Order instructions

Note: Your final can be uploaded earlier, should you want to be done with it; however, the date above is the last day the final will be accepted. No late papers are allowed for submission as part of the final. Be very careful with the date and time of submission.
This final will reflect your very best work. To achieve that aim, you will need to choose EITHER Paper 1 OR Paper 2 and revise it to make it the best piece of writing you can do. Utilize instructor comments (go back to that file I emailed you earlier this semester to help you revise for the final), reviewer comments, and your own careful re-reading and revision of your paper. When choosing the paper you want to revise, think about choosing the one that you think you can make the best final product out of, don’t just choose the one you got the higher or lower original grade on. The aim here will be for you to show that you know how to revise and make smart decisions in order to improve your own writing; often we do this better with either the paper that has the most personally interesting topic or the one we are more confident about improving.

Remember, there is an open forum available to you as well. Some useful ways to use it are to: post a question and get feedback, post a paragraph you’re struggling with and ask for help, arrange for a peer review partner, ask questions about readings to help understand them better and analyze them more completely in your paper, and so on. Use this resource to your advantage and help out your classmates as they help you.

Finally, you will need to grammatically correct and proofread your Paper. This is your final chance to let me see how hard you have worked, what you have learned and how strong your writing has become.

OVERVIEW:

This final will be submitted as ONE document with the pieces in the following order:

1. Reflection essay (2 pages)
2. Revision of EITHER Essay 1 OR Essay 2 (formatted as described below under #2 with strikethrough and bold and a single-spaced, explanation paragraph above the title)

DIRECTIONS FOR EACH PIECE OF YOUR FINAL:

1. “REFLECTION”

This is a short two (2) FULL page essay that explores some following questions:

· Who are you as a writer?
· What are your strengths and weaknesses?
· What characterizes your writing?
· What do you like best about your writing?
· What is the point of writing?
· How has your writing changed over the semester? How has it not changed? Or, take a longer view: how has your writing changed, or not changed, over your many years of schooling?

In this essay you don’t have to like your writing or think your writing has improved. You do have to write an analysis of yourself as a writer, for that is what you are, for whom else but a writer would write three essays in just a few months?

For this essay, show me the skills you have used. Do not attempt to answer all those questions I’ve asked, as then you will have an unfocused essay. Rather, choose your own way to focus your essay, and develop it with examples and evidence, as you have learned to do this semester. And, if there was ever an assignment designed to help you to think, to analyze, this is it.

2. ONE REVISED PAPER (include ONLY the new revision. Including other materials will decrease your grade.)

Review and revise EITHER PAPER 1 OR PAPER 2 (NOT BOTH), using the comments that your peers and I have written, and also your own insights as you re-read your essays. You may NOT use paper THREE as one of these essays. This substantially revised paper is the most important part of your final portfolio. A successful paper will include several new paragraphs as well as some significant cutting of old materials. When I evaluate your work I am looking to see that you have conquered the big challenges of college writing: focus, development, analysis, organization, clarity of prose and editing.

To demonstrate your changes, use strikethrough to indicate where you have removed material and bold text to indicate where you have added material. This may make your final paper look messy, but that is okay. Any material that is removed, should have strikethrough (even a comma) and anything added should be bolded. The only exception to this rule is if you move an entire body paragraph from page 4, for instance, to page 1. Then you can simply put, in parenthesis and in bold: “(moved paragraph from page 4).”

Here is an occasion when I will not overlook errors; you have time to fix errors and make your prose both clear and grammatically correct; furthermore, this will be your fourth or fifth draft of this paper so it should be nearly perfect. Therefore, failure to cleanup grammatical and proofreading errors will deeply lower your grade. It is my responsibility to make sure that students who have taken this course are prepared for the expectations of the academic community. Those expectations include grammatical and proofreading competence.

At the beginning of the paper you must include a paragraph (ABOVE THE TITLE) explaining the changes you’ve made to your essay. Describe what you’ve done to improve your essay, using the established criteria (focus, development, etc.) that we’ve discussed all semester. Single space this part.

Here is an example:

In this paper, I wrote an entirely new introduction, removed the second example about working from home and replaced it with a more telling example about the workplace, which I think more accurately and clearly supports my topic sentence because it is directly related to my idea in X way. I also decided to greatly expand the second example because it needed explanation in order for the connection to be easy to understand—my previous analysis was lacking because of Y. I also worked on the introduction to the quotes, specifically on page 2 and 3 and I believe I improved in Z way. Finally, I worked really hard to remove my previous typos, especially the sentence fragments and run-ons.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

Revise!!!
· Since this is a time to show what you’ve learned and how much stronger of a writer you are than from the beginning of the semester, really focus on revision. First, go through your notes from the entire semester to review the writing skills that you’ve learned.
· Forget the original assignment requirements. The paper you revise for this final must be argumentative and follow the guidelines of Chicago as well as continue to answer the original question that was posed. Other than that, take ownership of the essay—do what you need to do to make the essay the best it can be:
o Forget original page restrictions
o Strike or add a source (use only the sources provided in this class; no outside research)
o Shift or change the claim, etc.

Reminders:
This final represents your very best work. This work will therefore need to be carefully re-read and re-read again. I expect no proofreading or other careless errors. When you work hard on something it will show, and I want to see that in this last piece of work you do for this class.

If you have any questions, it is very important that you email me sooner than later so that I can clarify, so that you are clear on the directions for this final and so that you know what is expected of you.