Creative Non-Fiction Project: Draft Composing & Peer Review Essay

NOTE: This assignment is REQUIRED in order to pass the final assignment. The quality of your draft WILL be considered as part of your final grade on the assignment.
Collins
Composing and Peer Review Guidelines: Creative Non-Fiction Project
Draft Due on Canvas/Assignments by Apr 6 11:59pm.
Peer Edits (both marginal and endnotes on Canvas/Assignments): Due Apr 8
Final Draft Due: Apr 13, 11:59pm
Overview:
Your draft should be a minimum of 1200 words (Final Draft: 1500)
Follow MLA 8th edition citation conventions both in-text and as a works cited page
Please include page numbers and double-space your work.
Note: can use any of the material you have read in the process of preparing for this assignment. Examples include your descriptive writing assignment, notes/images from your Commonplace Book, reflective writing that you did on Jay-Z, Lorrie Moore, Didion or Dillard. If you did the interview, you can use excerpts from that, too. Here are the instructions for how to conduct an interview. You can also find these in the Creative Non-Fiction Project Overview.
Composing:
Use the following guidelines to compose your essay:
Look at your first draft and honestly assess it. Can you use this material? Do you think you need to take a different route? Comb through your Commonplace Book and Homework Assignments and find the responses you wrote that you think show the most promise.
Outline your project BEFORE writing. I don't care how you do it, but I assure you that if you do not plan this essay before you sit down to write it, you will spend far more time on it than if you had just taken a little time on structure at the beginning. After all, you just spend all these weeks learning about using description to establish PURPOSE! Go back to your samples (student and professionals) and reverse outline (https://owl(dot)purdue(dot)edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/reverse_outlining.html) their work. This will give you an idea of how you can outline your own.
Use your outline to compose your project, making sure that it has a clearly delineated purpose that is not simply an account of a personal experience, but suggests or even directly engages a significant political, social, cultural, or ecological reality.
Make sure there is ample engagement with purposed description: a 'cast' of characters, dates, events, places, and objects or actions used to create for your readers a compelling and believable world of experience. I.e., You don't tell us how to feel; you gently guide us with your subtle use of language!
Make sure there are visual and other textual elements added for texture and complexity.
Make sure you have paragraphs of multiple lengths. Try a couple of paragraphs that are only one line!
Make sure you have dialogue and that it is formatted correctly (https://firstmanuscript(dot)com/format-dialogue/)
(Links to an external site.)Make sure you have a compelling and specific title that indicates SPECIFICALLY what your essay is about (use a colon if need be! E.g., "The Frog: A Memoir About Jumping")
Go back over your draft and proofread for errors in grammar and logic. If you ran out of time and you know where you still have some problems, indicate in bolded brackets where you plan to revise. This practice saves your reviewers time and inconvenience and also allows them to comment more specifically on what, exactly, you might put in the bracketed section's place. E.g., [needs more information]; [unclear]; [don't like this]; [add section in book where he talks about [x]].
Submit for review.
For Peers:
Note: DO NOT correct your peer's grammar. It is the development of analysis and style that is the focal point of this assignment. If you are compelled, you can simply write "grammar" next to a grammatically problematic sentence. Only correct grammar if you can provide an explanation for the grammatical rule (e.g., "This is a run-on sentence; a run-on sentence is when you connect two independent clauses without proper punctuation--as in no punctuation or a comma splice. Here is a link to that rule).
Marginal Comments: Using the checklist below, each peer should make marginal comments either directly on the draft using the Canvas comments tool or using the editing tools on Word. Focus exclusively on content and organization (Do not correct grammar).
Write-Up: Please provide your peer with a roughly 350-word write-up of the draft that starts with a description of the draft’s greatest strength (e.g., description, clarity of purpose, insight, organization). Explain what you think the author might do to develop that strength further in the revision of the draft. You should also provide a description of the draft’s TWO main weaknesses (e.g., lacks effective description, lacks purpose, superficial, disorganized). Explain what you think the author might do to strengthen those areas. Be specific. Quote from the draft and point to page #’s.
I will be grading these peer edits based on the marginal notations and type-written summary you provide. Your grade will be based on both the clarity and specificity of direction you provide for the author’s revision, as well as your insight into the paper’s strengths and flaws. Do not use generalizing and unhelpful language such as “it flows well” or “I like your ideas” or “you do a good job with the evidence.” Instead, use constructive language that offers the author specific suggestions for reorganizing and rebuilding (E.g. "I loved the description of your mom's gardening; I thought the description of your struggles at school, however, lacked the same connection to the senses. You told us how you felt rather than showing"). Keep in mind that it is crucial that you show evidence for your claims; your peers can be misled by your suggestions if you do not demonstrate that you know what you are talking about, so always proceed with caution. Provide the sort of feedback that you would hope to receive.
Checklist:
Thesis/Purpose:
Find and circle/put a box around or highlight the most comprehensive and compelling statement of the draft’s main purpose and/or argument. It does not need to be at the beginning of the draft; in fact, it probably makes sense for it to come after the author has engaged us in some autobiographical and historical description, maybe even toward the end. Be sure to explain in a marginal comment what you think these sentences are doing to best highlight the purpose of the essay.
Author:
Is the author's self-presentation consistent with the draft's purpose? How does the author use his or her self-presentation to advance the purpose? Indicate at least THREE examples in the draft that provide us with a clear and compelling sense of the author’s character. In a marginal comment, explain how each of these examples works to advance the author’s purpose in composing the project and/or might be improved to advance the purpose. If you can't find three strong examples, you should write that your author's self-presentation is lacking.
Evidence and Description:
Do you read evidence of the role that stories and storytelling play in the development of the project? How are they working? How can they be improved upon?
Can you locate examples in the draft that tell us the ways in which the author tries to appeal to his or her readers with emotional tactics (pathos)? How are they working? How can they be improved upon?
Can you locate examples in which the author appeals to their readers' shared sense of what constitutes evidence to prove a claim or state of affairs? E.g., if the cupboard is bare, the person is probably hungry (Logos). How are they working? How can they be improved upon?
Can you locate any examples in which the author appeals to their readers' shared sense of what constitutes a certain kind of person? E.g., one who makes jokes has a sense of humor; one who describes things in crisp, concise language is probably no-nonsense; one who focuses on somber descriptions is probably a bummer (ethos). Explain how these examples can be improved upon and why.
Do you read descriptions that compel you to think about wider issues outside of the author's experience--political, cultural, social, ecological? How are they working? How can they be improved upon?

Organization (Transitions between sentences and paragraphs):
Does each paragraph end with a sentence that connects to the first sentence of the next paragraph?
Does the content of the paragraph focus on developing the main point of the paragraph’s topic sentence? (Easiest fix is to change the topic sentence, but that means the paragraph must make only one point. Does it? Often paragraphs are scattered and you will need to delete, move and add to make the paragraph focused and developed around a single idea/point. See below to determine whether your paragraph makes a single point)
Do each of the sentences within the paragraph follow one from the other? Is there a point where the sentences seem unconnected? Is this a new point? Can it be connected by adding a simple transition sentence? Or does it need to be part of a new paragraph with additional information? Moved elsewhere to a paragraph that makes the same point? Deleted?

Multi-Modals:
Does the author engage in multiple layers of linguistic expression? (can be words and phrases in another language, poems, translation, footnotes, directions, recipes, or other examples that might have come from the commonplace book). Is there any multi-modal element that is not effective? Do you need more elements? Fewer? (Elements shouldn’t be distracting; they should pull us in to the composition).
Is each multi-modal element arranged carefully to follow or appear beside text that either refers explicitly to the image or infers a connection to the image? It should make sense, in other words, when we are asked to pause our reading to look at a photograph that we are looking at that particular photograph in that particular moment of reading. Think of Between the World and Me.

Grammar:
Have you proofread carefully, reading aloud for any stylistic problems (are all sentences, for example, the same length? Do they all begin the same way? Try using your LB Brief or the style guide under Files/Writing How-Tos).
Other:
Does the author use appropriate MLA citation for quoted material in the text and on a separate works cited page?