302H Reflective Commentary Guidelines for Discipline Awareness Project: Tracing the Path of Scholarship

Reflective Commentary Guidelines

After revising each of your major assignments, you need to write a reflective commentary in which you discuss your experience of completing this assignment. In the case of the Discipline Awareness Project: Tracing the Path of Scholarship, please consider the following questions:

1) What was the hardest challenge you faced in completing this project? Why? What do you think you have done particularly well? Why?

2) What has this project taught you about the ways writers use sources, sources influence writers, and the two together shape the discussion of a topic?

3) Examining these sources should have introduced you to ideas and raised questions that you would not have gleaned from your initial source. Which of the sources you examine do you think would prove useful to the project going forward, and why?

4) How did the peer response process go and what changes did you make after receiving your peers’ comments? Note that you should not tell me about every little change — I don’t need to read about every comma you put in or took out; instead, you should describe how you spent your time in revision. Did you re-think some of your points, change the organization, focus on technical issues?

The commentary should be written like an essay — meaning well-organized and properly paragraphed, grammatically correct, do not number your answers — but the style may be informal, and of course you should use the first person. I expect it to be between 300 and 350 words total (not per question). Please use your word count function to put the total (not including the header) after the commentary. No title is necessary; just put “Reflective Commentary” at the top of the page.

Reflective commentaries, like other aspects of the essays, earn scores of √+, √, √-, or -. However, rather than being averaged into the score, your reflective commentary score will be converted to a bonus: a √+ will earn a bonus of 1 point; a √ will earn a bonus of .5 points; a √- will not earn a bonus; a – will result in a .3 point deduction, and not turning in a reflective commentary will result in a 1 point deduction. Remember that this essay assignment starts with a base value of 15 points.