Participation grades ("writing")

As the syllabus explains, there is a second 10% participation score that belongs to your writing grade. (Along with the 3 essays.)

There are three sub-categories here: discovery tasks, drafts, and peer review.

I'm giving an "A" for discovery task to anyone who submitted a reasonable effort at both of them. "C" if you missed one, "F" if you missed both. Reasonable effort means basically that you answered each question and didn't submit a blank document to EEE. I mean, I'm sure you didn't, but as Ronald Reagan said (somewhat nonsensically), "trust but verify."

For the drafts, you get an "A" if you submitted an ideas draft and a working draft for each of the three papers. One letter grade down for each one missed. I have never had a class that was so diligent about turning in completed ideas and working drafts. Please hold onto this habit; it will serve you well in the future. Even if drafts are not assigned, you ought to internalize some form of that process.

For the peer reviews, the default grade was A-. A couple gave more detailed/useful comments and got an A (apparently the Roses were very good partners to have for your paper... this gives me high hopes for the Rose/Rose collaboration on paper 3). A few gave less detailed/more cursory comments and got a B+ or B. But overall you did pretty well with this.

So I took those three sub-grades and averaged them together, basically. The overall average for writing participation was very nearly a straight A.

My favorite comment from the peer reviews, by the way, courtesy of Wes:

I think this next question is a load of rubbish. Who cares about the title of an essay that isn’t going to be published? You might as well call it “Laser Donkey Battles: The Austen Years” for the hell of it.

He makes a fair point. It would be silly to overemphasize the title to an unpublished essay. Then again, you could make the same argument for any other aspect of the essay! Such essays are, in the end, partly training exercises for writing similar essays in the future, partly assessment exercises, partly heuristics for promoting thought, and partly ways to nurture writing skills portable to other academic disciplines and professional fields (perhaps). I too think the two-part format can be rather stupid, and in fact I have made fun of it repeatedly to my fellow grad students. But it is a standard format in the humanities disciplines, a "unicorn" if you will. And it is somewhat useful, insofar as the second part tells the reader what the essay is about and the first part allows you to exercise some creativity. To make a long story short, the first part is indeed superfluous, but the second part isn't. All we're really trying to do is get students to write the mini-thesis in the title, and if they want to get a bit creative, that moves to the first part.