What’s the point?

In this writing, Daniel Hengel shares his ways of developing a thesis. First, he tries to explain that a thesis of a writing is similar to an argument or a controlling idea. It is the one or two sentence clear and concise point that is proved throughout the essay. He also explains that the essay should ultimately answer a big question which is our argument. Next, he splits these questions into categories of macro-questions, which is the thesis question answered by the essay, and micro-questions, which are the little questions that help answer the big question. Hengel believes that its best to start simple before going big and when we are reading the text, we should ask ourselves, “What do you see? What do you make of it? Why does it matter?” These are steps we can take to find the macro-question we want to answer throughout the essay. There are more questions that we can ask ourselves, but these are just questions that help us filter the potential theses we may use. Even though we may have already decided on a thesis we wanted to write about, it can change, and Hengel encourages us to make those changes so our writing can evolve.

Responding – Really Responding – To Other Students’ Writing

Richard Straub explains that we should not attempt a sloppy job when we are editing the papers of others because it is our feedback that they can utilize to improve their writing. Throughout the reading, Straub lists several ways we can provide better feedback and suggestions. One of the initial questions he lists on the subheading is “How Do You Get Started?” He further explains the things we should look for, such as the assignment, the writer’s interests, and aims, their stage of drafting, and the how well it connects to the work we discussed in class. There are many other ways listed to help us give better feedback, but the main ones are to be ourselves when grading and be honest when there are spots where we see improvement.

Response

The following readings would prove to be useful to me because of my lack of confidence in writing. Starting my writing is probably the part I struggle most with, so I’m sure I can utilize the methods that Daniel Hengel uses to structure my writings. Also, feedback was something I also didn’t do well in, but I’m glad I was able to read this before giving responses to other students’ writing because I felt I should consider the feelings of the writer and write feedback that pleases them. However, that is not how feedback works and it is supposed to help us improve, not sugarcoat the mistakes in our writing.

What’s the Point? 

Summary The thesis is the claim you’re trying to make about a topic. The author, David Hengel, states that your thesis is like a series of questions that you’ll be answering throughout your essay. To construct a solid thesis statement you must ask yourself a series of questions. The first three have to do with what you see?, what do you think about what you saw?, and why does what you saw, matter? After answering those questions you have to ask yourself whether the thesis you came up with is too simple?, too broad?, or too speculative?. It is important to keep in mind that your thesis can evolve throughout your essay to show what you’ve learned in your analysis. The rest is the fun part, the thesis gives your essay a direction to go in so from here you begin the writing process.

Response This essay helped me with my own thesis statement. It gives the reader a checklist, almost, as to what to ask about their thesis statements.

 

Responding—Really Responding—To Other Students’ Writing

Summary Before responding to someone else’s writing, you first have to understand the context of the writing. This’ll help you know what to look for and point out what shouldn’t be there. It is important to keep in mind that you are a reader, the writer’s second pair of eyes, a helping hand. As a reader, you’re meant to give the writer feedback on the paper itself. The more specific, the better. This shows the reader if their point is getting across to the reader as intended.

Response After reading this essay, I more or less have a good understanding of my role as a reader of someone else’s writing. I know what I can do to help the writer create the best version of their writing. Criticisms are worth more than compliments.

What’s The Point? Summary

The thesis statement is a tricky but integral part of writing.  It can sound quite simple when you strip it down to what it really is: an opinion.  What’s often overlooked however is how we don’t always have the strongest opinion on certain subjects, and consequently have a difficult time forming a substantiated argument.  The thesis statement is also delicate in that it shouldn’t be too “simple,” “broad,” or “speculative”.  Of course, they can be if they wanted to be, since these are simple guidelines to help one triangulate a more concise, inquisitive, and interesting argument.  One way to aid the overarching thesis statement is to propose “microquestions” that make for a more full-bodied argument.

Responding… Summary

Responding to the work of peers can easily turn into taking matters into your own hands.  We easily forget that we are the readers and not the writers of these essays, and end up projecting ourselves onto papers that belong to others.  The easy way to avoid this is to simply get in the mindset of a reader.  Not a reader of a novel or a newpaper article, but of a fellow student’s paper.  This means you’re in a position to offer your own thoughts and criticisms, see eye-to-eye with the writer.  It can be easy to get carried away, but it’s much more rewarding to simply offer well-meaning critiques and suggestions.

What’s the Point?

The thesis is the most important aspect of an essay, an argument that serves as its theme. Declaring the purpose of an essay is no easy task. This text provides the helpful method of thinking of the thesis as a question that asks the  following three questions simultaneously: “What do you see?”, “What do you make of it?”, and “Why does it matter?”. Once you’ve went through these three questions and came up with your “macro-question,” you can start drafting an easy-to-identify thesis statement that contains a “so what.”

Responding – Really Responding – to Other Students’ Writing

In this text, Richard Straub provides a detailed guide to the art of peer review. When commenting on a fellow student’s piece, your goal is to help the writer go back and reflect on his piece, seeing what he can work on and revise. Your comments are essentially a conversation you’re having with the student’s writing as you understand and react to it. Ideally, these comments should be a mix of criticism and praise, and take the context of both the paper and the writer into consideration. By putting in the time and effort to write a constructive response, you’re greatly helping the writer improve their writing in this paper and in papers to come.

Response

These texts were jam-packed with valuable information. One provided steps to crafting a good thesis and the other gave guidelines and tips for commenting on a fellow student’s work – both preparing me for my upcoming assignments. The detailed steps to coming up with a sustained and well-articulated thesis were especially helpful as one of my biggest concerns for my rhetorical analysis is the claim I’m trying to make.

What’s the point? 

When writing a text the most important question to ask yourself is what’s the point? The answer to this question will always be the thesis of the text. David Hengel expands more on this by pretty much stating that this question doesn’t really have one answer, but has multiple parts to it. In fact, it may be easier to view the thesis as this question instead. Hengel breaks down the foundation for a good thesis by having you ask yourself three questions. What do you see, what do you make of it, and why does it matter? If your claim answers these three questions you are well on your way to having a good thesis. Hengel also mentions that making sure your thesis isn’t too simple, broad, or even speculative is just as important for your paper as a whole. David Hengel makes a good point when it comes to writing a well-constructed thesis. It may seem hard to explain the point of your writing in just one to three sentences, but using these techniques really do help outline the rest of your paper. The better your thesis is and the better you understand it, the easier it is to write your paper.

 

Responding -Really Responding- to Other Student’s Writing

When giving a peer edit there is more to it than just being a supportive person. The best way to go about responding to a writer is to understand you are the reader and not the writer. Instead of changing a piece to sound more like you, focus on parts where you were confused at, or liked, etc, as a reader. Don’t sound like a critic when giving feedback. Your man goal is to be helpful and collegial. On the other hand, when you praise a writing it’s important to be sincere and specific when you describe what you liked. This makes it easier for the writer to trust you and understand what you saw in their writing. In the end, I think that the most important thing to remember is, to be honest, supportive, and informative on what you as a reader thought of the writing. Even when you are a little hard on the piece you can still be supportive.  

What’s the Point Summary and Response 

To fully understand a text, you must analyze it. The best kinds of analysis often have a thesis to summarize your opinions and thoughts. When creating a thesis, the easiest perspective is to see it as a question of inquiry first. Having a macro-question for your thesis and a micro-question for your arguments is important for maintaining organization throughout your essay. The tricky part with coming up with a main question is whether it is too simplistic, too broad, or unrelated to your essay. Once the question is created, it is time to create a draft for your thesis. It has to be clear, concise, and answer the question, “so what”. After completing the essay, it is essential to go back through the paper to make sure that every paragraph connects back to the thesis. I think it is extremely important to continually ask hypothetical questions throughout your essay to make sure you stay on track and keep organized. I like use the question, “so what” to craft my own thesis, which helps me get more analytical and specific on what I am writing about.

Responding – Really Responding – To Other Students’ Writing Summary and Response

A good peer editor is straightforward and gives constructive criticism to the writer. It would not be helpful to tell the writer what he/she just wants to hear. However, it is important to not be too harsh with edits. After all, you are not an editor nor the original writer, just give suggestions that the writer may or may not accept. As peer editors, you should write comments based on what type of assignment it is, the writer’s own interests, the type of work studied in class, and the stage of drafting. Again, it is important not to sound like a teacher or critic, just act as a colleague and a helper. You also should to write some compliments to balance out the comments. After reading this text, I genuinely learned more about peer editing. I now know to tie my comments in with the writer’s own goals and what the writer is learning in class, instead of just writing random comments. I also learned how to phrase my comments so they do not sound too harsh, and more like something I would like to hear more about.

In “What’s the Point” by Daniel Hengel, he makes a good point that a thesis can be thought of as the claim made in the writing or paper. He also gives us tips and advice on how to write a paper or an analysis. He breaks it down into three questions: What do you see? What do you make of it? Why does it matter? For step one, we need to identify something that we are interested in whether it be a word, a character, etc. Then our next step would be to write and analyze about what we noticed about the “something” we identified. Our last step is to talk about why this analysis is important and why it holds value. Hengel refers to this as the “so what” of the essay; an interpretation that gives the reader a new perspective. This is important because when we write our analysis we might get stuck on what the focus of our paper is, so these three questions can really help us to stay focused on one point.

Peer review is something everyone has heard of or have done before in their lives. But, where is the line between being too nice and being too critical? “Responding—Really Responding—To Other Students’ Writing,” by Richard Straub gives us insight on how to give effective feedback. Some of the questions he tells the reader to think about while peer reviewing are: what are your goals? How do you get started? How to sound? How much to comment? Etc. Straub emphasizes the importance of specifying all comments and also giving suggestions without sounds like your rewriting the paper for the writer. He also emphasizes that we need to sound as if we are talking with a friend. This is important because although peer reviewing is something everyone does, most people don’t know how to do it in an efficient way. I also had a problem with peer editing because I wouldn’t know what to comment on peoples’ writing. This reading allowed me to know exactly where to start and how to develop suggestions without sounding like I am trying to change or rewrite the writing.

What’s the Point

The purpose of this text is to get the reader to understand how to analyze a type of text, by providing different ways of approaching it in order to come up with a thesis in writing an analytical essay. The writer is encouraged to answer some questions in regards to how to start with coming up with the thesis, and these deal with how the writer interprets the texts in their own way. Through these questions, the writer would be able to find the lens that they would use to analyze this text, which helps develop the idea for the rest of the essay. Hengel also provides several tips in the transitioning between the ideas that are displayed throughout the essay. The whole purpose of this passage is to provide some aid in writing and showing the thesis clearly throughout the essay.

Responding—Really Responding—To Other Students’ Writing

In this text, the purpose is to help a writer become a good editor as well. There are many tips provided throughout the text that allows you to critique another person’s writing, by looking at the key aspects of their essay. As an editor, you are the reader and audience of the essay, so it is important to give the writer the opinions that you you might have about their piece. The main part of this is to make sure that the writer is doing the assignment correctly and that they are able to portray their thoughts effectively through their writing. The passage also provides way to write comments on the essay, as well as providing an example of how commenting works. The tips provided are meant to help you as the reader to point out your ideas or concerns that you might have about a writer’s work, by providing them with the opinions from the viewpoint of a reader.

Response

Both of these texts provides helpful information for both writers and editors. The information provided in “What’s the Point” is really helpful when someone is writing the first draft of the essay since it is the part where you mostly gather up all your ideas. With the thesis of your writing figured out, it would be easier to write down the ideas that supports your thesis, and allows you to have the general idea about what your essay is going to be about. The second passage provides good editor tips, and shows what is a good comment that could help the writer consider and further improve their essays. In general, the two texts have a lot of useful information that can be used when we write and review the first draft.

What’s The Point?

Usually, before beginning an essay or a paper, you are asked to clearly state your “point”, “argument”, “position”, “purpose”, or “thesis” somewhere in the introduction. This “thesis” will basically outline everything that the rest of your paper will revolve around. In order to come up with a good thesis, there are several questions you must ask yourself. The first question is “what do you see?” This question will help you determine what your thesis will be focused on. It could be a word, a character, a theme, an object, an image, or anything that catches your attention. The second question is “what do you make of it?” This question will help you understand what you saw in the first question by determining how you feel on the topic. It will help you develop a personal opinion on the subject and expand the idea from there. The third question is “why does it matter?” This question will be the foundation of your paper and will determine what your whole paper will focus on answering or proving. It is also important to make sure that your thesis is not too simple or can be answered with a simple yes or no answer. It also should not be too broad or out of your ability to answer since the scope of it is too obscure. Questions that are too speculative should be avoided as well since those would be too difficult to provide supporting evidence for. Once all of these conditions are met, a suitable thesis should have been made.

Responding – Really Responding – to Other Students’ Writing

Peer editing another classmate’s paper can be challenging. In order to be a good responder and actually be able to give them constructive criticism, there are several factors that you have to consider when giving feedback. The first is that you can’t rewrite or edit any of their work, you are only allowed to give ideas and make suggestions since it is their paper and not yours. The second is to keep in mind what sort of assignment this paper is. Depending on the type of paper it is (personal essay, analysis, persuasive argument, etc), it should determine what kind of language the writer should use in their paper. The third is the writer’s interests or aims. This is basically what the writer wants to accomplish or prove when writing this paper. Depending on what their interests are, there should be several specific areas that they would want to focus their paper on. The fourth is what stage of drafting this paper is on. If it’s a first draft, then it’s fine if the paper is a little messy or unorganized because they will obviously be revising and rewriting the majority of it over again. If it’s a final draft, then it’s important to point out any small mistakes that you notice in their paper. Other important factors to keep in mind is that it’s always a good idea to make a few comments relating to the work that has already been done in class and to not sound too much like a critic.

Response

Overall, these two readings provide important insight on how to properly create a thesis and how to properly respond to another student’s writing as a peer editor. I learned a lot of different methods on how to create a suitable thesis statement/question and a lot of important techniques on how to phrase my comments when critiquing another student’s paper.