The First Official Rough Draft Workshop!

It's Time for Some Peer Review

Get it ... "Pier Review?" AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Agenda:

• Questions?
• Peer Review and then Discuss Peer Review
• Questions?

Project One

Due Date: Your Final Draft of Project One is due to the Project One Storage Bin by 11:59 p.m. on September 29th..

Need Help?: Beside our peer-to-peer rough draft workshop, you are welcome to bring your draft to my office hours or schedule office hours with me for additional assistance, and I encourage you to drop by the Writing Center for additional one-on-one tutoring. I'm also taking volunteers for a public critique to take place next week (e-mail me if you'd like your draft to be used an example).

Evaluating Project One: My evaluation of (and your grade) for Project One will be a little different than evaluation of future projects. For this project, our primary interest is in your ability to both recognize and deploy effective techniques of persuasion. Although sentence-level details (grammar, arrangement, structure, etc.) will be an issue, they will not be as influential a component of evaluating this assignment as in future projects. The explicit criteria to be used in evaluating your Ad Analysis can be found in the Project One page. Here are a few other issues to keep an eye out for; all of these are based on common mistakes students have made doing this assignment in the past:

• Argument: Is there a clear argument (and thesis) to your project? In other words, is there an overarching idea linking your observations together (rather than your project being composed of "just" observations about your topic)?
• Exigence: Is the paper interesting enough to capture a reader's attention? Does it have a clear purpose and exigence?
• Background Information: Does the project insert its subject matter into the proper context? Does it use an individual ad (or multiple ads) to talk about larger issues and/or insert these ads into a larger frame of reference?
• Thoroughness: Is the argument complete? I.e., is enough argumentation and detail provided to convince an audience of the argument being made?
• Style: Is the project demonstrate coherence and correctness on a sentence-level? Does it avoid being confusing or unnecessarily wordy?

In Reference to Our Examples...

The Evolution of the Pixelated Ad: A study of produce placement and advertising in video games

• Thesis: Advertising has encroached into one of the few places we used to go to escape them: Video games
• Strategy: Show the evolution of this process in reference to marketing strategies and specific video games; argue for what both advertisements and video games "used to be" and "are now"

Is That What a Real Man is Supposed to Look Like?: A study of how men's bodies are becoming (almost) as important to advertising as women's bodies

• Thesis: Images of the "perfect" male body have become almost as important to advertising as images of women's bodies have been traditionally.
• Strategy: Stastistics and evidence to back up this claim (particulary resemblance arguments between images of men's bodies now and women's bodies in advertising historically), followed by an analysis of these ads use of the artistic appeals (logos, ethos, pathos)

Peta's Struggle for a Super Bowl Ad: An analysis of commercials produced by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and rejected from placement during the Super Bowl.

• Thesis: CBS rejected PETA ads because their messages would conflict with the message of their other advertisers
• Strategy: Analyze the ads individually, then use what they have in common to argue for the validity of the thesis

The Rough Draft Workshop

Rough draft workshop groups are assigned below (you will workshop the drafts of the two people in each group who are not you; simple, no?). You should focus on the following five questions (do not simply answer "yes" or "no" - provide examples to back up your answer). You should also provide any other critiques or advice that occur to you during your thorough reading of the draft. When your group is done responding to each other's drafts, you may work on your own draft or you may leave.

Questions:

1. Is there a clear argument/thesis to the paper? Can you identify the thesis directly in the text or paraphrase it in your own words?

2. Does the paper have a clear exigence and purpose? Do you have a solid idea of why this argument is an important one and/or why it is or should be interesting to an audience made up of people such as yourself? What is the exigence?

3. Does the paper follow a clear structure or does it read more like a disconnected series of observations? I.e., do the different paragraphs or sections of the piece seem to follow from one another? Are there appropriate transitions between different sections and ideas?

4. Did any argument or analysis in this paper seem unwarranted or exaggerated (in other words, did you think the writer was "jumping to conclusions" at times or being unfairly judgmental or dismissive)?

5. What, in your opinion, is the strongest part of this paper?

6. What, in your opinion, is the weakest part of this paper?

7. If you were presenting a counter-argument to the paper (i.e., an attempt to argue against the thesis or central argument of the paper), what would it be?

8. On the sentence-level, did you find the paper to be well written? Does it contain poor grammmar or sentence-fragments? Is it unnecessarily wordy at times?

9. Finally, what grade would you give this paper if you were evaluating it as it is now?

For Friday:

Due: Drop a link to your final draft of Project One on the Project One Storage Bin page before 11:59 p.m. on September 29.

Reading Assignments for Monday

• Review instructions for, and student sample executions of, Project Two
• Chapter 5 ("Analyzing Written Arguments") in Good Reasons.