RD 2 Feedback

After having had a chance to look over your rough drafts, I’ve decided that we should spend some more time talking about Lethem and revising our original arguments. In a lot of cases, I’m seeing significant progress from Paper 1 in terms of the ways you’re making connections between texts and using textual evidence. But in other cases, this somewhat broader paper prompt has led to arguments that are diffuse, disorganized, or underdeveloped.

Remember: the prompt asks you to consider how collective intelligence reflects individual agency, so you can’t simply offer a thesis that says, “collective intelligence reflects individual agency.” It doesn’t answer the question. Instead, you should try to think about the ways the texts represent relationships between collective intelligence and individual agency (or don’t), then come up with a claim that explains your interpretation of some aspect of this relationship. Under what circumstances is this relationship visible? What changes it? How is understanding it useful to solve some particular problem? The more specific the question you’re answering, the clearer your argument will be. It’s important to narrow your focus to some extent in order to ensure that you can sufficiently address it in 5 pages.

Related to that issue, I’ve noticed that a number of pages turn to dictionaries to define “intelligence” or “collective intelligence.” Remember: you should use the dictionary to clarify the way the authors are using the term if it isn’t clear from close reading, but you should start with their words first. Hopefully, the dictionary entries should show you that intelligence has more than one meaning: your job is to find which one or ones are most applicable to your discussion.

Also, a note on organization: as I mentioned before, it’s often the case that in writing our early drafts, we tend to write our way to a more specific point. I’ve seen a number of paragraphs with topic sentences that describe some feature of one of the texts. But then the paragraphs themselves will often touch on connections between texts, or the ways in which a keyword from one text applies to another. As you revise, try to identify the specific contribution of each paragraph; your topic sentence should reflect that. This is especially important in papers about 3 texts: since you now have to balance a number of perspectives, you really need to focus on connections rather than devoting too much time to a single text. Don’t feel obligated to cram in examples from each text in every paragraph: let the topic of the paragraph determine what texts are most relevant to bring up.

In the coming days, I will compile another Google Document with examples from rough drafts that we can workshop in class. If you want more individualized feedback, consider attending office hours or emailing me to set up an in-person or online meeting to discuss your work.