Conferences

Objective: After I’ve read and commented upon your draft, and you’ve read and considered my comments, we’ll meet for a 25-minute conference in which we’ll work together on strategies for revising the paper. These conferences are a crucial part of the writing process and essential to the progress that you will make in this class because they allow us to discuss general strategies of interpretation and argumentation with reference to your specific paper.

Conference Sign Ups:In the week before a conference week, please use the conference sign-up tool located under the “Conferences” page on our Canvas site.

Conference Location: 1 Bow Street, #236

Instructions: To make the best use of that time, please arrive ready to discuss your draft. Bring the texts you’re writing on, as well as a pen: you’ll come up with good ideas and you’ll want to get them down. Also review your draft before you come, so that it’s fresh in your mind.

Your own thoughts about your work are essential to the success of the conference. We will be in dialogue about your argument: I will not monologue about it. Given the importance of your role – the writer’s role – keep in mind:

  • My role as your reader is not to “fix” your essay. I will give you an invested and considered response to your work, which you will use as you revise your argument. Ultimately, you will make the final decisions about your revisions and thus the final form of your argument.
  • You will rethink and rewrite your essay, not merely tinker with it. A true revision requires you to eliminate, add, and refine parts of the argument, since you will discover stronger ideas and approaches to material only through writing the first draft. Revision is not a symptom of failure, but rather a necessary and productive reflection of how we work through ideas and communicate them to others. Such rewriting is an intrinsic part of the writing process; all writers, from famous professors to Nobel Prize winners, rewrite their work.

Finally, to help us make efficient use of our conference time, consider the following questions and be prepared to discuss them:

  • Where is your thesis? What specific claim does it make? What specific evidence/types of evidence does your thesis tell us you will employ to make your point? What particular preparation do you think a reader needs to understand your thesis (context, summary, key words defined, etc.), and do you provide that preparation in the introduction?
  • Point to what you think of as the strongest close reading (careful analysis of a detail, element, or pattern in the text) in your paper so far. What makes this strong? What is the weakest close reading? What makes it weak?
  • Chose one body paragraph to discuss. What idea/argument/point controls this paragraph? How does your assertion establish that point? How do you introduce your evidence? What evidence do you provide? How specific is it? How is the evidence explained? Can we see all of the steps that make the evidence relevant to the point of the paragraph?
  • What is the rationale for the order of your paragraphs? Why did you arrange your ideas in the order that you did?
  • How does your conclusion help us to see the importance or relevance of your argument?

In addition to your answers to these questions and your questions about my comments, there are two items you should bring as a hard copy (so that we can make notes on them) to every conference with me (and, I would suggest, with any other professor when you go to discuss a paper):

  • conceptual map of your argument: the conceptual map will help you “talk me through” your argument, and we can identify and discuss any problematic links in the chain of your logic.
  • basic outline of your paper: the basic outline will provide a snapshot of the structure of your paper at a glance, and we can quickly reorganize aspects of the paper if need be.

Please arrive early enough to start on time. I look forward to meeting with you!