Remember that your responses to these exercises count as your attendance for Wednesday’s class period. If your responses are not included in your In Class Writing folder, you will be marked absent.

I. Collaborative writing and our textbook reading

Please respond to the following questions in a blank document in your In Class Writing folder:

1. In Issue 5, “Composing Together,” Losh and Alexander highlight several different types of collaborative composing. Make a list of the different types of collaborations mentioned in the text. What do the textbook authors say about these different collaborations? How have you encountered these types of collaborations in your own academic experiences?
2. Look at Question #3 on p. 217 of the textbook. The Losh and Alexander ask about issues within your community. Respond to Question #3 with your topic for our assignments this semester in mind. In order to properly address the issue or problem you are working on within your community, what groups of people might you have to collaborate with? Explain your answers.

II. Revising exercise: PEAS Paragraphs

In the next week or so, as we talk about research, we’ll be using the framework of “claim, evidence warrant” to make sure we’re integrating sources clearly. (We already began working on this in class during our discussion of the podcast last week.) There are other ways, though, of working through paragraph revision, whether you’re using formal database research or not. I’d like us to work on having PEAS paragraphs in our Rhetorical Analysis final drafts. To have a PEAS paragraph, your paragraph must contain these elements:

• Point (claim/main idea)
• Evidence (how do they back up the claim?)
• Analysis (author’s thoughts/opinions/meaning)
• Synthesis (connections made)

It’s a great way of organizing your ideas in each paragraph, as well as of making sure that you are covering all the elements needed to explain your ideas in detail. Let’s look at an example of a paragraph color-coded to identify the elements of PEAS paragraphs:

In the last week, I made a few helpful contributions to the Google Docs homework: especially in the debatable claims homework. On the portion about narrowed thesis statements, I wrote about a tip that I learned in my English 101 class about narrowing my thesis statement stating that “it’s helpful to start from the evidence and then work your way into an analysis and then backwards to the thesis statement,” and Anna replied, “this is really useful! Thanks for sharing this.” This encouraged me to share some of the other helpful tips that I learned about thesis development in 101, such as how to develop a good transition sentence by using words and phrases from an earlier paragraph in the first sentence of a later paragraph. I felt like what I said helped Anna to structure her own Draft 1, and when we talked about it in class earlier today, she mentioned again that she was grateful for the tip. It is for this reason that I would give myself an “above standard” on this assignment.

Note that this paragraph is heavy on evidence, but lacks in-depth analysis. If this were a balanced PEAS paragraph, there would be more sentences in pink.

Let’s try this out on the second draft of your Rhetorical Analysis. Open your second draft (which should be submitted in document #5 in your Google Drive folder). Read through each paragraph of your draft carefully, color-coding your paragraphs according to PEAS elements as you go. Chances are, you’ll be missing at least one of the four PEAS elements in many (if not all) paragraphs, or you’ll notice a disparity between some of the elements. (For instance, you may notice that some paragraphs are made up of mostly point sentences and very little specific evidence, analysis, or synthesis.) Once you’re done, go back to the beginning of your draft and see what elements of PEAS you need to add or change to each paragraph. Make these changes in your final draft, which you should be starting to work on in document #6 in your Google Drive folder.