302H Reflective Commentary Guidelines for Advance Research Project Part II: The Essay

Reflective Commentary Guidelines

After revising each of your major assignments this semester, you need to write a reflective commentary in which you discuss your experience of completing this assignment. In the case of the Advanced Research Project, Part II:Position Paper, please consider the following questions:

1) Identify your audience for this essay. This should be a specific journal: to whom would you submit it for publication? Why would that journal be interested in it? (Mentioning other articles on similar topics that the journal has published would be one way to support this.) How well does your essay conform to the type of articles this journal publishes in terms of writing style and scholarly apparatus? Would you need to make any changes to the article (other than length) if you were planning to submit it?

2) At this point, you should be confident in your argument. However, the reality is that even in the best arguments, some supporting points are stronger and more persuasive than others. Which paragraph in your essay presents the best argument in support of your thesis? Which paragraph, on the other hand, is the one in which you have the least confidence?

2) As I noted, a rebuttal makes your argument stronger. By rebutting one of your sources, you demonstrate that you engage thoughtfully with the existing material on your topic, rather than uncritically accepting everything you have read. At the same time, quoting someone merely to say he or she is wrong can come across as a straw-man argument. The best approach is usually to acknowledge that your source has a point, but it is flawed. Where is your rebuttal? Describe your process in deciding to rebut this particular source.

3) Reflect on your organization. Did you structure your essay as closed-form or open-form? Where exactly is the thesis? If you used subheads, explain why you put the breaks where you did. In any case, what criteria did you use to order the body paragraphs: are they chronological in some way, or thematic?

4) How did the peer response process go and what changes did you make after receiving your peers’ comments? Describe how you spent your time in revision. What portion of your time did you spend working on the argument, improving the organization, focusing on clarity of expression and sthyle, and cleaning up technical problems with the citations and the works cited?

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 them to be between 400-450 words total (not per question). Please use your word count function to put the total (not including the header) after the commentary.

Reflective commentaris 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 2 points; a √ will earn a bonus of 1 point; a √- will not earn a bonus; a – will result in a .5 point deduction, and not turning in a reflective commentary will result in a 1.5 point deduction. Remember that this assignment starts with a base value of 25 points.