Best Essays: Self-Assessments

This post recap's a message sent to viewers of the Best Essays: Self-Assessments workbook. In square brackets toward the end of the message are a couple of minor revisions (a clarification and a correction).

Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 11:59

Best Essays: Self-Assessments

Hello everyone (§§1A & 1C + assistants):

Thank you for your cooperation yesterday in submitting self-assessments of your best essays to date, especially those of you who submitted the Best Essays: Self-Assessments form only once. I closed the form for additional markup and sorting this morning.

On the left most spreadsheet in this Google workbook (sheet 1: 2011-12_1st-20110601), I've marked redundant entires with dark blue backgrounds across rows. Red backgrounds in individual cells flag failures to follow instructions when entering data, for example:

- more than the last five digits of student numbers, 

- blog titles or URLs instead of blog handles, and

- line returns within paragraph text entries.

Please note that most of those undesirable and unnecessary line returns within paragraphs are residuals of copy and paste clippings _from paragraphs on your blogs_, many of which still contain large numbers of undesirable and unnecessary line returns within paragraphs. So please revise previous posts, and remove unnecessary line returns within paragraphs. Then remember to enter line returns only between paragraphs, and then to enter two, to create white spaces between paragraphs.

Most important, however, are the entries that I've flagged with green backgrounds, which reflect growing awareness of distinct qualities of your own writing. In a nutshell, among the qualities you've mentioned are:

+ audience appeal,

+ ease of understanding,

+ grammatical accuracy

+ grammatical complexity,

+ informativeness, and

+ self-expression.

Please review items 8 and 9 (important qualities, columns J-K [at present]), and tell us in class next week (June 8, 2011) of any other qualities of your or your classmates' [and] peers' writing that you are able to distinguish from this data collection, or through links in it. Please also prepare to identify the topics of the weakest paragraphs in your best essays, and explain what their weaknesses are.

Thank you again for your cooperation. PB

If you have concerns or questions about this message, please spell them out in comments on this post, or voice them in class next week. Thanks.

 [382 words]