302 Reflective Commentary Guidelines for Discipline Awareness Project: Periodical Analysis

Reflective Commentary Guidelines

For this reflective commentary, please consider the following questions:

1) Now that you have completed the project, how confident are you in your ability to write the essay that would result from it? Compare this experience to your process for prior research essays you have written. Would this assignment help you produce a more sophisticated final essay? Why or why not?

2) Which quotations are you most confident will prove useful in the essay, and why? Let’s say you could cut up to two from the actual essay. Which ones are you most likely to cut, if any? Why?

3) Consider your two introductions. Which one would you be more likely to use, and why?

4) Talk about how you would plan to organize the body of your essay. Which quotations are likely to appear in the first third, the middle third, and the final third of the essay’s body? Think in terms of subheads. How would you divide the essay and label the divisions?

5) 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. Roughly how did you divide your time and effort between improving the quotations and how you plan to use them, your introductions, and technical matters such as the list of references or works cited, the quotation and citation format, and the writing itself?

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 approximately 450-500 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.

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 1.5 points; a √ will earn a bonus of .75 points; 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 2 point deduction. Remember that this essay assignment starts with a base value of 20 points.