enough material to draft my paper, or because I waited too long to start, or because I haven't given it enough thought.  I'm pretty sure that I feel like I'm going crazy because I've never written a paper like this one before.  The peer review is Friday (today's Sunday), and this entry is supposed to be about problems I'm having.  The way it's going so far is that I keep thinking of stuff I needed to put in my outline but didn't, so every time I finish one task (for lack of a better word), I have to go back and put something else ahead of what I just wrote.  In other words, this thing is growing in every possible direction, and it may be totally out of control.

The one "task" that's given me the most trouble is defining a term:  action hero.  I guess that if I knew more about action/adventure stories in the 1800s, I'd be able to come up with a more scholarly definition that would take that into account.  As it is, I'm basing the definition on a couple of sources (the Tasker article and the one about Gladiator), and I think/hope I've finally got it to work.

The argument itself is shaping up okay, thanks to that Slate.com article.  I'm refuting it point by point.  My conclusion sucks.  That's the next big problem.

Speaking of peer reviews, my feed just popped up a batch of articles about a group of academics "corrupting" the process of academic publishing.  Take a look:

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Woe is me!

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, I'm way behind.  Worse yet, Lisa is ahead -- I don't know how she does it, but I do know one thing that helped her.  Unlike most of us in the class, she didn't screw up on the first essay.  I have to have a fresh revision for Monday.  It's almost done.  I still haven't finished my library research strategy exercise (that was supposed to be posted to the course discussion on Wednesday (2/24), but I did go over to the library and pick up my two interlibrary loans, before they got sent back and I got a $5 fine (I'll talk about those books next time, when I've looked them over).

I can't get over how much time this takes-- it's way more work than the first first-year comp class, even though there isn't as much actual writing.  I got a few good comments from the peer review on my research proposal, but I think I'm going to try to make it to Dr. Toffee's office hours before Thursday (it's due on Friday).

I've checked, and all of my journal entries so far are a lot more than the minimum 100-word requirement.  That should count for something, shouldn't it?  Not according to the assignment sheet.