ENGL 298 B: Intermediate Writing Social Sciences   Autumn 2011, University of Washington

For your week 7 blog post, due Friday, Nov. 11^th, along with your rough draft of your second major paper, please write a post for your peer review group members explaining what aspects of your draft you would particularly like feedback on, and why. This genre of writing is often called a conference memo. The “why,” in this case, requires you to explain what you’re trying to do with a particular section of the essay. Doing this will help your readers provide you with more effective feedback at the conference. Preparing a conference memo also helps you become more adept at describing your goals for a piece of writing – and this will make you more able to discuss your writing with professors in future classes.

The format of the conferences has not changed, but here is a reminder, in case you’ve forgotten.

1. Post your draft, along with your conference memo, by Friday at 5. Use the tags week7blog and mp2roughdraft.
2. At least 24 hours before your conference meeting, post your response to your group members’ papers. (This is not optional.)
3. Come to the conference, prepared to speak (not read!) for 2-5 minutes about the current status of your draft.
4. Also come prepared to respond to each of your group members’ drafts for 1-2 minutes. Remember to prioritize your feedback – you may not have time to say everything you posted as a comment. Also, you should be listening and responding to what the author has just said. (You may certainly have notes – in fact referring to specific parts of a draft is usually a good way of making sure that your feedback is detailed and precise and helpful.)
5. Avoid simply saying that the draft is all good, or repeating others’ feedback without adding your own. Avoid offering the same identical comment for all three members of your group. These will reflect poorly on your conference grade.
6. Remember to be respectful of your other group members, whether as authors or commenters. In this activity, you are a team, and you can impress me (and earn the highest grade possible) by being prepared, professional, and energetic.

Following through on these steps will help your conference be useful, as opposed to being a hour that you would be better off spending sleeping. They will also allow me to hand out 4.0 grades like confetti, and nothing would make me happier than for the entire class to get 4.0 grades for this round of conferences.

Remember, your draft should be around 2-3 pages long. Do what you need to do to convey your ideas as clearly as possible. If this means that your draft is partly prose, and partly outline, it can still be useful — provided you have made an effort to explain to your readers what you’re trying to do.