Summary and Response to “Whats the Point”
This text starts off explaining to the reader what a thesis is. The author states that it is the answer to a question youve raised about the topic. The thesis is the controlling idea of your paper. Its like the question you want to answer about your entire topic. The author then goes into explaining how he starts thinking about a thesis: where do you start? This article is beneficial to students who are having difficultly starting a paper, focusing on which specific question to ask. The most interesting part of this text was when he explained a thesis as a “macro-question.” Then he said all the little questions you use to help answer this were the “micro-questions.” I thought this was an extremely beneficial way of looking at a thesis because it doesnt make it too scary, it no longer becoming the make or break of your paper. With this ideology you can take a micro-question that you found extremely helpful and expand on it.
Summary and Response to “Responding…”
This text basically raises a bunch of questions about how to respond to a peers writing when editing it. The types of ideas that are talked about are “how you get started, how much to comment, how much criticism,” and many more. This text gives a quick look to students who actually want to help there peers and give them good feedback that they can use to better their paper. My favorite part of this text was the section titled, “How much should you be influenced by what you know about the writer?” I found this section extremely interesting because it said if the writer was being arrogant you should challenge the person ideas even more to make them have questions about the paper.